Syria Is Neither Safe Nor Stable

For a brief moment last month, Britain’s Home Office seemed to have joined other European interior ministries in a legal fiction about a failed state. On January 9, The Guardian reported that the Home Office declined a young Syrian man’s application for asylum because it was ‘not satisfied that he had a ‘well-founded fear of persecution’.

Syria Is Not Safe

For several years, it has become clear that European countries see Syria less as a humanitarian disaster and more as a bureaucratic problem. Much of that is due to migration.

China’s Empire of Debt

The People’s Republic of China advertises its political and economic systems as ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. Across the world, the business of borrowing and lending, and a great deal of construction, have assumed Chinese characteristics of their own.