Foreign Affairs

On the night of January 31, with little fanfare, without even a Big Ben bong, the United Kingdom will officially leave the European Union. After almost 50 years of EU membership and three years of bitter division over the vote to leave, the moment of formal departure is a historic milestone. But to say that the British are finally “getting Brexit done,” as Prime Minister Boris Johnson has claimed ad nauseam, is hopelessly optimistic. Friday marks the beginning of a new and uncertain phase of Brexit, not its end. 

The British government still needs to negotiate the terms of its future relations with the EU, a task so complex that many doubt it can be completed by the end of the year, when another ominous deadline looms. In the meantime, the country will be stuck in EU purgatory, bound by the bloc’s laws and regulations but powerless to shape them. Trade deals with other countries remain to be hammered out. And at home, the toxic fallout of Brexit division will linger—and potentially reshape British politics for years to come.

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Next week, Iowans will caucus to choose a Democratic candidate for president. But an observer might be forgiven for thinking that the future of U.S. health care was the real choice on the ballot.

Health care has been the most discussed topic at the Democratic Party debates, to the dismay of commentators who would like the conversation to expand beyond Medicare and its financing to highlight the candidates’ other policy differences with President Donald Trump. Yet politicians and debate moderators are merely responding to recent polls: health care is the only issue that a majority of Americans agrees is extremely important in the 2020 presidential election.

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Just after 10:30 AM on August 7, 1998, two truck bombs exploded within minutes of each other outside the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people—12 of them Americans—and wounding more than 5,000 others. In the days that followed, the FBI and the CIA briefed U.S. President Bill Clinton on those they believed were responsible. “This one is a slam dunk, Mr. President,” said the CIA’s basketball-loving director, George Tenet. “There is no doubt that this was an al Qaeda operation.”

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New technologies were supposed to open societies and empower individuals. Instead, they've given despots the upper hand.

In the last three years, tragic scenes of poverty and mayhem have dominated the coverage of Venezuela, a nation that used to be one of the wealthiest and most democratic countries in South America. Venezuela has become both a byword for failure and, curiously, something of an ideological hot potato, a rhetorical device dropped into political conversations around the world.

[Lea la versión de este artículo en español este lunes.] 

In election campaigns from Brazil to Mexico, Italy to the United States, politicians invoke Venezuela as a cautionary tale of the dangers of socialism. Left-wing candidates from Jeremy Corbyn, in the United Kingdom, to Pablo Iglesias, in Spain, find themselves accused of sympathizing with socialist Chavismo—and suffer real political damage from the association with Venezuela’s rulers. The charge, endlessly repeated, is that Venezuela’s failure is the failure of an ideology; socialism is to blame, and if you make the wrong choice at the ballot box, the chaos of Venezuela could come to your doorstep, too.

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By nearly every measure, the credibility and influence of the United States in the world have diminished since President Barack Obama and I left office on January 20, 2017. President Donald Trump has belittled, undermined, and in some cases abandoned U.S. allies and partners. He has turned on our own intelligence professionals, diplomats, and troops. He has emboldened our adversaries and squandered our leverage to contend with national security challenges from North Korea to Iran, from Syria to Afghanistan to Venezuela, with practically nothing to show for it. He has launched ill-advised trade wars, against the United States’ friends and foes alike, that are hurting the American middle class. He has abdicated American leadership in mobilizing collective action to meet new threats, especially those unique to this century. Most profoundly, he has turned away from the democratic values that give strength to our nation and unify us as a people.

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Shortly after taking office, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower gathered senior advisers in the White House solarium to discuss policy toward the Soviet Union. In attendance was his hawkish secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, who had been a vocal critic of Harry Truman’s policy of containment and instead advocated an offensive policy whereby the United States would seek to “roll back” Soviet influence across Europe and Asia. Afternoon light from the southern exposure would have contrasted with the darkening mood inside the White House. Diplomacy to end the Korean War was deadlocked. The United States was entering a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin was dead, but Eisenhower’s calls for dialogue with Moscow had gone unanswered. Defense spending seemed unsustainable. 

While the trade war between China and the United States has hogged headlines and driven market anxieties over the past year, an equally large threat to the global economy has gotten little attention: a looming tax war. Since the early twentieth century, countries have largely agreed on how to tax income earned by multinational corporations that conduct business across borders. But this long-standing regime is coming apart, imperiling the broader international economic order.

The current system, established through decades of practice and convention, provides a basis for determining which country can tax income earned in one jurisdiction by a business that resides in another. The regime rests on the norms set in domestic tax laws as well as a patchwork of almost 4,000 bilateral treaties. For decades, the system was stable and functional enough that no one other than international tax lawyers even talked about it.

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On October 14, Spain’s Supreme Court sentenced several leaders of the Catalonian separatist movement to lengthy prison terms for their role in organizing a controversial independence referendum two years ago. What followed seemed, in some ways, like a tragic replay of the failed 2017 secession bid: protests erupted in Barcelona, some descending into vandalism; riot police manhandled peaceful protesters; and Catalonia was left without a clear path to resolving its differences with the central government.

