Nick Ottens is a public affairs officer for the Dutch Animal Coalition and a board member for Liberal Green, the sustainability network of the Dutch liberal party VVD. He is a former political risk consultant and a former research manager for XPRIZE, where he designed prize competitions to incentivize breakthrough innovation in agriculture, food and health care. He has also worked as a journalist in Amsterdam, Barcelona and New York for EUobserver, NRC, Trouw, World Politics Review and Wynia’s Week, among others.
The only constant about President Obama’s foreign policy so far seems to be its reception. Conservatives dread the end of American ascendency and wonder out loud whether Obama is projecting weakness while the Europeans are supposedly upset about the current administration not paying them enough attention. The truth is that a series of early hiccups […]
Free markets are in retreat.
The president admits he may have underestimated the challenges of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Let’s not worry too much about non-Western actors cooperating on their own. The West might even benefit.
The recent disaster in Haiti has sparked a renewed wave of commentators to demand that men “sacrifice” for the sake of others’ needs. There is little mention of the injustice suffered by the Haitian people at the hands of their own government and, recently, at the hands of nature — which would be legitimate reasons […]
The best defense against bank failures isn’t regulation, rather the threat of bankruptcy.
Since the early days of the Obama Administration, economist Paul Krugman has been more than eager to defend every spending measure enacted by the Democrat.
Discord between China and the United States should be overstated. Disputes can be resolved.
“Westerners often see Russian politics in terms of a high-level struggle between liberals and conservatives,” observes Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, writing for The Moscow Times. For instance, under President Boris Yeltsin, reformers fought nationalists while under Vladimir Putin, economic liberals opposed the siloviki — a class of politicians that originally served […]
“We want our money back,” cried President Obama yesterday, “and we’re going to get it!” Announcing a Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee — a tax perfectly named for an era in which banks are held responsible for a recession that was beyond their control — the president promised American taxpayers that they would get “every single […]
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expects a “mature relationship,” but there is still plenty of confusion.
Until a few years ago, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez was sometimes described as the benevolent kind but in recent years, his reign has grown ever more authoritarian. He abolished presidential term limits, withdrew Venezuela from both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in 2007, nationalized the oil industry and built relations with countries […]
Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, capitalism is in recession. Capitalists have become a persecuted minority.
She overwhelmed the country as vice presidential candidate in 2008. The Left found plenty of reason to resent her and while initially hailed by Republicans as the hockey-mom voice of folksy America, conservatives soon found that underneath the no-nonsense layer of toughness that Palin exhaled, the then-governor of Alaska really had no intellectual depth at […]
While Japan continues to linger in economic trouble with little hope for imminent recovery, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama forced his 77 year-old finance minister Hirohisa Fujii to resign last week and had him replaced with Naoto Kan, a former civic campaigner against government corruption with virtually no experience in economics. Behind the screens Ichirō Ozawa, […]
