United States Archive

Editor’s Note: Lavender Au is China Note’s new lead writer, curating the week’s top news and expert analysis on China every Wednesday with WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm. More than 1,000 Chinese students and scholars have had their visas to the United States revoked recently under a new Trump administration program that claims to target security risks and guard against espionage. The affected students largely hail from China’s seven major national defense colleges, which are directly subordinate to China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, receive funding from the military and work on military projects. But to call […]

Reciprocity has become the watchword for the Trump administration’s increasingly confrontational approach to China, from imposing limits on the movement of Chinese diplomats and journalists within the U.S., to banning Chinese-owned social media and messaging platforms TikTok and WeChat. The immediate goal is to impose costs for Beijing’s similar restrictions on the activities of American diplomats, journalists and tech companies in China, while insulating the U.S. from the potential security risks of Chinese tech companies that officially operate in the private sector but remain in thrall to the ruling Communist Party. Beyond that, however, it is unclear what President Donald […]

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 […]

Imagine a different Middle East. “Were all outstanding hostilities resolved, border formalities simplified and roads unblocked, one might breakfast beside the Mediterranean in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, drive up to the Syrian capital of Damascus for lunch, race south to Jordan’s Amman for tea, make Jerusalem for an early dinner, and be back beside the Mediterranean for a stroll before bed in Tel Aviv.” That might have seemed like a fanciful vision when John Keay, a British writer and historian, sketched it out in 2003, in his book “Sowing the Wind: The Seeds of Conflict in the Middle East.” […]

Over the past five years, and accelerating amid the coronavirus pandemic, a new consensus on China has emerged and consolidated in the capitals of many Western and Asian democracies. The hope that China’s integration into the global economy will gradually result in a softening of its posture abroad and political liberalization at home has faded, particularly under the rule of Xi Jinping. China has shown little willingness to remedy the unfair trading practices it has long used to tilt the playing field in its favor during its rise as an economic power. And under Xi, the Chinese Communist Party has […]

“What we’ve seen is an infinitely more assertive China,” says Kevin Rudd, president of the Asia Society Policy Institute and former prime minister of Australia, in assessing the country’s evolution under Xi Jinping. As a result, Mr. Rudd is not surprised by how rapidly the consensus view of China has shifted, with strategic competition having replaced win-win cooperation as the buzzword in the capitals of Western and Asian democracies. “The principle dynamic here has been China’s changing course itself,” he says, as well as China’s emergence as a global power. “We have a new guy in charge who has decided […]

In the 19 years that have passed since I watched the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapse, not a single moment of that day has faded from memory. It was my second day on the job as a cub reporter for the New York Daily News, and I am still a bit embarrassed to admit I was running a little late that morning. I had stopped at the elementary school polling station near my apartment in Queens to cast my vote in the mayoral primaries at around 9 a.m. A few minutes later, as I hustled to catch […]

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 […]

Among the remarkable, unexpected developments during the coronavirus pandemic is one that may seem arcane to most people, but is nevertheless loaded with significance: the steep drop in the strength of the U.S. dollar. Fluctuations in currency markets respond to multiple factors, to be sure, but the effectiveness of government policy is unquestionably one of them. A close look at the behavior of currency markets over the past six months strongly suggests that the sinking fortunes of the once-reliable greenback represent a global vote of no-confidence in the actions of the current U.S. government. Early in the pandemic, financial markets […]

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, […]

The coming crisis of American power that is sure to follow the November election will be unique in U.S. history. Competing with China, Russia and whatever other major rivals may emerge will be less about aircraft carriers, fighter jets, nuclear submarines and stealth bombers than ever before, and more about helping other governments meet the vital needs of their citizens. Although the United States suddenly has much less of a hard power edge than it once did, due to China’s rapid and ambitious modernization of its military, and particularly its navy, Americans should treat skeptically the calls that are bound […]

When al-Qaida targeted the centers of American financial and military power on 9/11, it believed that most of the world would welcome seeing the United States knocked down from its perch of power. Whether by accident or by design, Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida’s leader and founder, had formulated his strategy based on an interpretation of classical realist theory, predicting that countries seeking to balance against American hegemony would be disinclined to get involved in any conflict that followed the attacks. Instead, while the ruins of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon still smoldered, leaders around the world pledged their […]

Though changes in trade policy create winners and losers within a given country, the net effect of lowering import tariffs is generally positive for the country’s economy as a whole. Now, however, tariffs are already low, so the trade agenda involves mostly addressing regulatory and other “technical” barriers to trade generated by countries’ domestic policies, with a core principle of international trade rules being to ensure that these domestic policies do not discriminate against imports. But using legally binding trade agreements to influence the substance of policies that apply to both imports and domestic products alike can create friction between […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Guest contributor Thomas Lee wrote the lead story in China Note this week. Amid a global pandemic and a summer of natural disasters and social unrest in the United States, it might be easy to forget that the country is still locked in a destructive trade war with China. Not that China itself is far from the minds of the two major U.S. presidential candidates, especially President Donald Trump. During last week’s Republican National Convention, Trump not surprisingly went […]