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As American power wanes in absolute and relative terms, the earnest officials who have designed and led U.S. foreign assistance programs are working hard to sustain and even strengthen this key component of America’s international engagement. It’s a daunting task, given the pressures to reduce funding, stop nation-building and comply with a commander-in-chief who devalues their work and has cut across the bow to eliminate categories of countries where needs and U.S. interests may be greatest. In June, officials from the Defense and State Departments and the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, released their first-ever interagency Stabilization Assistance […]

The U.S. military doesn’t spend much time thinking about how America could lose a war. Neither do America’s political leaders and security experts. Whether described in operational plans, strategic wargames or even fiction, the pattern mirrors the Civil War or World War II: Things are hairy at first and defeat even seems possible since an aggressor struck first, but then the United States gets serious, turns the tide and fights its way to victory. In the collective American memory, armed conflicts that have not followed this script—Vietnam, Korea—are largely forgotten or attributed to political ineptitude. Victory is still considered the […]

Last week, Chile’s president, Sebastian Pinera, was at the White House for a meeting with President Donald Trump. During a photo-op in the oval office, Pinera held up a printout of the American flag. Outlining one white star and a pair of red and white stripes, he had managed to draw a smaller, Chilean flag inside of it. “Chile is at the heart of the United States,” Pinera explained, with a smile. “And the best proof of this: This is the American flag, and there is a Chilean flag right at the very heart of the US flag.” It was […]

History has indelibly branded the Balkans as the battleground of empires, a fault line where great powers clash. That pattern came into full view again this weekend, when Macedonians voted in a referendum on whether or not to change their country’s name in order to ease its accession into the European Union and NATO, a question that has drawn the interest and involvement of Russia. The referendum yielded a head-snapping outcome. First, the returns showed overwhelming approval, with some 90 percent voting to change the country’s name. But then the tally showed that voter turnout was just 36 percent, well […]

On Oct. 1, the International Court of Justice announced its long-anticipated verdict in a case brought by landlocked Bolivia, which argued that neighboring Chile was obliged to negotiate Bolivia’s territorial access to the Pacific Ocean. The ICJ ruled in Chile’s favor, dealing a major blow to Bolivian hopes for a route to the Pacific Ocean more than a century after its current boundaries were decided. Bolivian President Evo Morales, who rose to prominence in part due to his outspokenness on this issue, said after the ruling that “Bolivia will never give up.” In an interview with WPR, Christopher Sabatini, a […]

On Sept. 30, residents of Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost prefecture, were busy with an almost ritualistic activity this time of year: cleaning up after a tropical storm. Typhoon Trami had struck the day before, causing dozens of injuries, power outages and transportation disruptions. But this year, Okinawans had something else on their minds beyond the recovery efforts. They were preparing to go to the polls to elect their next governor. The election, initially scheduled for November, had been moved up due to the death of Gov. Takeshi Onaga in August, from pancreatic cancer. Onaga was a staunch opponent of a contentious […]

Editor’s note: Every Wednesday, WPR’s newsletter and engagement editor, Benjamin Wilhelm, curates the top news and analysis from China written by the experts who follow it. Much of China is on a weeklong holiday to mark the 69th anniversary of the country’s founding. But while the so-called Golden Week, which kicked off with China’s National Day on Monday, could offer a welcome respite from an especially tumultuous period for U.S.-China relations, there were few signs that tensions might ease in sensitive areas like security and trade. Last Wednesday, U.S. B-52 bombers flew over the South China Sea in what Pentagon […]

Donald Trump campaigned for the presidency in 2016 based on his celebrity status and his reputation as a maverick businessman, vowing to run the country as he ran his real estate empire. The renegotiation of the trade deal with Mexico and Canada formerly known as NAFTA, announced this weekend, is the latest example of how in one striking way, he has been true to his word. The problem is that Trump was a more successful self-promoter than businessman, and the results are on display in the trade deal as well as other aspects of his foreign policy. Early in his […]

