Global Archive

Nikki Haley may find that representing the United States at the United Nations is a bit of a letdown. President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to nominate Haley as his ambassador to the U.N. has been one of his better-received choices. In her current position as governor of South Carolina, she has made some decisions that pleased liberals, most notably removing the Confederate flag from the state house. U.N. officials who feared that Trump would send a unilateralist firebrand to speak for him in New York hope Haley is someone that they can do business with. There has, however, been a good […]

Is it time to be optimistic about Donald Trump? Since Trump won the U.S. presidential election, liberal foreign policy commentators have split into two camps. Some have stuck to their pre-electoral stances that Trump’s election could signal the implosion of American power and principles. Others have started to reassess their views, resulting in a spate of think pieces explaining why the next president-elect could prove a moderate pragmatist in office. I made my own minor contribution to this somewhat spineless school of literature last week, arguing that Trump could come to recognize the value of United Nations mediators and peacekeepers. […]

Movements like the self-proclaimed Islamic State must innovate or die. An insurgency is always weaker than the government or governments it faces, so it must make the most of its limited resources and whatever advantages it does enjoy. Often what it has in its favor is a lack of restraint and a willingness to carefully orchestrate violence to maximize its effects. That is why groups like the Islamic State rely on terrorism, using it to generate fear disproportionate to the resources it takes to execute an attack. In strategic terms, terrorism is cheap but potentially effective, particularly if the victim […]

Could the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States presage an unexpected boost for United Nations mediators and peacekeepers? It seems an improbable proposition. During the election campaign, Trump frequently criticized the U.N., and he looks likely to disrupt multilateral diplomacy on issues from climate change to human rights. Why should he be any kinder to the organization’s envoys and the blue helmets? The answer is that, having laid out an utterly incoherent vision of international security in his campaign, he may need the U.N. to help fill some of the biggest gaps. Previous Republican leaders have […]

The timing of Donald Trump’s stunning upset to become the president-elect of the United States couldn’t have come at a more inauspicious moment for global efforts to blunt climate change. As the election returns were pouring in last week, across the Atlantic in Marrakech, Morocco, representatives from nearly 200 nations gathered at the beginning of a major conference following up last December’s historic global climate accord signed in Paris. The Paris Agreement for the first time committed the U.S. and 192 countries to an ambitious international regime to curb global emissions, aiming to cap global temperature rises by the end […]

Donald Trump’s surprise presidential election victory was a result, in part, of his success tapping into growing populist sentiment across much of the United States. That follows a global trend that has seen populist leaders come to power in Latin America, Europe and Asia. For all the attention on populism, though, what is it? Jan-Werner Müller explained it this way in a December 2014 article for WPR on the threat populism poses to liberal democracy: Contrary to conventional wisdom, populism is not simply a matter of irresponsible policies or appeals to the downtrodden. Populism is an anti-elitist but, crucially, also […]

In less than a week, Americans will vote for their next president. The choice this year is stark, particularly with regard to the two candidates’ character and qualifications. For all her flaws, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is clearly qualified and prepared to assume the presidency. By contrast, her Republican counterpart, Donald Trump, has demonstrated a lack of seriousness and a cavalier amateurishness that makes him ill-suited for the office. This is not so much an endorsement of Clinton as a statement of fact for most unbiased observers of international affairs and national security. It is also unfortunate, since the campaign—while […]