Column Archive

America’s foreign policy establishment is at war with itself over the shape of the country’s approach toward a steadily rising China. For now, it is only an epistolary war. But as the debate deepens, its outcome will go far toward deciding how the United States responds to its most serious global rival for economic and geopolitical power for decades ahead. Among a slew of recent op-eds and policy papers about how Washington should manage the perceived challenge that China represents, two statements stand out as poles in the debate and, as such, deserve extended consideration. The first, which appeared in […]

Japan and South Korea are in the midst of a nasty diplomatic dispute, and Japan is using trade restrictions as a weapon to try and resolve it. Beyond the potential threats to American and regional geopolitical interests if the two countries remain at loggerheads, the nature of the spat is also disturbing. Japan’s use of trade restrictions to force South Korea to back down, while publicly justifying them as necessary for national security reasons, echoes U.S. President Donald Trump’s cavalier approach to trade rules and alliance relations. If the dispute is not resolved quickly, it could complicate efforts to deal […]

Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Neil Bhatiya is filling in for Stewart Patrick this week. On July 18, in the Trump administration’s first punitive measure since Iran announced earlier this month that it would exceed the levels of enriched uranium permitted under the international nuclear deal, the United States expanded sanctions against Tehran to include a network of international companies it said were linked to procuring materials for Iran’s nuclear program. In announcing the sanctions, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said his department was “taking action to shut down an Iranian nuclear procurement network that leverages Chinese- and Belgium-based front companies […]

If there’s still any question about whether President Donald Trump will actually deliver on his promises to “get out” of Afghanistan, the answer seems simple after this week. No, Trump won’t, not while he remains convinced that he could win the war there in 10 days by killing 10 million people and wiping Afghanistan “off the face of the earth.” Trump’s statement, made in a stomach-churning Oval Office meeting with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan on July 22, may have been shocking, but it wasn’t all that surprising. After 19 years at war, the bumbling that has passed for U.S. […]

Uruguay, the small country wedged between South American giants Brazil and Argentina, has become something of a leftist icon in Latin America, albeit a calmer, more restrained one. While other countries caught up in the now-receding “pink tide”—both Brazil and Argentina, plus Venezuela, Ecuador and elsewhere—fell under the spell of charismatic populists, Uruguay engaged in politics and policies that have been decidedly short on leftist agitation. Instead, it was guided by a conciliatory and pragmatic progressivism, blazing trails without polarizing the nation. It is an approach that worked well for the governing coalition, the Broad Front, or FA, keeping it […]

Back in 1996, during a six-month stay in Ecuador, I was invited by an economist to attend a workshop he was leading in an agricultural community in the western foothills of the Andes. The economist and the local nongovernmental organization he worked with were seeking to educate smallholder peasant farmers about the market forces that determined the prices of their crops. The goal was for them to rationalize their yearly planting decisions based on current market conditions, rather than to simply repeat them unchanged from year to year. At the end of the workshop, which introduced basic economic concepts like […]

Weeks after Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping agreed to a truce in the U.S.-China trade war on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Osaka, negotiations remain on pause, and speculation is growing that neither side is particularly eager for a deal. Last week, reports emerged that American and Japanese negotiators are intensifying efforts to strike a smaller trade deal that Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe could sign during the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September. The news hardly looks like a coincidence. Trump is desperate for a trade deal […]

Seventy-seven years ago this summer, Wendell Willkie did something remarkable. The failed Republican presidential candidate, defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940, embarked on a round-the-world tour that helped expand America’s horizons and propel the nation toward a policy of internationalism that shaped the postwar global order. Undertaken at FDR’s behest, Willkie’s 49-day odyssey captured the American imagination and lifted his country in thought and spirit. “One World,” his hopeful account of that trip, quickly became one of the best-selling nonfiction books in American history, with a print run of more than 2 million copies. Its thesis was plain: The […]

