As U.S. officials focus on countering China and Russia, Washington’s policy community is taking a new look at U.S. relations with the Global South. The fact that these conversations are taking place is encouraging, but the questions they focus on also demonstrate how little U.S. leaders understand about the Global South.
Last month, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan gave a speech declaring that the neoliberal “Washington consensus” was officially dead. The Biden administration’s new policy approach is a bold departure from one that allowed far too many decisions to be determined solely by the market, but it has problems of its own.
A growing number of jurisdictions worldwide have recently moved toward some form of cannabis regulation. Moving away from prohibition makes sense, but cannabis legalization has not been without its challenges. One trend in particular gets little attention: the complicity of legal cannabis corporations in the illicit cannabis trade.