It is perceived that economic nationalism has slowed the meteoric rise of global trade. Since the Uruguay Round created the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, trade of goods and services has become a dominant feature in global economic growth. As a result, hundreds of millions of people in developing countries have graduated from subsistence living to middle-class status. The accession of China into the World Trade Organization in 2001 accelerated both the volume and character of global trade. By 2008, Global Value Chains (GVCs) have come to explain up to 70% of global trade volumes. GVCs optimize comparative advantage across borders and have enabled innovation in trade logistics and services technologies, in addition to a general WTO commitment by member states to facilitate trade.

As Americans are stripping their Christmas trees of tinsel and ushering in the new year, Coptic Christians in Egypt are celebrating their Christmas today, which falls on January 7 of every year. However, there’s a difference in the aura surrounding Christmas to the Copts: It is celebrated with the shadow of the terrorism they’ve faced in years prior looming over their communities — and especially their churches.

Donald Trump’s decision to pull ground troops out of Syria, followed hard by Defense Secretary Mattis’ resignation effective January 1, has sparked the usual complaints about the unpredictable, shoot-from-the-hip president. And as usual, the most important issue underlying the debate over his decision is ignored––our failure to settle on a coherent, long-term foreign policy strategy.

While it would have been wiser to leave the 2,000 American troops in Syria longer, both to ensure ISIS’s demise and to protect the Kurds, and while the administration benefited greatly from Secretary James Mattis’s restoration of deterrence, which merited him a much longer tenure, the hysteria over the withdrawal of troops and the unfortunate resignation of Mattis as something end-of-the-world devastating and historically unprecedented is as weird as it is incoherent.