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Hungary’s controversial prime minister, Viktor Orban, is facing down international criticism and restoring a commanding position at home as the campaign gears up for next year’s general elections, which are due to be held by May. The pugnacious populist has also managed to capture some of the regional and global zeitgeist in the era of U.S. President Donald Trump, making common cause with hard-line nationalists around him and seizing on the aftermath of the 2015 migrant and refugee crisis. However strong he appears, though, Orban’s power in Hungary is in no small part thanks to a divided and discredited opposition. […]

The aftermath of Monday’s terrorist attack in New York was a case of both good news and bad news. That the city essentially shrugged off an attempted suicide bombing in the subway that only seriously injured the bomber himself demonstrated a salutary resilience and sangfroid, as defeating terrorism requires in part a refusal to be terrorized. That the attack was so rudimentary and amateurish is a testament to the broad success of American and European approaches to counterterrorism that make more sophisticated attacks prohibitively difficult to mount. But the fact that such attacks don’t generate much surprise anymore—whether in New […]

LIMA, Peru—Last December, Maria Victoria Fernandez, a 26-year-old nurse from Caracas, Venezuela, began traveling by bus to Peru, having decided that life in her home country was no longer tenable. The journey of nearly 3,000 miles through Colombia and Ecuador and down Peru’s Pacific coastline to Lima took her five days to complete. She had $170 in her pocket and her 2-year-old daughter, Sofia, on her lap. The day they left home, Sofia fell sick, meaning the trip was, for Fernandez, more stressful than any hospital shift she could remember. “We didn’t have medicine, and she had a fever and […]

Mali is set to hold presidential elections in July 2018. Pre-campaign maneuvering recently accelerated, with candidates declaring and likely candidates readying themselves to run. Although President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita enjoys the structural advantages of incumbency, events since last summer suggest he may be vulnerable next year. Keita, known in Mali as IBK, will likely seek re-election after winning his first term in 2013. He is a veteran politician, having served as prime minister in the 1990s and president of the National Assembly in the mid-2000s. Like much of Mali’s political class, he has been on the political scene since the […]

It’s now well understood that many governments see their cyber capabilities as a tool to influence, coerce, deter and disrupt their enemies and rivals. Societies and states today are almost totally dependent on cyberspace to communicate, conduct routine but essential transactions, store information and make critical decisions about policy matters, from the mundane to the strategic. Yet it’s hard for people without deep technical understanding of the technology—your columnist included—to know where to fit these cyber realities into familiar categories for the conduct of national security and international relations. There’s also a risk of discussing openly how to respond to […]

The United Nations is a slow, imperfect and often unsuccessful peacemaker. We should celebrate that. Last week, U.N. officials were grappling with three crises that have each been on the organization’s agenda for over half a century. On Tuesday, Undersecretary-General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman flew to North Korea to call for “open channels” of diplomatic communication with Pyongyang to avoid a nuclear confrontation. His visit came just over 70 years after the U.N. General Assembly first set up an international commission to facilitate the reunification of the northern and southern halves of the country, a dream that remains as […]

MEXICO CITY—Were Enrique Pena Nieto eligible for re-election in Mexico’s 2018 presidential race, most analysts believe he would be soundly beaten. Pena Nieto is plagued by corruption scandals, rising crime rates and, above all, the sense that he represents the very worst of the country’s oldest political party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI; his six-year-term, which ends next December, has exposed many of the fault lines that continue to undermine Mexico’s potential. Add U.S. President Donald Trump’s bullying tactics on trade and border security, and the resurgence of veteran leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in the polls, and until […]

The lifting of international economic sanctions on Iran following the 2015 nuclear agreement opened the doors to what many observers expected to be a rush of foreign investment. Yet lingering restrictions from the United States and the decision in October by the Trump administration to decertify the Iran deal have kept some European firms at bay, while China has exploited opportunities in their absence. In an email interview, Nader Habibi, the Henry J. Leir professor of economics of the Middle East at Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies, discusses China’s involvement in Iran before and after the nuclear […]

