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Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has defied the usual short-term trajectory of Japanese administrations. Indeed, if Abe is able to serve out a third term as leader of his ruling Liberal Democratic Party, with leadership elections slated for September, and maintain power in Japan’s parliament, the Diet, he would become Japan’s longest-serving modern-day leader. But before he has a chance to get there, he’ll have to weather the kind of unexpected political instability that he has largely avoided in Tokyo. The largest point of contention right now for Abe is a re-emergent scandal over potential graft in the sale of […]

This week, Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince and the presumed real leader of the kingdom, arrives in the United States for a lengthy visit. On his trip, the 32-year-old prince, the architect of a newly bullish Saudi foreign policy, will likely address a wide range of bilateral and regional issues that have, on balance, strengthened U.S.-Saudi ties since Donald Trump became president. The visit is unlikely to herald any breakthrough in the nearly 10-month-long rift within the Gulf Cooperation Council, which pits Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain—plus Egypt—against Qatar. Trump’s pro-Saudi instincts have made […]

Earlier this month, the United States, Canada and Mexico concluded the seventh round of talks to amend the North American Free Trade Agreement, once again failing to agree on terms to update the 24-year-old pact that U.S. President Donald Trump promised to renegotiate. Trump’s threats to pull the U.S. out of NAFTA if he doesn’t get what he wants, on top of his other protectionist trade policies, have pushed Mexico to diversify its trade relationships, including with its neighbors in Latin America. In an email interview, Duncan Wood, the director of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington, […]

More than a year into the Trump administration, it is obvious that the White House has little interest in using the bully pulpit or U.S. economic clout to promote democracy and human rights around the world. With a few exceptions, such as Venezuela, Iran, Cambodia and Cuba, the administration rarely speaks about human rights abuses in other countries. As president, Donald Trump has held meetings with autocratic leaders whom the Obama administration refused to invite to the White House, like Thai junta leader Prayuth Chan-ocha and Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi. Trump has also praised some foreign leaders’ abuses of the […]

The United Nations has weathered the first phase of the Trump era, starting out 2018 in better shape than seemed possible a year ago. But U.S. relations with the U.N. could take a sharp and sudden turn for the worse quite soon. President Donald Trump took office promising to slash the U.N.’s budget and rip up international agreements. But he has often shied away from delivering on his direst threats. His ambassador in New York, Nikki Haley, has shaved significant sums off U.N. budgets but avoided more severe cuts that would halt the organization’s operations. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has […]

For the past nine months, the tiny but very wealthy Arab state of Qatar has been subjected to a blockade by its three immediate neighbors—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain—as well as Egypt, which accuse it of supporting terrorism and aligning itself with their regional rival, Iran. But the blockade has hardly achieved its aim of isolating Qatar and forcing it to abandon its independent foreign policy. Instead, Qatar’s economy remains mostly unaffected and its external relations are largely intact. On Tuesday, however, Qatar lost an important partner when President Donald Trump abruptly sacked his secretary of state, […]

Nigeria’s population has quadrupled in the past 60 years, creating a host of pressures on the country’s rural population and pushing farmers and herders into an escalating state of conflict. In 2016 and 2017, four states in Nigeria enacted bans on the open grazing of cattle, aimed at restricting herders and the pastoral communities they support. But the bans haven’t helped reduce violence; over 100 people have already been killed in clashes between farmers and herders this year. In an email interview, Adam Higazi, a research fellow at the University of Amsterdam and an affiliated lecturer at the University of […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Senior Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Last October, when four U.S. soldiers were killed after coming under attack in the West African nation of Niger, various lawmakers in Washington said they had been unaware the U.S. military had any kind of presence in the country. “I didn’t know there was 1,000 troops in Niger,” Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, said on “Meet the Press.” He added, “We don’t know exactly where we’re at in the world, militarily, and what we’re doing.” Part […]

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 the week’s big news, including the firing of U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the escalating tensions between London and Moscow after a former Russian spy was poisoned with a lethal nerve agent in the United Kingdom. For the Report, Natalie Rouland talks with Peter Dörrie about Ksenia Sobchak, the celebrity-turned-politician challenging Vladimir Putin in Russia’s presidential election. Is Sobchak an opportunistic stalking horse for the Kremlin, or a rising force for Russia’s beleaguered opposition? If you like […]

