U.S. President Donald Trump’s surprise move last week to recognize Morocco’s claim to the disputed region of Western Sahara, in exchange for Morocco normalizing relations with Israel, ushered a long-frozen conflict into a new and more volatile phase. In one sense, it is formal acknowledgement of the reality that Morocco has cemented its de facto control over most of Western Sahara. With U.S. backing, Morocco now has even less incentive to cooperate with the United Nations in its decades-long effort to determine the fate of the coastal desert territory through a referendum on self-determination, promised after the U.N. brokered a [...]
CAIRO—With hundreds of women flooding social media in recent months with accusations of sexual harassment and assault, a growing #MeToo movement is taking Egypt by storm. Their online testimonials have garnered massive public support and prompted reforms to the country’s sexual harassment laws, like granting anonymity to victims and witnesses in sexual assault cases. More broadly, they are challenging the culture of victim-blaming that is often associated with sexual harassment and assault in Egypt. Activists are hoping to build on this momentum in a country where gender-based violence has become all too common. After the Arab Spring protests in 2011 [...]
When President-elect Joe Biden takes office on Jan. 20, he will inherit two types of problems from his predecessor. The first will involve repairing the damage President Donald Trump created through neglect: the alliances, partnerships, multilateral organizations and U.S. government institutions to which Trump paid too little attention the past four years. Though not negligible, these problems will in most cases be relatively straightforward to address through methodical diplomacy—the simple art of showing up. The second category of problems has to do with the damage Trump created by paying too much attention to an issue: most of all, his campaigns [...]
