Column Archive

The World Trade Organization recently released a decision that it surely would have preferred to avoid. Ukraine had challenged restrictions on its exports imposed by Russia in the wake of its 2014 takeover of Crimea. The Russian government claimed that an exception to international trade rules allowed it alone to decide when trade restrictions are “necessary” for national security reasons. Moscow argued that the WTO should have no role in adjudicating the dispute. Since the WTO had never previously ruled on the national security justifications for trade restrictions, the Russia-Ukraine case is important in its own right. But lurking behind […]

The pursuit of an open world, I wrote last week, animated U.S. postwar planning during President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. The United States sought an international order based on collective security, nondiscriminatory commerce and political self-determination, governed by multilateral institutions. As an objective that promised to balance national sovereignty with common rules of coexistence, it was deeply in U.S. national interests. That same vision has never been more relevant than it is today, when the defining global struggle pits defenders of openness against forces of closure. Preserving an open world—as scholars Mira Rapp-Hooper and Rebecca Friedman Lissner have recently argued—should […]

The United States, especially the American military, hates counterinsurgency. It is ethically and politically difficult, at times impossibly so. To do it, American troops and government officials must prod a problematic ally to undertake deep reforms while facing off against an often ruthless enemy. Terrorism, assassination, subversion and sabotage are persistent and more common than the type of pitched but conventional battles that the U.S. military prefers, in which it can assert its technological advantages. Whenever the United States becomes involved in counterinsurgency, it eventually wishes that it hadn’t. As Judah Grunstein wrote this week, the recent counterinsurgency campaigns in […]

Concerns about Russian activities across Africa have been growing for some time, and new revelations about the Kremlin’s alleged efforts to interfere in the most recent presidential election in Madagascar have lifted the veil on what looks like a concerted campaign to expand Moscow’s influence by a variety of means. As outlined in a BBC documentary last month, in addition to investigative reporting by The Project, an independent Russian journalism collective, these efforts have been spearheaded by Yegveny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin who is known as “Putin’s Chef.” Prigozhin rose to prominence after he was […]

The surprise reappearance of the leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in a recently recorded video seems like a throwback to the mid-2000s. The most visible difference from the video recordings Osama bin Laden used then to remind al-Qaida followers he was still alive—and persuade them he was still relevant—is that al-Baghdadi, who was last seen in 2014, is seated on the floor of what seems like a furnished living room, rather than a cave. In other ways, too, the defeat of the Islamic State as a self-declared caliphate and its return as a transnational terrorist network would […]