Column Archive

Joe Biden’s appointment of John Kerry as his special envoy for climate change signals the U.S. president-elect’s determination to place the fight against global warming, at long last, at the center of U.S. foreign and national security policy. His efforts to save the global environment should not stop there, however. Beyond climate change, the planet is experiencing a historically unprecedented collapse in biodiversity, undermining the countless benefits humanity gets from nature. To slow this disastrous loss of species and ecosystems, the incoming administration should spearhead a multilateral effort to reverse the multiple drivers of global ecological degradation, which go well […]

During a long campaign that was, for both tactical and public health purposes, deliberately subdued, Joe Biden frequently offered a pithy, two-word answer to the question of how he would change America’s message to the world: “We’re back.” Biden’s first major Cabinet choices were also intended to reinforce this theme, as literal returnees. People like Antony Blinken, Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, and other members of his national security team are all veterans of the Obama administration. Despite Biden’s evident comfort with the familiar, though, as I argued in one of my earliest columns for WPR, there will be […]

President-elect Joe Biden is about to inherit a trade dispute that gives him an early chance to show whether he is prepared to break not just with Donald Trump, but with the corporate-friendly trade policies championed by his Democratic predecessors. The outgoing administration is set to impose new tariffs over France’s recent decision to tax the revenue of U.S. digital giants like Facebook, Apple and Google, charging that the move discriminates against U.S. companies. For Trump, the fight is a simple matter of protecting the profits of rich American companies against what he sees as a European cash grab. Barack […]

Joe Biden’s election as president offers the United States an opportunity to recast its relationship with the United Nations after four years of “America First” disengagement under Donald Trump. The president-elect is already declaring that “America is back.” But to make good on his promise, Biden needs to reinvigorate American leadership within the U.N. itself, while tempering expectations about what the world body can deliver at a time of intense geopolitical rivalry. Beyond reversing Trump’s misguided assaults on the U.N., Biden must strengthen U.S. capabilities to conduct multilateral diplomacy, promote institutional reforms to bring the U.N. into the 21st century, […]

If American policy in Afghanistan was a Hollywood thriller, acting Pentagon chief Christopher Miller’s announcement Tuesday that President Donald Trump plans to reduce the number of American troops in the country from 4,500 to 2,500 by the time he leaves office in January might have made for a riveting plot twist. The trouble for White House script writers is that we’ve all seen this movie before, and it never seems to end with a better outcome for the Afghan people. The one hidden benefit of Trump’s drawdown announcement is that it could free up Joe Biden to write an alternative […]

When a Nobel Peace Prize winner goes to war little more than a year after receiving the world’s most prestigious honor, it may come as a shock. But when Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who won the prize in 2019, announced last week that he was launching a military offensive against one of his country’s ethnic regions, the news didn’t surprise close observers. Despite the sudden outbreak of large-scale fighting between federal forces and the heavily armed Tigray regional government, tensions had been building steadily since Abiy became prime minister in 2018 and later dissolved Ethiopia’s ruling coalition, which included […]

Now that world leaders and the D.C. foreign policy establishment have breathed a collective sigh of relief over Joe Biden’s election as U.S. president, things can get back to normal when it comes to preparing for a new administration in Washington. For world leaders, that means scrambling for access and favor, while readying offer sheets of how their governments can be of help to Biden’s team. For the D.C. establishment, that means angling to be part of that team, or else writing lengthy policy proposals that, unlike in 2016, might actually be read by the people who do end up […]

Editor’s Note: This will be Kimberly Ann Elliott’s final weekly column for World Politics Review. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank Kim for all of her insights into economic policy over the past two and a half years, in which she has made sense of tumultuous trade news and offered readers a sharp, lively guide to Donald Trump’s trade wars. The World Trade Organization had plenty of problems before the United States elected an isolationist president determined to put “America first” and go it alone in 2016. Four years ago, the WTO could point to only a few […]

