Column Archive

A week ago, Colombians faced a sudden, unwelcome reminder of the bad old days. In a video message that spread rapidly throughout the country, well-known former guerrilla leaders announced their rejection of the 2016 peace agreement between the state and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC. The men, dressed in the olive-green fatigues they had worn for decades waging a self-proclaimed Marxist revolution, blamed the government, which they accused of betraying them and the deal they reached in Havana three years ago. That hard-fought peace accord, the result of four years of negotiations, had won then-Colombian […]

Is restraint the answer to America’s foreign policy problems? The idea that the U.S. should avoid military interventions and rein in its global security commitments, instead emphasizing diplomacy and persuasion to advance its interests, has been steadily gaining ground over the past decade, helped along in that time by the failed U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Now restraint seems like a grand strategy whose time has come. In his column last week, Stewart Patrick discussed a recent book by three leading proponents making the case for restraint as the guiding logic of America’s engagement with the world. Barry […]

Amid the gyrations of his trade war with China, President Donald Trump was eager to trumpet his administration’s progress in negotiating a trade agreement with Japan during the recent G-7 summit in France. Unfortunately for him, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Trump’s own chief negotiator, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, sounded a far more cautious note, with Abe even pushing back gently on some of Trump’s claims. While Trump predicted the agreement would be signed in September during the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, it is still not clear when, or even if, the outstanding […]