Column Archive

Over the past few decades, the U.S. military has had to shift its focus several times as the security environment and American national interests evolved. Until the end of the Cold War, it concentrated on preparing to fight the Soviet Union, potentially with nuclear weapons. In the 1990s, most of the military’s attention was on conventional wars against what were called “rogue states,” particularly Iran, Iraq and North Korea. After the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. military retooled for counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. Now that era, too, is ending. Today, as the United States disengages from Iraq and Afghanistan, and Russia and […]

In the midst of a raging political battle in the United States over President Donald Trump’s unprecedented measures against migrants and asylum-seekers along the southern border, Vice President Mike Pence set out on a tour of Latin America this week. The trip was planned and announced before Trump’s so-called zero tolerance policy against illegal immigration, including forcibly separating children from their parents, turned into a major international news story. Trump has since moved to rescind the family separation policy with an executive order, although his administration, characteristically, is still sending out mixed messages about whether the policy is still in […]

The events of the past month have some political observers wondering if the United States has begun, or is in the midst of, a slide toward authoritarianism under President Donald Trump. The worry is that, with the Republican Party apparently cowed by Trump and his political base, the constitutional system of checks and balances is no longer fit for purpose. Against this backdrop, the administration’s coarsened political rhetoric and policies against immigrants and asylum-seekers at the border are seen as precursors for broader restrictions of liberties moving forward. At the same time, there is a backlash—from Trump supporters, but also […]

The new president that Mexico elects this weekend will not take office until Dec. 1, which means there will be little progress for the rest of the year in the negotiations between Mexico, Canada and the United States on a new and “improved” North American Free Trade Agreement. By December, American voters will have elected a new Congress that might have at least one house under Democratic Party control when it convenes next January. And later in 2019, Canadians will hold their parliamentary elections. The electoral calendar often poses challenges for trade negotiators because politicians are loath to make concessions […]

When Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency, nervous commentators warned that he would pursue transactional relations with foreign powers, eschewing America’s traditional values and alliances. To the extent that he has disdained many of the principles that guided U.S. engagement with the world after 1945, they were correct. But the Trump administration has also proved strikingly averse to genuinely transactional diplomacy, if you define that term as making and delivering concrete bargains that all sides can afford. Foreign diplomats, not least among U.S. allies, have made strenuous efforts to satisfy the president’s widely publicized love of deal-making. Rather than simply […]

Following last week’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, U.S. President Donald Trump trumpeted the potential for economic development in a country that most of the world has long considered a pariah. “Think of it from a real estate perspective,” Trump said, suggesting that instead of building nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, North Korea could have “the best hotels in the world.” While it is easy to attribute this seemingly peculiar position to Trump’s inexperience at statecraft, it actually runs deeper than that. It is one more manifestation of the enduring difficulty Americans have understanding how other cultures […]

Last Sunday, Colombians elected their next president in a second round run-off, delivering a strong victory for the conservative candidate, Ivan Duque, as the polls had predicted. That the outcome was largely expected in no way diminishes the historic significance of the election, and it does nothing to ease the complexity of the challenge facing the man some are calling Colombia’s Emmanuel Macron, a young, little-known figure who rose from relative obscurity, vowing to bring change. The comparison to the French president is overdone. Like Macron, Colombia’s president-elect faces high expectations. On the economic front, the center-right Duque, who worked […]

In Europe and the U.S. this week, callous government treatment of asylum-seekers triggered public outrage and political tensions, which may be enough to soften policy in the short term. Unfortunately, that will not meaningfully address the underlying causes of the migration crises that have become the new political ground zero on both sides of the Atlantic. Long-simmering tensions within the European Union boiled over when Italy’s new populist government refused to allow the Aquarius, a ship carrying rescued asylum-seekers from North Africa, to dock at an Italian port last week. The Aquarius was left stranded in the Mediterranean for days […]

Trying to follow trade policy under the Trump administration makes your head spin. One minute there are going to be big tariffs on billions of dollars in Chinese exports, and then there are not—except then maybe they will be imposed, after all. But who really knows, because a lot can happen between now and July 6, when the latest tariffs that were announced last week are set to take effect. Just in the past month, President Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions on Tehran, then undermined the enforcement of those sanctions by undercutting penalties against […]

