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China and Taiwan marked the Lunar New Year holiday this week with dueling propaganda videos showcasing their respective military might, released on social media. It was the latest sign that North Korea may no longer be the world’s most volatile hotspot, the nation most likely to unleash a major crisis that could spiral out of control. Now that dubious distinction may be shifting to Taiwan. The root of the problem is, of course, that China considers Taiwan an inextricable part of its territory ripped away in 1949 when the government of the Republic of China, facing military defeat against communist […]

Business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month warned that China has overtaken the United States in the development of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, such as fifth-generation wireless or 5G. “There’s almost an endless stream of people who are showing up and developing new companies,” Blackstone’s CEO Stephen Schwarzman told one panel of his frequent trips to China. “The venture business there in AI-oriented companies is really exploding with growth.” The attention on China’s rapidly evolving tech sector has overshadowed another area of competition between Beijing and Washington, which may be moving more slowly but […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing series about national drug policies in various countries around the world. Eighteen people were killed last month in a fire at a drug rehabilitation center in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s second-largest city. The blaze was reportedly caused by patients who rioted in a bid to escape the clinic, which was operating illegally. In an interview with WPR, Carla Alvarez, a titular professor of political science at the State University of Milagro in Ecuador, discusses the pervasive problem of illegal rehabilitation clinics and explains why Ecuador’s government should focus on preventing drug addiction instead […]

The latest United Nations climate talks held in Poland in December produced surprising progress toward developing the rulebook governing the Paris climate agreement. International negotiators added teeth to the accord by crafting a detailed system to catalogue national emissions, requiring new benchmarks for measuring and forecasting emissions, and mandating public multilateral and technical assessments. Nations will now have to uniformly track their emissions progress and expectations, with scrutiny from other governments and independent experts. But the next obstacle to climate action will be harder to overcome. There is no existing international financial institution capable of mobilizing enough money to finance […]

Back in December, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition decided to dissolve parliament and call new elections, the news inspired a chain reaction of yawns. Despite Netanyahu’s growing legal problems, the overwhelming consensus was that he was headed for another victory, one that would allow him to break the record of Israel’s founder, David Ben Gurion, as the country’s longest-serving prime minister. To be sure, the election, scheduled for April 9, is still Netanyahu’s to lose, but the inevitability of another victory by Bibi, as he is known, and his rightist Likud party is now in doubt. Voters who […]

The Togolese opposition’s decision to boycott recent legislative elections seemed to play into the hands of the ruling party. As Togo President Faure Gnassingbe, whose family has ruled for over five decades, maneuvers to strengthen his position, his challengers’ options appear to be shrinking. On a Saturday morning last month, opposition activists in Togo did what they’ve been doing with some regularity for the past year and a half: take to the streets to protest the continued rule of the Gnassingbe family, which has held power for just over five decades. But the turnout was a far cry from the […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. The U.S. and China held two days of high-level trade talks in Washington last week, just before the start of China’s week-long Lunar New Year holiday. Negotiators conveyed cautious optimism but stressed that much work remains to reach an agreement before the March 1 deadline. Vice Premier Liu He, China’s economic czar, led a Chinese delegation that included central bank governor Yi Gang. The American negotiating team was headed by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and also included Treasury […]

The death toll continues to rise in southern Brazil after the collapse of a tailings dam at a mine last month triggered a massive mudslide. In what is being called the country’s worst environmental disaster, 134 people have been confirmed dead and another 199 are still missing in the nearby town of Brumadinho, in Minas Gerais state. Five people have been arrested as part of an investigation into the collapse, and a Brazilian court ordered the mine’s operator, Vale S.A., to stop using eight other tailings dams, which are constructed out of the waste materials left over from mining operations. […]

The standoff pitting Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro against National Assembly leader Juan Guaido, who declared himself interim president two weeks ago, continues to paralyze the country. It has also highlighted a political divide outside Venezuela—in particular in the U.S. between advocates and critics of the Trump administration’s pursuit of regime change in Caracas. That debate has broader implications for the formulation of a progressive foreign policy framework in the runup to the U.S. presidential election in 2020. After the U.S., joined by most of the governments of South America and Europe, recognized Guaido as the legitimate head of state, a […]

