Diplomacy & Politics Archive

Thousands of Portuguese nurses marched through Lisbon earlier this month to call for higher wages and better working conditions, as the main nurses’ unions negotiate with the government following a recent three-week strike that paralyzed the country’s health sector. Other public sector unions have taken similar actions, putting intense pressure on Prime Minister Antonio Costa, who survived a no-confidence motion last month. In an interview with WPR, Jorge Fernandes, a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, points out that this turmoil is largely a result of behind-the-scenes politicking by Portugal’s major political parties ahead of legislative elections […]

Ten years ago this month, senior United Nations officials were hard at work equivocating over a crisis. A cynic might say that the U.N. exists in a constant state of equivocation. But in March 2009, its leaders were mired in an especially grim political mess—and handling it badly. The cause of their troubles lay in northern Sri Lanka. After decades of civil war, the Sri Lankan military was carrying out a final offensive against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a rebel group with a long history of atrocities. As the decisive battle wore on, U.N. officials and journalists in […]

Amid widespread criticism of its response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa five years ago, the World Health Organization took stock of what went wrong. In a report released in 2015 before the outbreak had even ended, its Ebola Interim Assessment Panel urged the WHO to “re-establish its pre-eminence as the guardian of global public health” and to “undergo significant transformation in order to better perform.” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus vowed to act on these recommendations when he ran to become the WHO’s new director-general in 2017, during its first-ever open election campaign, in which the director-general was selected in […]

American farmers have arguably suffered the greatest collateral damage in President Donald Trump’s ongoing trade war with China, and things could get even worse. A landmark ruling last month by the World Trade Organization—one of Trump’s favorite targets—should have been good news for American farmers, since it could provide a bit of relief for them from the trade war. But even that small compensation is now likely to be delayed or lost—again because of Trump. Even if Trump’s trade war with China ends soon, American farmers are going to struggle to regain the markets they once had there. Making matters […]

For the first time since it was founded in 2006, the United Nations Human Rights Council earlier this month rebuked Saudi Arabia for its human rights record. In a rare show of unity, the council’s statement, which condemned the kingdom’s “continuing arrests and arbitrary detentions of human rights defenders,” was co-signed by all 28 members of the European Union. But that move coincided with another unanimous decision by EU member states: to prevent Saudi Arabia from being added to an EU blacklist of countries with insufficient controls on money laundering and terrorism financing. In an interview with WPR, Julien Barnes-Dacey, […]

Tuesday marks the centenary of one of the most extraordinary foreign policy debates in American history, which has renewed resonance today. On March 19, 1919, 3,000 lucky spectators crammed into Boston Symphony Hall to hear Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, square off against A. Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard University. Both men were Republicans and Boston Brahmins. But they disagreed on a big political question. Should the United States, having helped win the Great War, join a League of Nations to defend the peace? The Lodge-Lowell debate was the opening salvo in […]

Serbia’s protests have been hard to miss even if you don’t follow news and politics out of the Balkans. For more than three months, thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets of Belgrade and other Serbian cities to demand free and fair elections, an end to violent attacks against politicians and journalists and investigations into them, and more independent and unbiased reporting in the country. Why is that last demand so central to protesters? Serbia’s media environment has been suffering from several long-standing problems, but things took a turn for the worse after President Aleksandar Vucic and his Serbian […]

In late February, Canada’s former justice minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould, testified before a parliamentary committee that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other high-ranking aides had pressured her to intervene on behalf of the engineering firm SNC-Lavalin in a criminal case being pursued against the company. Trudeau now faces his biggest political crisis since taking office, with general elections looming in October. In an email interview, Christopher Sands, director of the Center for Canadian Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, explains the background of the SNC-Lavalin scandal and its implications for Trudeau and Canada’s political landscape. World Politics […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Senior Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. French President Emmanuel Macron’s latest Africa trip took him to a region where France doesn’t wield much influence. But the themes he stressed over four days in Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya this week were familiar, underscoring the priorities of a government that, while unhappy with certain aspects of its role in Africa, has no plans to fundamentally alter it. Macron’s first stop was Djibouti, a former French colony that is home to a French naval base as well as […]

