Foreign Affairs

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...

For the last six months, Afghanistan has felt the stirring of something rare: if not peace, then the promise of its pursuit. President Ashraf Ghani invited the Taliban into negotiations without preconditions in February. Islamic scholars and Afghanistan’s neighbors rallied behind that offer in the subsequent months, while sit-ins, marches, and demonstrations broke out across Afghanistan, calling for an end to the country’s chronic conflict. For the first time in 40 years, the warring parties observed a nationwide cease-fire over three jubilant days in June. The vital question throughout this period has been whether the Taliban insurgency is actually open to making peace. The group has sent mixed signals this summer—agreeing, on one hand, to the June cease-fire, as well as restarting direct talks with the United States, but all the while continuing its years-long refusal to negotiate...

European development aid is unlikely to stem the flow of people crossing the Mediterranean. Instead, it will deepen authoritarian patterns of governance across North Africa and the Sahel. 

In foreign policy, progressives are adrift, caught between dated paradigms that have not yet come to terms with the current geopolitical moment.

The Gene-Editing Revolution

The late U.S. Senator John McCain's life was one marked by courage, empathy, pride, and determination.

The “land question” in South Africa is a powerful symbol of the failures of post-apartheid democracy to adequately address the structural roots of poverty and racialized inequality.

While countries such as China, India, and Turkey rapidly expand their economic engagement with African countries, the United States is lagging behind.