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Unlike the torrid, slow-burning drama of Brexit in the United Kingdom or the head-spinning tweets that emanate daily from the Trump White House, politics in Japan has become staid and predictable. That was the unavoidable conclusion from last weekend, when Japanese voters went to the polls to elect members of the upper house of the Diet, the country’s legislature. As expected, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling coalition retained its comfortable majority in the 245-seat House of Councillors, although it fell short of the two-thirds supermajority required to achieve Abe’s long-held goal of revising Japan’s constitution. The final tally showed Abe’s […]

The long-running Tory leadership contest has finally come to an end, producing the result that everybody expected all along: Boris Johnson has become the new leader of the British Conservative Party and, by extension, the 77th prime minister of the United Kingdom and 55th person to hold the office.* Johnson’s coronation is the culmination of a lifetime of inherited entitlement and personal ambition, a path to the premiership that began at Britain’s most elite private school and its most prestigious university, then passed via plum jobs in its right-wing press. Ever since he was elected mayor of London in 2008, […]

Back in 1996, during a six-month stay in Ecuador, I was invited by an economist to attend a workshop he was leading in an agricultural community in the western foothills of the Andes. The economist and the local nongovernmental organization he worked with were seeking to educate smallholder peasant farmers about the market forces that determined the prices of their crops. The goal was for them to rationalize their yearly planting decisions based on current market conditions, rather than to simply repeat them unchanged from year to year. At the end of the workshop, which introduced basic economic concepts like […]

In this week’s Trend Lines interview, WPR’s associate editor, Elliot Waldman, talks with Jake Sullivan about the damage being done to America’s global standing under Trump, how domestic issues tie in with the perception of the United States overseas, and the challenges Democrats face in crafting an effective foreign policy message as they vie to take Trump on in 2020. A former national security adviser to Vice President Joseph Biden and director of policy planning at the State Department, Sullivan is currently a visiting fellow at Dartmouth College. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Since early July, Chinese and Vietnamese vessels have been engaged in a tense standoff over natural gas resources in waters off the coast of southern Vietnam. The ongoing confrontation is just one incident in a pattern of increasingly assertive Chinese behavior in the South China Sea, and while no shots have been fired so far, it could provoke anti-Chinese protests in Vietnam. The South China Morning Post reported on July 12 that six “heavily armed” coast guard vessels—two Chinese […]

SDEROT, Israel—For the Ozeri family, as for many others in Sderot, a small Israeli town just half a mile from the Gaza Strip, the children’s bedrooms double as bomb shelters. That’s where Adina Ozeri, her husband and their five children all slept the weekend of May 4. Throughout that weekend, “Code Red” public address alerts pierced the air, as Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza fired over 600 rockets into Israel in a span of two days. Four Israeli civilians were killed and dozens wounded in this latest round of violence, including one man who left his bomb shelter for […]

Following Ursula von der Leyen’s confirmation last week, the European Union not only has its first female president of the European Commission, but also the first who was formerly a minister of defense. What will her leadership mean for the long contentious issue of European security and defense policy? In an enthusiastic stump speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg before she was confirmed by a vote of 383-327, von der Leyen laid out her “political guidelines” for the European Commission over the next five years. Yet defense only appeared vaguely, under the fifth objective for “a stronger Europe in […]

Weeks after Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping agreed to a truce in the U.S.-China trade war on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Osaka, negotiations remain on pause, and speculation is growing that neither side is particularly eager for a deal. Last week, reports emerged that American and Japanese negotiators are intensifying efforts to strike a smaller trade deal that Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe could sign during the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September. The news hardly looks like a coincidence. Trump is desperate for a trade deal […]

Seventy-seven years ago this summer, Wendell Willkie did something remarkable. The failed Republican presidential candidate, defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940, embarked on a round-the-world tour that helped expand America’s horizons and propel the nation toward a policy of internationalism that shaped the postwar global order. Undertaken at FDR’s behest, Willkie’s 49-day odyssey captured the American imagination and lifted his country in thought and spirit. “One World,” his hopeful account of that trip, quickly became one of the best-selling nonfiction books in American history, with a print run of more than 2 million copies. Its thesis was plain: The […]

Midday on June 28, a suicide bomber struck a checkpoint outside a military camp in the town of Indanan, on the restive southern Philippine island of Sulu. Moments later, a second bomb exploded. The attack killed three Philippine soldiers and three civilians, as well as the two bombers. The local military commander quickly blamed an ISIS-affiliated faction of Abu Sayyaf, the extremist group that has been active in the southern Philippines for decades. Within hours, the Islamic State released a statement claiming responsibility for the attack, marking the second time this year it has linked itself to a twin suicide […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing series on food security around the world. In the short term, it is critical to respond to the immediate food shortages being caused by persistent African drought conditions. But the search for more lasting solutions may actually mean looking back to traditional systems. Persistent drought conditions across large swaths of Africa have left tens of millions in need of food assistance, particularly in the semi-arid eastern and southern regions of the continent. These areas are on the forefront of the fight against global climate change and will be increasingly hard-pressed to […]

Leaders from across Africa gathered in Niamey, the capital of Niger, earlier this month to officially launch the African Continental Free Trade Area, or AfCFTA. The sweeping agreement, which covers 54 out of 55 African Union members, is designed to boost intra-African trade and eventually create a single African market for goods and services. It has been called a potential “game changer” for Africa, but member states must now complete the hard work of implementing the deal and negotiating specific reductions in tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade. In an email interview with WPR, Trudi Hartzenberg, the executive director of […]

Editor’s Note: Africa Watch will be off the next two weeks. It will return Aug. 9, with Andrew Green curating the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. The Ebola outbreak that began in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo more than a year ago is now officially a global health emergency. The World Health Organization declared the epidemic a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, or PHEIC, after declining to do so on three previous occasions. The reconsideration followed the virus’ spread to the city of Goma, a major regional hub home to a million people. […]

This week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to block President Donald Trump’s effort to bypass Congress and complete major arms deals with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The resolution will almost certainly be vetoed by Trump, but it nonetheless demonstrates an emerging consensus in Washington on the need to reevaluate close U.S. ties with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies in the wake of human rights abuses like the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. How durable might this shift be? And how else is the U.S. foreign policy consensus evolving in the Trump era? In this week’s […]

La Paz, BOLIVIA—President Evo Morales wants Bolivia to become the “energy heart of Latin America,” producing many times more electricity than it consumes and exporting it all across the continent. The key to these grand ambitions will be hydroelectric power, with several megaprojects planned. But these dams are proving controversial for their social, environmental and economic consequences—and for the way the government is trying to push them through. There are three main projects at different stages of development. The Rio Madera complex is a set of four dams in the northeast of the country, near the border with Brazil; two […]

This week marks five years since Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine. Since then Russia has seemingly spared no effort or expense in waging an epic disinformation campaign to beat back allegations that Kremlin-backed mercenaries and separatists in the Donbas region fired the Russian-made Buk missile that killed all 298 people on board the passenger jet. Yet as evidence of Russian involvement has continued to mount in recent days, it looks like Moscow may need to retool its strategy. Almost five years to the day that a group of intrepid journalists at Bellingcat, an investigative collective, […]

It might have seemed like a barely consequential item amid another torrent of breaking news. But word that President Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, just attended the annual gathering of a controversial Iranian opposition group at its unlikely base in Albania should raise flags for many reasons, not least of which are concerns for Albania’s troubled and fragile democracy. If Albania is now unexpectedly drawn into one of today’s most dangerous geopolitical conflicts—the one pitting Iran against the United States, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states—the timing couldn’t be worse. The country is in the midst of a full-blown political […]