It is fitting that one day before U.S. President Donald Trump decided to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, breaking with 40 years of American policy, his State Department issued an order forbidding its staff and their families from traveling to Jerusalem’s Old City. It appears that before lighting the match, Trump did not want any of his own people near the powder keg when the fuse was lit. At the moment, it is not certain how extensive the blowback will be. Regionally, anger will be tempered by regimes unwilling to allow the possibility of wide-scale demonstrations getting beyond […]

In late November, after a building fire killed 19 migrant workers in a shantytown on the southern outskirts of Beijing, the city government began forcibly evicting thousands of migrants before razing entire neighborhoods to the ground. The evictions have sparked an outcry from within China and raised questions about the country’s urbanization policies. In an email interview, Mark Frazier, a professor of politics and academic director of the India China Institute at The New School in New York, explains what is driving the evictions and how they fit into China’s broader urbanization policies. WPR: Why is the Beijing city government […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Associate Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Since taking office in May, French President Emmanuel Macron has been an enthusiastic champion of the G5 Sahel Joint Force, which brings together soldiers from Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Mali to combat militant groups and drug and human trafficking. His efforts have involved publicly pressuring the United States to do more to support the force; his defense minister, Florence Parly, made the case directly during a visit to Washington in October. But while American officials have pledged […]

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, managing editor, Frederick Deknatel, and associate editor, Omar H. Rahman, discuss U.S. President Donald Trump’s controversial decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and what it means for the Middle East. For the Report, Andrew Green talks with Peter Dörrie about a pilot program in Kenya that is testing the long-term impact of a universal basic income. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines, as well as what you’ve seen on WPR, please think about supporting our work by subscribing. We’re currently offering a 25 percent […]

Hondurans went to the polls nearly two weeks ago to elect a new president and a new 128-seat congress, as well as the mayors of 298 municipalities and 20 representatives in the Central American Parliament. They’re still waiting for the winners to be declared. Now, after days of protests, charges of fraud and results that appeared to swing back and forth, the country’s electoral tribunal says there will be a partial recount of 4,753 ballot boxes, equal to roughly 25 percent of polling places. That’s significant, as it means the authorities are actually opening the ballot boxes, which they never […]

U.S. President Donald Trump has reportedly approved the core elements of what will be his first official National Security Strategy, known within the government as the NSS. If true, it will be an impressive accomplishment. The difficult coordination needed to get agreement on the NSS within an administration, given the painful fine-tuning of every word, means that few presidents have produced one during their first year in office. In a speech last week at the annual Ronald Reagan Defense Forum in California, Trump’s national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, hinted at the major themes of the forthcoming strategy. Comparing today to […]

On Nov. 28, the day Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta was sworn in for a second term, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters that attending the event would give him an opportunity to reinforce Israel’s engagement with the continent. “Our intention is to deepen ties with Africa, also by forging links with countries that we do not have diplomatic relations with,” he said before boarding a flight to Nairobi. “I hope by the end of the day I will be able to announce the opening of a new Israeli embassy in an African country.” Netanyahu got what he wanted. Though […]

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka—For an outsider trying to unravel the complexities of Sri Lanka’s postwar challenges, the country presents countless tangled and unexpected threads. Among the surprises is that the most unlikely of countries, a nation half a world away—one that on the surface has very little in common with Sri Lanka—is playing an important role in guiding Sri Lanka forward. Colombia, the South American nation that just a year ago signed a peace agreement with rebels to end its own lengthy war, is lending its knowledge and expertise to help Sri Lanka tread a path toward peace and stability. The […]

Five years ago, on a hazy summer afternoon in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, a security guard at the presidential palace led me around its mosque, which had been the site of a 2011 assassination attempt against then-President Ali Abdullah Saleh during the height of the Arab Spring protests. The shoes of the men who were killed in the bombing—a who’s who of Yemen’s ruling party—were still piled outside the mosque’s entrance. Saleh was very lucky that day. He had been standing near the mosque’s doorway, away from the center of the room that had taken the brunt of the explosion, the […]