Foreign Affairs

The key to a successful North Korea sanctions strategy is recognizing that such measures take time to achieve results.

In October of last year, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke at a gathering of his Justice and Development Party (AKP) about the steps that have been taken so far to eliminate the Islamic movement of the exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen whom he blames for organizing the July 15, 2016, coup attempt. After describing some of the domestic measures that he has pursued to stamp out the group, known officially as the Fethullahist Terror Organization (FETO), Erdogan noted his desire to also take down its networks abroad.

“Neither in the East nor in the West is a single member of this organization comfortable as before, nor will they be,” he said. “If not today, then tomorrow, one day every member of the FETO traitors’ front will pay for his treason against the country and the nation.”

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China's vast investments in clean energy will help it replace the United States as the most important player in many regional alliances and trading relationships. Washington needs to respond before it is too late.

Worries that Trump is an isolationist are out of place against the backdrop of the administration’s actions. In fact, Trump has ushered in an entirely new U.S. grand strategy: illiberal hegemony.

The international order is built to last through significant shifts in global politics and economics and strong enough to survive a term of President Trump if its defenders step up.

Washington has been wrestling with a new term that describes an old threat. “Sharp power,” as coined by Christopher Walker and Jessica Ludwig of the National Endowment for Democracy (writing for ForeignAffairs.com and in a longer report), refers to the information warfare being waged by today’s authoritarian powers, particularly China and Russia. Over the past decade, Beijing and Moscow have spent tens of billions of dollars to shape public perceptions and behavior around the world—using tools new and old that exploit the asymmetry of openness between their own restrictive systems and democratic societies. The effects are global, but in the United States, concern has focused on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and on Chinese efforts to control discussion of sensitive topics in American publications, movies, and classrooms.

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Democratic governments should not overreact to sharp power in ways that undercut their true advantage, which comes from soft power.

Sooner or later, Trump's luck will run out. And when it does, the true costs of his presidency will become clear.

For scholars studying the effects of presidential leadership on U.S. foreign policy, Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 has offered quite the test. What does it mean for the United States to elect a leader with no experience in government, little knowledge of foreign policy, and an explicit disdain for expertise?

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Given the unacceptable consequences of war with North Korea, it is long past time for policymakers in the United States to get realistic about diplomacy with Kim Jong-un's government.

The documents most closely associated with the creation of the United States—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—present a problem with which Americans have been contending from the country’s beginning: how to reconcile the values espoused in those texts with the United States’ original sin of slavery, the flaw that marred the country’s creation, warped its prospects, and eventually plunged it into civil war. The Declaration of Independence had a specific purpose: to cut the ties between the American colonies and Great Britain and establish a new country that would take its place among the nations of the world. But thanks to the vaulting language of its famous preamble, the document instantly came to mean more than that. Its confident statement that “all men are created equal,” with “unalienable Rights” to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” put notions of freedom and equality at the heart of the American experiment.

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Former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh was more than just a leader practiced in the arts of political expedience. He represented the last historic link with the origins of the Yemeni Republic’s foundation and the last hope for its future.

Despite the vast suffering the Chinese Communist Party has caused, it has never admitted guilt, far less memorialized its victims. Nor is it likely to. Too much remembering would risk undermining the party’s legitimacy.

Russia has never truly reckoned with the horrors of Stalin’s regime. And now the Kremlin is keener than ever to avoid acknowledging past crimes; instead, it is promoting an authoritarian ideology dangerously reminiscent of Stalin’s own.

In 2014, an unusual book topped bestseller lists around the world: Capital in the Twenty-first Century, an 816-page scholarly tome by the French economist Thomas Piketty that examined the massive increase in the proportion of income and wealth accruing to the world’s richest people. Drawing on an unprecedented amount of historical economic data from 20 countries, Piketty showed that wealth concentration had returned to a peak not seen since the early twentieth century. Today in the United States, the top one percent of households earn around 20 percent of the nation’s income, a dramatic change from the middle of the twentieth century, when income was spread more evenly and the top one percent’s share hovered at around ten percent.

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The United Kingdom’s vote last year to leave the European Union was a seismic event. The British people ignored the advice of the leaders of all their major political parties and of virtually all experts. George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, told voters that leaving would wreck the British economy. U.S. President Barack Obama warned that it would reduce the United Kingdom’s influence on the world stage. Financial markets, many pollsters, and political pundits all anticipated that voters would heed the elites’ advice. And yet they decided not to, setting off a process destined to transform the country’s politics, economy, and society.

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The terrorist threat has changed since 9/11 and the United States must develop a strategy for this new phase in the war on terrorism.

Peshmerga views of the post-ISIS regional order are key to understanding Iraq’s political future.