U.S. Foreign Policy Archive

2019 has not begun, but it is already getting bad reviews. Economists fret about a recession. American commentators worry that President Donald J. Trump is increasingly erratic and unconstrained. Their European counterparts are bracing for a very hard Brexit indeed. Is the outlook for multilateral institutions equally bleak, or even worse? The United Nations and other international organizations face two major strategic challenges, plus multiple subsidiary crises, over the next year. The main challenges are an intensification of competition between the U.S. and China in multilateral forums, and a rapid deterioration of the once-sturdy nuclear arms control framework. These twin […]

During the first two years of the Trump administration, Washington has dramatically reduced its rhetorical focus on democracy promotion in Asia. For instance, President Donald Trump has mostly ignored issues of human rights and democracy when meeting with leaders of abusive regimes, like the Thai prime minister and junta leader, Prayuth Chan-ocha. This approach is consistent with Trump’s overall realpolitik; he usually does not raise rights issues in meetings with other authoritarian leaders, and he often seems to have more contempt for democratically elected leaders around the globe than for autocrats. More recently, despite extensive evidence suggesting that the armed […]

Last week, the Maiquetia airport outside Caracas was the site of a remarkable event. On Monday, one after another, a series of Russian military aircraft landed in Venezuela. Most notably, the flock included two nuclear-capable, supersonic Tu-160 “White Swan” bombers, along with a passenger plane reportedly bringing about 100 Russian military personnel, and a large cargo plane possibly delivering military equipment. Just a few days earlier, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro had met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow and received promises of a $6 billion aid package. Now, Putin was using Venezuela to send a powerful message to Washington. […]

The changing alliances in Syria’s civil war have pitted militaries and militias against each other, drawing Turkey progressively deeper into the conflict. Find out more when you subscribe to World Politics Review (WPR). In January 2018, Turkish forces attacked Afrin, a Kurdish-controlled enclave in northwestern Syria, putting both American and Russian plans for Syria to the test. Most of Afrin’s original inhabitants are Kurds belonging to the People’s Protection Units, or YPG. The YPG is a Syrian appendage of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, which has been locked in conflict with the Turkish government since the 1970s. The YPG […]

What happened in the multilateral system in 2018? Looking back over the year, it is possible to identify three strategic trends and a last-minute political surprise that may resonate in the future. The big trends in multilateralism included a hardening of the Trump administration’s opposition to international cooperation, a concomitant increase in China’s efforts to influence bodies like the United Nations, and worrying signs of European splits over the value of internationalism. The surprise was an unexpected, and arguably almost accidental, revitalization of humanitarian politics over Yemen. Let’s start with the trends. By the end of 2017, it was clear […]

As 2018 draws to a close, U.S. President Donald Trump and his South Korean counterpart, Moon Jae-in, are sounding remarkably optimistic about the future of the Korean Peninsula, a marked contrast to the hostile rhetoric of potential “fire and fury” that reflected heightened tensions following a series of nuclear and missile tests by North Korea just one year ago. Most experts and analysts, however, are skeptical that the current approach will yield the positive outcomes the two leaders predict, noting that no concrete actions toward denuclearization, much less the process by which they might be taken, have been discussed with […]

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo caused a minor rumpus last week with a speech in Brussels attacking multilateral institutions. His list of complaints about entities such as the United Nations and European Union was long and often quite vague, but his core point was that too many diplomats and international officials have come to see “multilateralism as an end unto itself.” “The more treaties we sign, the safer we supposedly are,” Pompeo continued. “The more bureaucrats we have, the better the job gets done.” The secretary of state is hardly the first American politician to dismiss international organizations as […]

Last October, Washington announced that the U.S. Cyber Command was targeting individual Russian information warfare operatives to deter them from interfering in America’s midterm elections. The thinking seemed to be that if Moscow’s agents knew that the United States had identified them, they would think twice about undertaking hostile actions. Even though the Trump administration had been unable to make Russian President Vladimir Putin forego cyberwarfare all together, it might at least be able to weaken the effectiveness of the Russian offensive at the operator level. The story grabbed attention both because it indicated that the United States was shifting […]

As widely expected, U.S. President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping declared a truce in their trade war over dinner in Buenos Aires this past weekend. According to the White House statement after the meeting, Xi committed to increase imports of American agricultural and energy products to reduce the bilateral trade deficit and to immediately begin negotiations over China’s unfair trade policies. In exchange, Trump agreed that he would not increase tariffs from 10 percent to 25 percent on $200 billion in Chinese exports as scheduled on Jan. 1, but that he could do so later if there […]

George Herbert Walker Bush grasped the importance of the United Nations like no other American president before or since. The 41st occupant of the White House, who died last week, was U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in the early 1970s. Yet his main contribution to the institution came at the end of the Cold War. Throughout his single term in office, Bush grappled with the dilemma of how to dismantle the Soviet Union’s empire without sparking a disastrous bust-up with Moscow. He relied on the U.N. to pull off this geopolitical conjuring trick, turning to the Security Council to resolve […]