Foreign Affairs

The U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, lays out the Trump Administration's foreign policy towards Iran. 

Socialism and declining oil prices are often blamed for Venezuela’s catastrophe. In reality, it was decades of destructive leadership under Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, that transformed Venezuela into a poor country and criminalized state beholden to a foreign power. 

Three years since the start of the European refugee crisis, the continent’s politics are still convulsed by disagreements over migration.

The United States' once raised taxes on the wealthy in times of war, now it heaps the costs of conflict onto the middle and lower classes through deficit spending. 

Clausewitz would have understood the weaponization of social media.

North Korea's nuclear arsenal may be more opportunity than threat. 

Both Russia and China view weakening Western democracy as a means of enhancing their own standing.

Trump is putting the global nonproliferation regime at risk.

After watching politicians of nearly every mainstream party be caught in corruption scandals, Brazilian voters are willing to rebel against a dysfunctional system.

When Andrés Manuel López Obrador takes office as Mexico’s president in December, his biggest challenge will be to stanch the escalating problem of criminal violence. 

The United States is a deeply polarized nation, yet one view increasingly spans the partisan divide: the country is at imminent risk of being overtaken by China. Unless Washington does much more to counter the rise of its biggest rival, many argue, it may soon lose its status as the world’s leading power. According to this emerging consensus, decades of U.S. investment and diplomatic concessions have helped create a geopolitical monster. China now boasts the world’s largest economy and military, and it is using its growing might to set its own rules in East Asia, hollow out the U.S. economy, and undermine democracy around the globe. In response, many Democrats and Republicans agree, the United States must ramp up its military presence in Asia, slap tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods, and challenge China’s influence worldwide.

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Managing the impacts of climate change requires a fundamentally different approach from the way most policymakers currently think about the issue.

For Washington, space security depends at least as much on international cooperation as it does on national dominance.

It shouldn’t have taken policymakers as long as it did to relearn what they should have already known about financial crises.

Financial crises empower right-wing populists. The crash of 2008 was worse than usual.

Another conflict may be coming in Iraq. This time, it will be between the powerful, resource-rich, and battle-hardened Shiite rival factions that dominate the government.

Seen through the prism of public opinion, the two-state solution is clearly not dead. But the continued construction of Israeli settlements is making it seem unfeasible, and damaging its popularity. 

Austria's example shows that any check on populist parties for the time being needs to come from the center-right.

In the first decade of this century, the U.S. manufacturing sector shed jobs at an alarming and unprecedented rate. That coincided with a surge in imports, weak growth in exports, and a yawning trade deficit. The sharp job losses in manufacturing helped keep employment growth weak and labor force participation low.  During the 2016 presidential election, both Republican candidate Donald Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders blamed trade and globalization. That message helped propel Trump to the presidency. But most economists dismissed it, arguing that automation was to blame. Media reports often take this view as fact. In late 2016, for example, New York Times reporter Binyamin Appelbaum wrote, “From an economic perspective . . . there can be no revival of American manufacturing, because there has been no collapse. Because of automation, there are far fewer jobs in factories.” Yet this view...