A little more than a year after the launch of its new South Asia strategy, the Trump administration—without officially announcing a change in approach—appears to have refocused much of its efforts in Afghanistan around a long-elusive peace process. Gen. John Nicholson, the departing top military commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, backed up the Afghan government’s extended cease-fire with the Taliban during the Eid al-Fitr holiday in June, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently appointed former Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad as a new special envoy tasked with leading reconciliation efforts. But despite that summer cease-fire and some preliminary […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing series about national drug policies in various countries around the world. Last month, South Africa’s Constitutional Court surprised many observers by upholding a lower court decision striking down the country’s prohibition on the consumption and cultivation of cannabis for personal use. The ruling was widely cheered by advocates, but lawmakers in Cape Town and officials in Pretoria must now decide how best to implement this sudden legal shift. In an interview with WPR, Anine Kriegler, a doctoral candidate in criminology at the University of Cape Town, explains why hammering out the […]

Cameroonian President Paul Biya is expected to coast to re-election on Oct. 7. But two ongoing conflicts have undermined what he has long pitched as his greatest strength: his ability to maintain peace in an otherwise unstable region. The coming years could be among the most challenging of his decades-long reign. In the grainy cellphone footage, Cameroonian soldiers march two women down a sandy road. One of the women wears a pink t-shirt, large silver earrings and a bright blue headwrap. Her head upright, she carries a baby on her back. The other woman has an outfit of green patterned […]

On Sept. 26, in a tense, crowded courtroom in Guatemala City, a three-judge panel ruled unanimously that genocide and crimes against humanity occurred in the Maya-Ixil region of northern Guatemala in 1982 and 1983, at the height of the country’s civil war. But in a split 2-1 vote, the court determined that the defendant, retired Gen. Jose Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez, did not bear criminal responsibility for the crimes and acquitted him on all charges. Ixil witnesses who testified during the trial described the court’s ruling as “bittersweet” and vowed to continue their fight for justice. This was the second acquittal […]

Deadlines can be useful in negotiations since they often force sides to act. If there is a difference in the intensity of interest in reaching an agreement, however, leverage shifts to the party less desperate to get a deal. That is evident in the now-successful effort to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. Canada clearly wanted to remain part of the deal. But up to the end, Canadian negotiators behaved as though the deadline was not as hard as their American counterparts insisted. President Donald Trump seemed to badly want an agreement that he could tout as a win […]

Was Donald Trump nasty or nice at the United Nations last week? The answer may depend on whether you listened to his comments from Beijing or Tehran. Diplomatic observers expected the American president to look tough at the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. Many predicted that he would strike an especially aggressive tone toward Iran. He didn’t disappoint them, using his U.N. appearance to celebrate his withdrawal from the “horrible” Iranian nuclear deal and attack Tehran’s “agenda of aggression and expansion” in the Middle East. Yet there was something formulaic about his rhetoric, and he made no startlingly […]

Months after deadly riots in Port-au-Prince forced the resignation of Haitian Prime Minister Jack Guy Lafontant, a new government is finally in place. But newly sworn-in Prime Minister Henry Ceant faces a slew of roadblocks, including a major corruption scandal and a yawning budget deficit. Ceant also lacks previous administrative experience and is viewed with suspicion by much of the Haitian political elite. In an email interview with WPR, Francois Pierre-Louis, a former Haitian government official who is now a professor of political science at Queens College, the City University of New York, explains why the new government in Port-au-Prince […]

Last month, Turkey and Russia, largely on opposites sides of the Syrian civil war, struck an 11th-hour deal to prevent a military assault by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces on the last remaining rebel stronghold of Idlib in northwestern Syria. While the agreement, which was reached in the Russian Black Sea resort town of Sochi, won’t end the Syrian conflict, it buys some time to attempt to find a sustainable resolution in Idlib, where there are some 30,000 rebel fighters, perhaps a third of them al-Qaida-linked extremists. But if all things fail, Russian President Vladimir Putin has crafted the agreement in […]