Latest Archive

Twice in the past two weeks, Iran has breached the limits on its nuclear program mandated by the 2015 international agreement aimed at preventing it from developing a nuclear weapon. First, it exceeded the maximum stockpiles of enriched uranium; then it began enriching to a higher level of purity, a potentially crucial step on the path to a bomb. Tehran didn’t act secretly or even quietly. It announced its plans and made sure the entire world knew it was steadily, if gradually, breaking out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, the deal that President Donald Trump unilaterally […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. The central Chinese city of Wuhan put a garbage-burning power plant on hold this week after days of protests against the project. Following a police crackdown, local officials, apparently caught off guard by the protests, have pledged to consult with residents before moving forward. The demonstrations highlight the recurring failure of local authorities in China to provide transparency and address safety and environmental concerns over government projects. Waste-to-energy incineration plants like the one proposed in Wuhan are especially controversial. […]

Reports of overcrowded and inhumane conditions in detention centers that the Trump administration is using to house migrants and asylum-seekers, mostly from Central America, have given rise to a fierce debate in the United States. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York has repeatedly referred to the camps as “concentration camps,” which critics say is inappropriate given that term’s association with the Holocaust. Yet while the uniqueness of the Nazi extermination camp system must be recognized, concentration camps are not out of the ordinary. They can be found all over the world at various times in history, as the journalist Andrea […]

Last month, the United Nations released a blistering report about its own recent track record in Myanmar, the source of one of the world’s worst refugee crises. Written by an independent investigator but commissioned by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, the report documented the “systemic failure” by U.N. agencies in dealing with the humanitarian suffering caused by Myanmar’s state crackdown on minority Rohingya Muslims. That failure continued even as abuses escalated over the past five years, ultimately resulting in such atrocities that the U.N.’s own fact-finding mission has called for Myanmar’s top military leaders to be investigated on charges of genocide […]

With the announcement this week that it has begun to enrich uranium above the 3.67 percent limit allowed by the 2015 international deal curbing its nuclear program, Iran has opened another round of high-stakes signaling with the Trump administration, which withdrew from the agreement last year, and the European nations that helped negotiate it. The move is the latest attempt by Iran to impose costs both on Washington for having reimposed punishing economic sanctions, and on Europe for its inability to mitigate their pain. The incremental but reversible breach of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, as the […]

On June 4, Spain’s Supreme Tribunal halted the exhumation of Gen. Francisco Franco’s remains from his burial site at El Valle de los Caidos, or The Valley of the Fallen, only days before it was scheduled to take place on June 10, and almost a year after the Spanish Parliament had authorized it. The tribunal ruled that Franco’s family, which had brought the case, must be allowed to appeal the government’s decision to exhume the former dictator’s remains and rebury them at a family tomb. Notwithstanding the Supreme Tribunal’s ruling, the struggle over Franco’s exhumation has little to do with […]

Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Neil Bhatiya is filling in for Kimberly Ann Elliott this week. A little more than two years since he announced in the Rose Garden that the United States was “getting out” of the Paris climate change agreement, President Donald Trump was in Japan, the sole leader at the G-20 summit to disagree with a modest communique once again committing the international community to taking on climate change. It laid bare America’s isolation under Trump on an issue that much of the world—and indeed more and more of the American public—consider increasingly dire. Climate change has hardly […]

Earlier this year, Reuters broke a stunning story. It disclosed that intelligence services from the United Arab Emirates had hired ex-U.S. operatives from the National Security Agency to hack into the iPhones of Emirati citizens in order to access their personal phone numbers, emails, passwords and even follow their location. The operation, code-named “Project Raven,” was supposed to track Islamic State cells. But Reuters uncovered a much more sinister pattern of surveillance. Under the guise of national security, Raven contractors broke into the personal communications of scores of human rights activists, civil society leaders and investigative journalists, both in the […]