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As China’s rise has become a central force in global politics, analysts and policymakers have tracked its path to potential preeminence on a number of fronts: the size of its economy, the scale and reach of its investment and commercial relationships, the budget and capabilities of its military forces. But as of 2019, China has surpassed the United States in an underappreciated but crucial measure of global influence: the size of its diplomatic network.

For decades, Washington had the largest diplomatic network in the world. Now China does, boasting 276 diplomatic posts—including embassies, consulates, and permanent missions to international organizations. The United States’ network, meanwhile, stands at 273, down one post since 2017.

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A congressional impeachment inquiry seeks to determine whether U.S. President Donald Trump extorted a foreign leader, withholding a coveted White House meeting and U.S. military aid in order to promulgate a Russian-inspired conspiracy theory and smear his chief opponent in the 2020 election. The United States’ gravest constitutional crisis since Watergate is not just about preserving the integrity of U.S. democratic institutions from the president’s abuse of power, however. It is an episode in a broader geopolitical struggle between the defenders of democracy and the forces of oligarchic authoritarianism, from Kyiv’s Maidan to Hong Kong’s Mong Kok. In this wider global conflict, Trump and his surrogates have consistently aligned themselves with the forces of oligarchic authoritarianism—in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and other countries, too. Nowhere is this clearer than in Ukraine.

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What if an election is held and no one votes? This question now confronts Algeria, where the government of interim President Abdelkader Bensalah has scheduled a presidential election for December 12. Yet the election risks ending as an exercise in absurdity: nearly all Algerian political and civil organizations have refused to endorse the five official candidates and have called upon Algerians to refrain from voting. The failure of this election will, paradoxically, mark the success of the country’s democratic aspirations, as expressed through a phenomenon that has dominated the Algerian political landscape since late February: le hirak.

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By far the most important foreign policy story of our time is the way Washington has refocused its attention on great-power competition. 

Engagement with a rising China has been far more successful than generally recognized, and it continues to be the best path forward in an age of great-power competition. 

Presidential impeachment in the United States has always seemed to be a domestic matter. President Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about sexual misconduct. President Richard Nixon resigned to avoid certain impeachment in the wake of the Watergate scandal. And in 1868, the House of Representatives leveled 11 articles of impeachment against President Andrew Johnson for defying a Republican-led Congress and its positions on Reconstruction.

The current inquiry into President Donald Trump is different. Sometime in December, it is likely that a U.S. president will for the first time be impeached for misusing his foreign policy authority in the service of personal political interests. The evidence laid out in House Intelligence Committee hearings establishes that Trump conditioned the release of congressionally authorized military aid to Ukraine on an announcement by the Ukrainian government that it would conduct investigations of Trump’s political opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, and of the baseless allegation that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

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For three weeks in October, hundreds of Catholic bishops and priests mostly from the countries of the Amazon River basin convened at a special synod at the Holy See. The meeting signaled Pope Francis’s deep concern for the indigenous peoples of the South American rainforest. In his own words, the pope sought “drastic measures” to avert further harm to these communities. “Every kind of injustice and destruction,” he said, “has been practiced upon these people.” Francis knew this synod would upset some traditional believers who have little patience for his moral investment in the protection of indigenous groups. Although his opponents created audacious distractions, the pope persevered in advancing an agenda that facilitates concrete gains for officials, activists, and community leaders dedicated to saving the Amazon.

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Thirty years ago this month, the opening of the Berlin Wall ushered in the last great diplomatic struggle of the Cold War. As cheering crowds danced atop what was left of the Iron Curtain, the fate of Germany hung in the balance. In retrospect, it is easy to see that triumphal moment as part of an inevitable march toward German reunification. At the time, however, the future felt anything but certain. 

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In the absence of a magic potion for development, the best way for a country to profoundly transform millions of lives is not to try in vain to boost growth. It is to attempt to raise living standards with the resources it already has.

Since the end of the Cold War, every U.S. president has come into office promising to build better relations with Russia—and each one has watched that vision evaporate. The first three—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—set out to integrate Russia into the Euro-Atlantic community and make it a partner in building a global liberal order. Each left office with relations in worse shape than he found them, and with Russia growing ever more distant.

President Donald Trump pledged to establish a close partnership with Vladimir Putin. Yet his administration has only toughened the more confrontational approach that the Obama administration adopted after Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2014. Russia remains entrenched in Ukraine, is opposing the United States in Europe and the Middle East with increasing brazenness, and continues to interfere in U.S. elections. As relations have soured, the risk of a military conflict has grown.

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The story of how the Tunisian revolution began is well known. On December 17, 2010, a 26-year-old fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi from the town of Sidi Bouzid set himself on fire outside a local government building. The man’s self-immolation—an act of protest against repeated mistreatment by police and local officials—sparked protests that quickly spread across the country. Within a few weeks, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali had stepped down and fled the country after 23 years in power, offering Tunisia an unprecedented opportunity for a democratic opening. A massive wave of uprisings soon swept the country’s neighbors, reaching all the way to the Levant and the Persian Gulf. 

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