Diplomacy & Politics Archive

It’s déjà vu all over again for voters in Israel, who will go to the polls for the third time in less than a year on March 2. Previous elections in April and September 2019 were inconclusive, as no party was able to form a majority coalition in the Knesset, Israel’s legislature. Will Israeli voters, fed up with all the political wrangling, produce a different result next month? And how might recent developments, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s indictment on corruption charges and the unveiling of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Israel-Palestine peace plan, affect the outcome? For this week’s interview […]

For the first time in Syria’s nine-year war, the Turkish military this week launched direct attacks on the Syrian army. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Monday that he ordered howitzers and F-16 fighter jets to hit President Bashar al-Assad’s forces near the Turkish border in response to the killing of eight Turkish soldiers in Idlib province in northwestern Syria. “We are determined to continue our operations to ensure the safety of our country, our nation and our brothers in Idlib,” Erdogan warned. Turkey’s defense minister, Gen. Hulusi Akar, later claimed 76 Syrian soldiers were “neutralized” in attacks on more than […]

MEXICO CITY—Mexico’s left-leaning president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, took office in December 2018 vowing to demilitarize his country’s war on drugs and tackle its wave of violent crime with a policy of “hugs, not bullets.” Yet his first full year in office saw 35,588 homicides committed nationwide, breaking the previous record for the third year in a row. In one of the more high-profile atrocities, nine members of a prominent Mexican-American Mormon family were massacred in November, including six children. The spiraling violence, along with AMLO’s failed promises to address it, has rekindled a long-running debate in Mexico over how […]

These are heady days for U.S. President Donald Trump. Secure in the knowledge he will survive impeachment, Trump is also coming off a string of what he can and does depict as foreign policy successes. Closer inspection reveals these “successes” to be mixed bags at best and little more than hot air at worst. His trade war with China produced a “phase one” deal that leaves most of the underlying tensions unresolved, with any potential gains remaining hypothetical. And so far, his so-called maximum pressure campaigns against North Korea, Iran and Venezuela are 0-for-3 when it comes to concrete strategic […]

In a month spent celebrating supposed trade triumphs, the White House quietly conceded that some of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, on imports of steel and aluminum, were in fact failing to achieve their stated aim of boosting American production. But instead of rolling the tariffs back, Trump issued new ones. Late on a recent Friday night, a time when all presidents try to bury bad news, the White House released a proclamation in which Trump ordered new tariffs on nails, wire, car bumpers and certain other metal-based products because increased imports of those “derivative” products were “undermin[ing] the purpose” of […]

BELFAST, Northern Ireland—The two main political parties in Northern Ireland announced a deal last month to restore the region’s power-sharing government, which had ceased to function three years ago. Within 24 hours of the announcement of the deal on Jan. 10, which was brokered by the British and Irish governments, Northern Ireland’s institutions of devolved government were back up and running. Yet while many in Belfast are breathing a sigh of relief, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s recent Brexit deal has created a host of new problems for the region that the reopened Northern Ireland Assembly will need to confront. […]

At first glance, the Nile valley at Wad Ramli, an hour’s drive north of Khartoum, looks as lush and fertile as ever. Date palms sag, heavy with fruit along the banks. Neat rows of barley await harvesting in the heat. With thousands of miles of unbroken desert to the west and many hundreds to the east, this narrow, green strip—at points only 200 meters wide—still closely resembles the life-giving refuge from a hostile environment that it has been for millennia. But ask the farmers, fishermen or anyone else who depends on the river for their livelihood, and they’ll tell you […]

LIMA, Peru—When Martin Vizcarra stepped up from the vice presidency to replace the disgraced Pedro Pablo Kuczynski as president of Peru in March 2018, the odds appeared stacked against him. An austere, accidental leader whose tiny political party, Peruvians for Change, controlled a fast-disintegrating congressional bloc, Vizcarra immediately came under heavy fire from the hard-right Popular Force party, led by Keiko Fujimori, which had seized on a bribery scandal to force Kuczynski to resign. After three months of attempting to appease the Fujimoristas—and seeing his approval ratings plummet—Vizcarra launched a make-or-break campaign against Peru’s rampant corruption, and by implication Popular […]

The rapid spread of the Wuhan coronavirus, which the World Health Organization declared a global health emergency last Thursday, is immediately testing the multilateral system’s capacity to respond to a pandemic. As of Jan. 31, the virus had infected a reported 9,720 people in China and around 100 more in 20 other countries and territories, killing at least 213. The deepening health crisis underscores that we live in an epidemiologically interdependent world, in which outbreaks anywhere can hopscotch around the world at jet aircraft speeds. Preserving global public health depends in large part on three things: timely and credible action […]