Weeks into Nicolas Maduro’s disputed second term as Venezuela’s president, his prospects for political survival appear more uncertain than ever. Many countries, including the United States and many South American and European countries, have recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido, president of the National Assembly, as the legitimate interim president, as he declared himself last month. It is risky to predict the end date of a regime whose leadership has already weathered nearly six years of economic crisis, but if it is approaching, there should be plans for reviving the economy of an oil-rich but desperate nation. Guaido is already devising […]

APARTADO, Colombia—The sun was sitting low in the sky when Luis Izquierdo noticed the group of armed men walking onto his family’s farm in this town in Uraba, a region of northwestern Colombia that abuts the Caribbean Sea. In the fading daylight, he couldn’t see them clearly at first; he and his parents and siblings thought they might be soldiers looking for something to eat or drink. Their guts started to clench, however, when the men came closer with their rifles shouldered. They realized it was more likely that the men belonged to a paramilitary group that had recently started […]

The scale of the humanitarian disaster in Venezuela is almost inconceivable. Despite the world’s largest proven oil reserves, the economy barely functions. People struggle just to survive. Store shelves are nearly empty of food, medicine and other necessities. The few goods available are out of reach for most people because of hyperinflation that the International Monetary Fund estimates reached a shocking 1 million percent in 2018. An estimated 3 million Venezuelans have already fled to neighboring countries, and more will likely join them. Last fall, the Pharmaceutical Federation of Venezuela estimated that only around 20 percent of needed medicines were […]

He is often tagged as an aloof, slow-moving executive with a narrow and insular coterie of advisers, and he has fallen short of the promises that won him the presidency four years ago. Yet Muhammadu Buhari remains the front-runner in Nigeria’s presidential elections scheduled for Feb. 16, which will pit the incumbent against several challengers—the most prominent, by far, being former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, who served in office from 1999 to 2007 and placed third in the 2007 election. Buhari is still the favorite because of his party’s continued strength in its strongholds in northern and southwestern Nigeria, along […]

Intense fighting has returned to western Myanmar’s troubled Rakhine state, this time between the military and the Arakan Army, a well-armed ethnic group that advocates self-governance for the region. At least 26 people have died since fighting erupted in December, and thousands of civilians have been displaced, according to the United Nations. The renewed conflict is likely to further complicate the already difficult process of repatriating hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims living in refugee camps across the border, in Bangladesh. In an interview with WPR, David Scott Mathieson, an independent analyst based in Yangon, Myanmar, discusses the Arakan Army’s […]

What is the point of the United Nations General Assembly? The assembly—where all member states, from the United States to Kiribati, wield one vote each—has a reputation for generating more hot air than real action. It produces over 300 resolutions a year, but these lack the binding legal force of Security Council resolutions. Assembly members discuss certain sensitive issues, such as the situations in Palestine and North Korea, annually. They scored a major success in negotiating the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. They also chew over questions such as whether to designate 2024 the Year of Camelids. This is exciting […]

After years of impoverishment, Guyana is suddenly on the verge of prosperity. Since 2015, a consortium led by Exxon Mobil has developed at least 10 deepwater oil wells off Guyana’s shores, with a combined productive capacity of around 750,000 barrels per day. Exploration is ongoing, with most experts anticipating the country’s oil reserves exceed the current estimate of 5 billion barrels. One way to grasp the magnitude of these discoveries is that in 10 years, Guyana, with a population of slightly less than 800,000, could pump nearly a barrel of oil per person each day—more production on a per capita […]

Shinzo Abe has already outperformed his five immediate predecessors, putting to rest the idea that a Japanese prime minister couldn’t stay in office for more than a year. Now, he is approaching a milestone. He will become the longest-serving prime minister in Japan’s history if he remains in office until November. But Abe is looking beyond that, with a chance to serve out his current term as prime minister until 2021, since he was overwhelmingly re-elected last fall for a third and final term as president of the governing Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP. The party can effectively determine the […]