Who can speak for the United Nations on human rights with any credibility these days? Last week, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced that he wants an open competition to determine who will become the new U.N. high commissioner for human rights when the position becomes vacant this summer. This is an explosively sensitive portfolio. The high commissioner is historically one of the most recognizable U.N. officials after the secretary-general. The media treat whoever holds the post as a sort of modern-day moral oracle. The outgoing incumbent, Prince Zeid Raad al-Hussein of Jordan, has not shied away from this vocation. He has […]

The world has been fixated this week on the Singapore summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, the ruler of North Korea. As the first-ever meeting between the serving leaders of these two bitter enemies, it was seen as an opportunity to redirect a relationship that only a few months ago seemed to be lurching toward armed conflict, and the risk of nuclear war. The outcome from Singapore, though, was less an equitable step forward than a clear win for Kim. Since the unexpected summit was put together very quickly, while surviving a sudden and soon-reversed cancellation […]

At a time when the international order is being challenged and decades-old conflicts appear to be in flux, perhaps it isn’t a surprise that anti-government protests in an impoverished Central American country have fallen under the radar. But the escalating unrest in Nicaragua, less than 1,000 miles from U.S. shores, could well morph into a catastrophe that grabs global attention, if the government there continues along its uncompromising path of repression. The toll of clashes between protesters and government forces has spiked to at least 148 dead and well over 1,000 wounded in recent weeks, according to the Nicaraguan Center […]

Let’s get this out of the way up top: The outcome of yesterday’s summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is preferable to nuclear war. That’s a pretty low bar, of course, but lowering the bar increasingly seems like Trump’s one area of expertise. In any event, we can all be glad that he—and Kim—cleared it. After that, the verdict is less forgiving for Trump. When stripped of all its smoke and mirrors, its oddball pageantry and puffery, the summit delivered a boilerplate document rehashing previous talking points on both sides, with no new […]

Editor’s note: This will be Ellen Laipson’s final weekly column for World Politics Review. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank Ellen for the thoughtful and lucid analysis she has offered WPR readers each week for the past three years. Ellen will continue writing regular briefings for WPR. As my three years as a weekly columnist for World Politics Review come to an end, I’d like to reflect on the experience, from the practical challenges of being a columnist to the topics I’ve considered and returned to from time to time. Editor-in-Chief Judah Grunstein came up with the title […]

Should we really be shocked, or even mildly surprised, when an upstart American president upsets the Group of Seven industrialized nations and suggests non-Western powers should enter the club? President Donald Trump trashed this weekend’s G-7 summit by not only bad-mouthing his counterparts over trade, singling out the Canadian hosts for extra bile, but also arguing that Russia should rejoin the group just four years after it was expelled over the Ukrainian war. Other G-7 leaders were distinctly unamused. Trump’s behavior was crude even by his undiplomatic standards. Yet he was hardly the first U.S. leader to question the G-7’s […]

During a January talk in Israel, retired Gen. David Petraeus, the former CIA director, warned that the world had entered an age of the “weaponization of everything.” What he meant was that weapons are no longer simply the traditional tools of war—guns, missiles, warplanes, naval ships and so forth—but everyday objects that can be adapted to damage, destroy or kill. Think, for instance, of the hijacked airliners in the Sept. 11 attacks, the increasingly common use of trucks and cars for terrorism, and the kinds of aggressive information warfare conducted through cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns that exploit “fake news” and […]

When people take to the streets to protest high prices and tax increases, their message doesn’t usually resonate beyond their country’s borders. But when the protests erupt in a country like Jordan, in the heart of the Middle East, they are an uncomfortable reminder to the region, and the world, of the kingdom’s vulnerability and its importance in preserving regional stability. The protests started last week in Amman, and they quickly took on a life of their own, expanding well beyond the capital and drawing support from across society—a sign that their objective of drawing attention to economic hardships resonated […]