In this week’s editors’ discussion episode of Trend Lines, WPR’s editor-in-chief Judah Grunstein, managing editor Frederick Deknatel and associate editor Elliot Waldman look at British Prime Minister Theresa May’s latest Brexit setback, the Trump administration’s latest policy shift on Israel, and the United Nations Security Council’s latest report on North Korea sanctions noncompliance. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three […]

In recent years, the issue of Chinese investment has become divisive enough to help shape the outcomes of elections in Malaysia, the Maldives and Sri Lanka, mostly through money tied to Beijing’s huge Belt and Road Initiative. Indonesia, which is preparing for general elections next month, has welcomed billions in Chinese money to fund critical infrastructure needs, and there are signs that Asia’s largest economy will play a major role in the vote there too. Opposition candidate Prabowo Subianto has already called for reassessing Indonesia’s trade with China, declaring that President Joko Widodo, whose administration has prioritized infrastructure development, is […]

One thing the Cold War taught the United States was how important it is, whenever possible, to address security threats without using force. American leaders knew that almost any military action risked confrontation with the Soviet Union and potential escalation to nuclear war. So armed conflicts had to be kept limited, and the two superpowers instead sought to use nonmilitary means to deal with adversaries. The United States learned during the Cold War to rely on economic and political power, reserving military action for deterrence and for addressing serious threats that could not be handled any other way. American leaders […]

Thousands of supporters of Benin’s political opposition flooded the streets of the country’s largest city, Cotonou, on Monday, bearing flags, vuvuzelas and banners with slogans denouncing the government. But while the country is set to hold legislative elections next month, the rally was not a standard show of support to get out the vote. Rather, its organizers were demanding something more fundamental: that opposition political parties be allowed to participate at all. Because of changes to Benin’s electoral rules, only two parties have met the requirements to field candidates for the polls scheduled for April 28, and both of them […]

The murder of journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kusirova, just over a year ago stunned Slovakia. Sunday’s presidential election will show if the shock was sharp enough to shake up a political scene long criticized for corruption and cronyism. Although the shooter, driver and other middlemen are all in jail, it took until today, March 14—two days before the election—for police to formally charge a suspect for ordering the February 2018 killing of Kuciak and Kusirova: Marian Kocner, a businessman with links to the ruling Smer party. The investigative journalist had been probing Kocner’s businesses. The murder sparked […]

When President Donald Trump stunned the world last year by agreeing to hold a summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un—the first-ever meeting between an American president and a North Korean head of state—it felt like a punch in the gut to South Korean conservatives. Hard-liners on North Korea, they were already roiling from corruption scandals that had brought down President Park Geun-hye with massive protests in 2016 and led to the election of President Moon Jae-in. Now, after Trump’s abrupt decision late last month to walk out of talks with North Korea during his second summit with Kim, he […]

Great-power competition is back. But for all the focus on countries like the United States and China building up their militaries, consolidating resources and leveraging industrial productivity, science and technology to boost their influence, another area of competition is emerging: artificial intelligence. Is China already outpacing the United States there? Artificial intelligence carries enormous promise, both economically and militarily. For already developed economies, including America’s, artificial intelligence could lead to the likes of automated supply chains and increased worker productivity through automating routine business tasks. Similar impacts are predicted for the military—with new levels of intelligence and automation in everything […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Just two years ago, on the heels of Donald Trump’s election, the European Union was playing up China’s potential as a partner that could help preserve the global order. But a new strategy paper from the European Commission, released on Tuesday, moves to recalibrate the EU’s approach toward China, calling it an “economic competitor” and a “systemic rival.” The paper, which comes ahead of a planned series of high-level meetings between European and Chinese leaders, notes Beijing’s failure to […]