This week marks five years since Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine. Since then Russia has seemingly spared no effort or expense in waging an epic disinformation campaign to beat back allegations that Kremlin-backed mercenaries and separatists in the Donbas region fired the Russian-made Buk missile that killed all 298 people on board the passenger jet. Yet as evidence of Russian involvement has continued to mount in recent days, it looks like Moscow may need to retool its strategy. Almost five years to the day that a group of intrepid journalists at Bellingcat, an investigative collective, […]

It might have seemed like a barely consequential item amid another torrent of breaking news. But word that President Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, just attended the annual gathering of a controversial Iranian opposition group at its unlikely base in Albania should raise flags for many reasons, not least of which are concerns for Albania’s troubled and fragile democracy. If Albania is now unexpectedly drawn into one of today’s most dangerous geopolitical conflicts—the one pitting Iran against the United States, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states—the timing couldn’t be worse. The country is in the midst of a full-blown political […]

Earlier this month, The New York Times created a mini furor on the internet with a job listing for someone to lead its coverage of East Africa. The announcement described it as an opportunity “to dive into news and enterprise across a wide range of countries, from the deserts of Sudan and the pirate seas of the Horn of Africa, down through the forests of Congo and shores of Tanzania.” It went on to speak of the region’s “many vital story lines, including terrorism, the scramble for resources, the global contest with China,” among others. Whether as afterthought or sop, […]

During the Cold War, American policymakers frequently pushed nonaligned countries to take sides. The Central Intelligence Agency fomented coups against governments that flirted with communism and the Soviet Union, or that just drifted too far to the left for comfort. The State Department threatened to cut aid flows to countries that voted too often against U.S. priorities at the United Nations. Could sub-Saharan Africa find itself caught in the middle again if a cold war with China breaks out? In a speech at the Heritage Foundation last December, President Donald Trump’s hawkish national security adviser, John Bolton, launched a new […]

Four years ago, to great fanfare, U.N. member states endorsed a sweeping blueprint for human progress known as the Sustainable Development Goals. Intended to guide global development efforts through 2030, the 17 SDGs, as they are known, are ambitious in the extreme. They range from eliminating extreme poverty—everywhere—to ensuring human health at all ages. Collectively, the goals are backed by a whopping 169 targets, each with various indicators. In September, world leaders will gather in New York for a quadrennial SDG summit to answer the question former mayor Ed Koch used to ask his constituents: “So, how am I doing?” […]

Editor’s Note: This will be Steven Metz’s final weekly column for World Politics Review. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank Steve for more than six years of keen insights into U.S. strategy, national security and defense policy, all delivered with pristine logic in a uniquely direct style. Last week, I argued that President Donald Trump’s foreign and national security policy has produced few tangible gains but has caused a dangerous decay in America’s alliances and partnerships and an erosion of U.S. global influence. Under Trump’s direction, the approach to the world that served the United States well for […]

Twice in the past two weeks, Iran has breached the limits on its nuclear program mandated by the 2015 international agreement aimed at preventing it from developing a nuclear weapon. First, it exceeded the maximum stockpiles of enriched uranium; then it began enriching to a higher level of purity, a potentially crucial step on the path to a bomb. Tehran didn’t act secretly or even quietly. It announced its plans and made sure the entire world knew it was steadily, if gradually, breaking out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, the deal that President Donald Trump unilaterally […]

With the announcement this week that it has begun to enrich uranium above the 3.67 percent limit allowed by the 2015 international deal curbing its nuclear program, Iran has opened another round of high-stakes signaling with the Trump administration, which withdrew from the agreement last year, and the European nations that helped negotiate it. The move is the latest attempt by Iran to impose costs both on Washington for having reimposed punishing economic sanctions, and on Europe for its inability to mitigate their pain. The incremental but reversible breach of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, as the […]

Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Neil Bhatiya is filling in for Kimberly Ann Elliott this week. A little more than two years since he announced in the Rose Garden that the United States was “getting out” of the Paris climate change agreement, President Donald Trump was in Japan, the sole leader at the G-20 summit to disagree with a modest communique once again committing the international community to taking on climate change. It laid bare America’s isolation under Trump on an issue that much of the world—and indeed more and more of the American public—consider increasingly dire. Climate change has hardly […]