After the U.S. announced in May that it was ending sanctions waivers for countries to purchase oil from Iran, India, like many other major oil-importing countries, has been forced to diversify its suppliers. U.S. sanctions have also affected other aspects of India’s economic ties with Iran, making the Trump administration’s so-called maximum pressure campaign against Tehran a significant irritant in U.S.-India relations. In an email interview with WPR, Harsh V. Pant, a professor of international relations at King’s College London and director of studies at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, explains how the Trump administration’s hard line is […]

As its trade war with the United States goes on, China in recent months has raised the possibility of weaponizing its control over 80 percent of the world’s supply of rare earths, minerals that are used in a wide array of important industrial and consumer products. In response, Washington wants to partner with other countries to help develop their mineral reserves to diversify the global supply chain, and even boost its own domestic supplies. But while that may sound sensible on paper, it is based on an unrealistic portrayal of the threat posed by China’s near-monopoly supply of rare earths, […]

Some protesters mockingly waved handcuffs in Liviu Dragnea’s face as he left the courtroom in Bucharest to start a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence on May 27. Many others celebrated less publically, seeing the fall of Romania’s most powerful man as proof that the country’s embattled institutions, though under more and more political pressure, still function independently. Dragnea’s arrest put the brakes on the government’s controversial judicial reforms, viewed by many of Romania’s allies as an attempt to undermine a strikingly successful anti-corruption drive. The government’s staunchest critics hope it will be a knockout blow for the ruling Social Democratic Party, or […]

Quietly but steadily, the most important environmental treaty that most people have never heard of is taking shape. Late last month, a United Nations committee released the draft text of a new, legally binding international convention to protect the “marine biodiversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction.” The so-called BBNJ treaty will promote the “conservation and sustainable use” of marine resources and living organisms in the high seas, an expanse encompassing 50 percent of the planet’s surface and all the water below. The high seas are the quintessential global commons. Lying beyond any nation’s exclusive economic zone, or EEZ, which extends […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Can a #MeToo moment that originated in Nigeria’s evangelical community last week spark a regional movement? It began last Friday when photographer Busola Dakolo accused Pastor Biodun Fatoyinbo, who heads the influential Commonwealth of Zion Assembly, of raping her when Dakolo was a teenager. Women took to social media to share their own experiences of rape and sexual abuse by church leaders alongside hashtags that include #MeToo, #ChurchToo and #SayNoToRape. By Sunday, protesters had gathered outside different branches of the Pentecostal church. […]

In this week’s editors’ discussion episode of the Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, and associate editor, Elliot Waldman, talk about whether a slew of recent actions by President Donald Trump reveal a fundamental flaw in his approach toward foreign policy. Will adversaries see Trump’s concessions to China and Mexico on trade issues and his last-minute cancellation of a planned military strike on Iran as signs of weakness? And what could that mean for his potential successor in the White House? Judah and Elliot also discuss the significance of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent meeting with Japanese Prime Minister […]

The best that can be said about President Donald Trump’s handling of U.S. national security and foreign policy is that it has avoided outright catastrophe—at least so far. Trump did finish the job of helping local allies in Iraq and Syria destroy the self-styled Islamic State’s “caliphate.” But in every other part of the world, the United States is in a worse position than when he took office, less influential and less respected nearly everywhere. Most of America’s security partnerships have eroded; some are close to collapse. China and Russia are more assertive and less constrained than they were a […]

Fears of a full-blown trade war between the United States and India seem to have faded for the moment following last week’s meeting between President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Japan. Trump and Modi agreed to instruct their trade officials to meet soon to find solutions to an escalating row over tariffs that had triggered concern in both countries. It was a climbdown of sorts for Trump, who just a day before the Osaka meeting had taken to Twitter, as usual, to air his grievances. “India, for years having put […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Hong Kong was rocked by another round of protests against its controversial extradition bill on Monday, the 22nd anniversary of the territory’s return to Chinese rule. While hundreds of thousands of peaceful protesters took to the streets, a smaller group of activists stormed and occupied the city’s legislature. The contrasting tactics revealed a divide in the protest movement that could undermine it. There are fears that Beijing will use the violence as justification to strengthen its grip over Hong […]