Global Archive

“The Future We Want, the UN We Need.” That’s the theme Secretary-General Antonio Guterres chose for the 75th U.N. General Assembly, which opened virtually earlier this month because of the coronavirus pandemic. By using the word “we,” Guterres had in mind not just the governments of the U.N.’s 193 member states, but the aspirations of everyday citizens, consistent with the spirit of the U.N. Charter, whose preamble begins, “We the Peoples of the United Nations….” But how do you measure the attitudes and preferences of 7.8 billion people, especially in the midst of a pandemic? In the run-up to this […]

As recent polling has confirmed, the prestige and image of the United States have suffered a precipitous decline under President Donald Trump. As for Trump himself, a recent survey by the Pew Research Center showed that people in a variety of other countries place more stock in the leadership of both China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin than in America’s president. Although domestic issues are likely to dominate the upcoming U.S. presidential election, for these reasons and others, a key feature of Democrat Joe Biden’s campaign to send Trump into political retirement has appropriately been addressing the damage to […]

Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Edward Alden is filling in for Kimberly Ann Elliott. The World Trade Organization is dying. We’ll miss it when it’s gone, for many reasons. But one stands out in particular: The WTO helps keep national leaders from doing economically harmful things for domestic political reasons. Without that constraint, we can expect governments to take more and more actions that are politically popular but harmful to both their national economies and to the global economy. The decision last week by a WTO dispute settlement panel that ruled against the Trump administration’s tariffs on China is a sign […]

In mid-July, a Russian satellite moved uncommonly close to a U.S. government satellite in low-Earth orbit, before quickly rendezvousing with another Russian satellite nearby. The Kremlin initially insisted that this satellite was part of a routine program to monitor its own assets in space. But a week later, U.S. Space Command, which oversees American military operations in space, deemed Russia’s maneuver a non-destructive test of an anti-satellite weapon—a sophisticated counterspace tool that could threaten U.S. space assets and national security. U.S. officials had raised similar concerns twice before, earlier this year and in 2018, about abnormal Russian satellite behavior in […]

The opening of the 75th United Nations General Assembly finds international cooperation in crisis and the U.N. in the crosshairs. Many critiques, especially from the United States, focus on the institution itself, as if it were somehow disembodied from the interests and policies of its major member states. The U.N.’s troubled anniversary is an opportune moment not only to reassess its strengths and weaknesses, but also to temper expectations of what multilateralism can possibly deliver when the U.N.’s leading members turn it into a geopolitical football—or are absent without leave. With these ends in mind, I offer the following 10 […]

Like other world leaders, U.S. President Donald Trump is not traveling to New York for this week’s U.N. General Assembly due to the coronavirus pandemic, delivering a pre-recorded video address instead. But while the format may be peculiar, the substance of what he will say could be more familiar, and jarring. Trump has addressed the assembly three times since taking office, and he tends to repeat certain themes each year, often with one eye on his domestic audience. Here are five points to look out for in Tuesday’s speech. China: The president is almost certain to devote a significant chunk […]

In late April, Luca Esposito was reflecting, like many of us, on how the coronavirus pandemic had upended his family’s life. Esposito wrote in a blog post that his elderly father in southern Italy had turned to WhatsApp to order groceries, because he could no longer visit the store in person; that his children’s school had struggled to adapt to the demands of online learning; and how remote working, once a privilege of senior managers, in his view could become the norm. As the executive director of the World Lottery Association, or WLA, a lobby group that represents national, state […]

Expectations will be low this week as the United Nations kicks off its first General Assembly by Zoom. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has come up with a catchy theme—“The Future We Want, the UN We Need”—but don’t expect any breakthroughs. The most significant accomplishment will be a general Declaration of Principles issued on Sept. 21, in which member states recommit themselves to multilateralism. Beyond that, the world body is in a holding pattern, awaiting the outcome of November’s U.S. presidential election and the eventual passing of the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s a pity, because the U.N.’s 75th anniversary finds the world racked […]

Globally, the past decade has been marked by the twin advances of authoritarianism and populism. The two are not always linked, but in situations ranging from the Philippines and Cambodia to Hungary and Poland, politicians have leveraged populist movements to seize power. Once in office, they have begun the process of dismantling the institutions designed to check their authority and protect human rights, particularly the judiciary and the media. The populist boom is fueled by disparate, local issues, but these often share common features, such as feelings of disenfranchisement, of being left out of a global economic boom and of […]

Millions of children headed back to school this week, but the environment they’ve returned to is anything but familiar. Those in classrooms are facing radically different health and safety protocols, while many others are still confined to their homes, using remote tools to communicate with their teachers and classmates. This week on the Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s Elliot Waldman was joined by Rebecca Winthrop, senior fellow and co-director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, to discuss how COVID-19 is changing the face of education. Winthrop and her colleagues have found that the pandemic is exposing new […]

Education has traditionally been viewed as humanity’s great equalizer, providing children from less privileged backgrounds with the tools they need to achieve greater degrees of financial security and success in their chosen fields. Unfortunately, education can serve to entrench socio-economic disparities just as much as it alleviates them. That has become all too clear in recent months, as the families and schools with the greatest resources, both financial and technological, look to be the ones best-prepared to weather the coronavirus pandemic. But according to Rebecca Winthrop, senior fellow and co-director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, […]