It’s no coincidence that while congratulations for Joe Biden’s victory in the U.S. presidential race came quickly from Western democracies, many thuggish regimes remained conspicuously silent. The many despots who welcomed Donald Trump’s crass indifference to the fortunes of freedom are right to be wary of Biden. The president-elect intends to make America decent again, not only at home but abroad, by restoring the promotion of liberty and defense of democracy as pillars of U.S. foreign policy. Rebuilding U.S. credibility on human rights will take time, however. Trump’s affinity for autocrats is well documented. “It’s funny,” he mused to Bob […]

To say President-elect Joe Biden has his work cut out for him when it comes to U.S. foreign policy and national security would be a gross understatement. China, Russia, Iran and North Korea all loom large, right alongside climate change and the still-worsening coronavirus pandemic. Yet with a persistently polarized American electorate and a possibly divided Congress, it will be hard for his administration to make significant progress on the biggest security challenges facing the United States. Whatever happens with the messy transition period leading up to Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, the Republican Party’s obstructionism and Donald Trump’s decapitation […]

Peruvian legislators stunned the country Monday night when they unexpectedly voted to remove President Martin Vizcarra from office, using a questionable interpretation of the constitution. The move not only underscores Peru’s chronic political instability, it also exemplifies the ferocious pushback faced by political figures who try to untie the knots of corruption that keep many countries, not only in Latin America, from dealing effectively with their problems. Vizcarra lost power because he sought to craft fundamental reforms to Peru’s political and judicial system, which posed a threat to the establishment. Legislators in the unicameral Congress voted overwhelming to declare Vizcarra […]

It didn’t require an acute sense of hearing to register the sighs of relief from many quarters around the world when Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump was called by leading American news networks Saturday. From the mayor of Paris, the message was an exuberant “Welcome back America!”⎯and that spirit of encouragement was matched in places as far flung as Canada, South Korea and Ethiopia, even if the language was slightly more restrained. In certain other quarters, just as predictably, mum was the word. Vladimir Putin, who rushed to congratulate Trump four years ago, passed the first few days after […]

Donald Trump has been an unorthodox president, to say the least. Much of America and the rest of the world is hoping for a return to some semblance of normality under President-elect Joe Biden. But what might that mean on trade? The traditional take on American trade politics for decades has been that Republicans tend to be free traders while Democrats are more skeptical. Trump certainly turned that on its head. Yet after he started imposing tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars in imports, several polls—which obviously have to be taken with a grain of salt—showed most Americans becoming […]

Last Wednesday, with a divided and anxious citizenry awaiting the outcome of an agonizingly close election, President Donald Trump voted for climate change, as the United States became the first nation to formally withdraw from the Paris Agreement. The good news is that Joe Biden, now the winner of the presidential election, can restore U.S. participation at the stroke of a pen. The bad news is that rejoining the pact won’t by itself do much to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That will require dramatic domestic action from a deeply divided nation. The Paris Agreement is the most impressive multilateral agreement […]

Say goodbye to sleep, world, because it’s going to be nothing but fever dreams until noon on Jan. 20, 2021, when the United States holds its presidential inauguration. If you thought America looked crazy from afar the past few years, amid all the chaos of Donald Trump’s presidency, just wait until you see what one of the most punishing political contests in its history does to the psyches of 328 million people. Before Tuesday, it might have been tempting to think that the U.S. would rest a little easier after the presidential polls closed and all the votes were counted. […]

As a terrorist attack was unfolding late Monday night in Vienna, where four people were killed and 22 others injured in a shooting rampage on crowded bars, speculation about the culprit, unsurprisingly, was rife on social media. Many of those offering theories were quick to accuse Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of stoking the rage of militant Islamists. There is no indication that the attacker—a young extremist who it turned out had previously been convicted in Austria for trying to join the Islamic State—was motivated by Erdogan, as Austrian authorities have pointed to his ISIS sympathies and the Islamic State’s […]

Despite all the alarm over the potential for violence and disruption, the U.S. presidential election and ballot-counting process have so far been routine. Were it not for the massive number of mail-in ballots due to the coronavirus pandemic, we would in all likelihood already know the victor. As it is, at the time of writing this column, there are still three possible scenarios ahead because of the time it will take to tally the final outstanding ballots. The first is a reelection for President Donald Trump largely along the same lines of the electoral map he rode to victory in […]