Jordan announced this week that it was suspending its free trade agreement with Turkey, in order to protect Jordanian companies from what it called “unequal competition” from industries supported by the Turkish government. It looks like a setback in ties between Amman and Ankara, yet the geopolitical picture is more complicated. Two weeks ago, over consecutive days in late February, Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, and its highest-ranking military officer, Gen. Hulusi Akar, visited Jordan for meetings meant to signal both countries’ desire to upgrade their bilateral relationship in light of regional developments. A major impetus is undoubtedly the Trump […]

For more than 70 years after World War II, U.S. foreign and national security policy followed a distinctive pattern. Despite many policy differences between Republicans and Democrats, there was also deep agreement about the overall goal and logic of U.S. strategy. Across the political spectrum, most political leaders and opinion-shapers believed that preserving the global order by cultivating and working with allies and partners was the best way to advance U.S. national interests. And they agreed that this should be done by a cadre of foreign and national security policy experts who moved in and out of government service, guided […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing series about national drug policies in various countries around the world. On Feb. 17, Portugal’s main opposition party, the Social Democratic Party, formally endorsed the legalization and regulation of cannabis at its national conference. Although Portugal decriminalized the use and personal possession of all drugs in 2001, from cannabis to heroin, the government has not legalized any illicit drugs. The Social Democratic Party’s endorsement is a step toward changing that. If translated into law, it would make Portugal the first country in Europe to legalize and regulate cannabis. In an email […]

Throughout Kenya’s latest election crisis, there was little love lost between the country’s two political archrivals. Raila Odinga, the opposition standard-bearer who lost last year’s bitter presidential race, accused the incumbent, Uhuru Kenyatta, of presiding over an “electoral dictatorship.” Kenyatta, meanwhile, implied that Odinga, in calling for a boycott of their runoff contest in October, was trying to deprive Kenyans of their right to vote. Last week, however, the tenor of the exchanges between the two men, whose rivalry extends a family feud that can be traced back to the early days of Kenya’s independence, changed completely. After meeting for […]

It is revealing of current American political obsessions that a recent book about the Marshall Plan’s relationship to the Cold War might be seen first and foremost as having lessons for today’s troubled ties between the United States and Russia. In that book, Benn Steil, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that with the Marshall Plan’s launch in 1947, the U.S. and the Soviet Union “became irrevocably committed to securing their respective spheres of influence.” Yet despite widespread concern about Russia, the most consequential great power struggle today is the one between the U.S. and China. […]

Before Colombians voted in congressional and presidential primary elections last Sunday, the front-runner in the race for president, according to early polls, was Gustavo Petro, a former leftist guerrilla fighter and once-mayor of Bogota. But to anyone who thought those numbers meant Colombia was about to take a sharp leftward turn, the election results came as a surprise. The most startling outcome from the congressional vote was the spectacularly disastrous performance by the FARC, the longtime rebel group that signed a peace deal in 2016, demobilized and entered politics, repurposing its Spanish acronym from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia […]

Negotiations to bring peace to South Sudan have restarted in earnest, with the parties circulating a power-sharing plan that has failed once before. It is unclear if negotiators have a new strategy to successfully resurrect that agreement or if they are simply out of ideas. What is clear is that there is no end in sight for the current negotiations, even as fighting rages on into a fifth year and aid agencies report that 9,000 people are estimated to be losing access to food every day. Last December, the High-Level Resolution Forum (HLRF) announced a cessation of hostilities agreement between […]

For the past 14 months, the refrain of President Donald Trump’s defenders within the U.S. foreign policy community has been to ignore what he says on Twitter and pay attention to what his administration is doing. It’s safe to say Rex Tillerson might have a word or two for them regarding the wisdom of that advice. In the latest stunning development to come out of Trump’s White House, Tillerson was unceremoniously axed as secretary of state, reportedly learning of the news via the president’s Twitter account upon his return from a weeklong tour of Africa. Trump’s explanation for the move, […]