The Americas Archive

“Russia, whatever they’re doing right now, is not the Soviet Union,” said Washington Democratic Rep. Adam Smith yesterday at a discussion of the U.S. defense budget. Although most of his congressional colleagues would likely agree with that statement, there is no consensus on Capitol Hill about how to respond to a crisis in Ukraine that appears to leave the United States with few options. And while the differences in large part follow party lines, internal divisions within each camp have also surfaced. Democrats appear to generally support, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, the Obama administration’s approach of gradually increasing pressure […]

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama today amid escalating tensions in Ukraine and lingering mistrust over NSA spying revelations. In an email interview, Sudha David-Wilp, senior trans-Atlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, explained where the two countries’ interests overlap, and where they diverge. WPR: How closely do the U.S. and Germany’s political and economic interests converge—within Europe, in the trans-Atlantic context and globally—and where do they diverge? Sudha David-Wilp: Germany and the U.S. refer to the trans-Atlantic partnership as one steeped in common values. Under that broad justification for working […]

President Barack Obama’s delayed visit to East Asia—finally carried out this month after domestic politics forced him to skip key summits last fall—was supposed to highlight America’s seriousness about rebalancing its foreign policy attention to the Asia-Pacific region. Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, spoiled the narrative, as the ongoing crisis in Ukraine continues to suck up most of the oxygen of the U.S. foreign policy process. Unlike earlier Obama peregrinations overseas, this trip did not generate blockbuster headlines or do much to burnish U.S. global leadership. Some pundits are already writing off the entire “pivot” to Asia as a failed […]

China and Russia have launched a global campaign to regulate content on the Internet that, if successful, would slowly destroy cyberspace as a means of self-expression, freedom and unregulated speech. While they are still far from achieving their goals, Moscow and Beijing sense an opportunity in the outraged reaction to former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks to change the global conversation and continue nudging stakeholders in the direction of censorship as the universal default norm. The Russian and Chinese governments already heavily regulate the Internet at home, but they are increasingly seeking to use international forums, organizations and […]

In mid-April, unions across Argentina called a general strike in protest of high inflation and taxes, bringing the country to a standstill for 24 hours. In an email interview, Maria Victoria Murillo, a political science professor at Columbia University who has researched labor politics in Latin America, explained the role of labor unions in Argentine politics. WPR: What has been the recent trajectory of labor unions’ role in Argentina’s politics? Maria Victoria Murillo: Labor unions have always been crucial actors of Argentine politics since the emergence of Peronism—the vaguely defined populist ideology of former Argentine President Juan Domingo Peron—in the […]