Foreign Affairs

The Zimbabwean presidential election appears to be less an effort at restoring the voice of the country’s long-suffering citizenry than a charade aimed at the international community.

Social media companies will be best able to play a productive role in preventing midterm election interference when informed by the government’s latest, best understanding of what that interference could look like.

The fast-approaching deadline for agreeing to the conditions for the United Kingdom’s departure from the EU and to move to the transitional phase of Brexit have placed a time bomb under the May government.

For the better part of two decades, Iran’s leadership has been hedging against international isolation by developing deeper ties with China and Russia. 

Although the upcoming Pakistani elections are being supervised by a neutral interim civilian government, the real power appears to rest with Pakistan’s military and the judiciary, which see undiluted democracy as a threat.

There’s reason to think that the real cyberthreat from Russia today is an attack on critical infrastructure in the United States—including one on the power grid that would turn off the lights for millions of Americans. Washington must take urgent action to deter hackers, diagnose vulnerabilities in the grid, and prepare for counteroffensive operations.

In the face of a growing Russian threat to the interests of the United States at home and around the globe, Washington still lacks anything resembling a grand strategy to meet it, as the Trump-Putin Helsinki summit showed.

Europe is no longer immune from great power competition. It needs to reform to survive.

Sometime in 1940, an 11-year-old refugee named Yudita Nisse reached the United States on a boat from Japan. Her Latvian-Jewish family had fled Nazi Germany east across the Soviet Union; the trip to North America was to have completed their escape. But the family had no legal authorization to enter the United States, so on arrival in Seattle they were locked up as illegal immigrants. They were eventually released, and Yudita later Anglicized her first name, becoming Judith. A second name change when she married made her Judith Shklar, and by that name she became the first woman ever to receive tenure in Harvard’s government department and one of the most formidable political theorists of her generation. Shklar’s work focused on cruelty. Her ideas offer a window onto the morality of the current crisis at the U.S.-Mexican border. Cruelty, in Shklar’s conception, is the deliberate...

At their meeting in Helsinki, the two leaders could breathe new life into the fraying system of U.S.-Russian arms control and resume military-to-military cooperation. 

The debate over the effects of artificial intelligence has been dominated by two themes. One is the fear of a singularity, an event in which an AI exceeds human intelligence and escapes human control, with possibly disastrous consequences. The other is the worry that a new industrial revolution will allow machines to disrupt and replace humans in every—or almost every—area of society, from transport to the military to healthcare.

There is also a third way in which AI promises to reshape the world. By allowing governments to monitor, understand, and control their citizens far more closely than ever before, AI will offer authoritarian countries a plausible alternative to liberal democracy, the first since the end of the Cold War. That will spark renewed international competition between social systems.

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A broader North Korean peace process would actually do more to ease progress on denuclearization, as well as multiple other fronts.

The Trump administration seems to believe that allies are meant to pay and obey. When it comes to Europe, this may pose a problem.

U.S. President Donald Trump has shown himself to be a master practitioner of psychological manipulation when it comes to the subject of immigration and refugee policy.

Washington needs to work with Mexico to form a more cooperative and comprehensive migration strategy. Otherwise, it could face a much larger flow of migrants at the southern border than it does today.

How López Obrador chooses to enact his policies—and whether he will abide by the often frustrating institutional checks and balances within Mexico’s democratic political system—will have long lasting consequences for the contry's future.

Western democracies do not need to fear the China model. Instead, they should worry about the widespread misinterpretation of this model by the West, the developing world, and China’s own political elites. 

Canadian officials can learn from both U.S. successes and U.S. mistakes as they try to design tax, regulatory, enforcement, and public health measures in order to reap the benefits of legal marijuana while managing the very real risks.

A successful assault on the Yemen's biggest port would change the course of the war, but it could come at a steep cost.

The United States needs a new approach to trade policy, one that does more than seek to maximize overall economic growth, particularly when the benefits go disproportionately to global corporations and the wealthy.