Diplomacy & Politics Archive

Seven years into a sweeping and costly effort to rebuild Asia with itself at the center, China has a publicity problem with its Belt and Road Initiative. What has become the guiding macroeconomic centerpiece of Chinese foreign policy is in many ways stranded on shaky ground. Some of the Belt and Road Initiative’s trouble is superficial, like its unwieldy name, which had to be rebranded from its earlier form, “One Belt, One Road,” that itself was an abbreviation for two interrelated investment strategies called the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. But fundamentally, Beijing’s problems […]

The small Caribbean island nation of Dominica has been rocked by protests in recent weeks ahead of parliamentary elections that are scheduled for Friday. Demonstrators and opposition groups claim the current electoral system unfairly advantages Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit’s government, which is refusing to implement needed reforms to facilitate a free and fair vote. In an email interview with WPR, Robert Looney, a distinguished professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, explains how the government’s stance on electoral reforms is threatening the legitimacy of this week’s elections. WPR: What prompted the recent protests over electoral reforms? What are […]

Ending 15 years of governing by the leftist Broad Front coalition, Luis Lacalle Pou of the center-right National Party was declared the winner on Nov. 30 of Uruguay’s closely contested presidential runoff. The results of the second-round vote a week earlier, on Nov. 24, came down to just 28,666 votes out of 2.43 million cast, according to the Electoral Court. With turnout at 90 percent, Lacalle Pou, a lawyer, veteran congressman and son of a former president, edged the Broad Front’s candidate, Daniel Martinez, a former mayor of Montevideo, 48.7 to 47.5 percent. During the Broad Front’s decade and a […]

Since his first day in office, President Donald Trump has made clear his general discomfort with multilateralism and particular dislike for the World Trade Organization. It was little surprise that he appointed Robert Lighthizer, a long-standing skeptic of the WTO and its legally binding dispute settlement system, as the U.S. trade representative. Over the past two years, as it has unilaterally imposed tariffs on trading partners and launched a major trade war with China, the Trump administration has taken steps to steadily weaken that system by blocking appointments to the body overseeing appeals. Now, the White House is reportedly threatening […]

When President Donald Trump granted pardons to two Army officers—one convicted of war crimes, the other accused of them—and reversed the demotion of a Navy SEAL who was convicted of posing with the corpse of an enemy combatant, he exposed several troubling ambiguities about civilian-military relations in the United States. Civilian and uniformed defense officials feel most at ease when the dynamics of their relationship are clear-cut, with formal and tacit assignments of roles and responsibilities that leave little room for uncertainty. In practice, though, things are rarely so black and white. There is only one certainty so far in […]