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Editor’s Note: Every Monday, Managing Editor Frederick Deknatel highlights a major unfolding story in the Middle East, while curating some of the best news and analysis from the region. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive Middle East Memo by email every week. The usual rush by an outgoing administration in Washington to tie up loose ends at the end of its term is, not surprisingly, taking on a different tone with President Donald Trump. In the Middle East, the Trump administration is racing to seal last-minute diplomatic deals and lock in its so-called maximum pressure campaign against Iran, […]

Joe Biden’s appointment of John Kerry as his special envoy for climate change signals the U.S. president-elect’s determination to place the fight against global warming, at long last, at the center of U.S. foreign and national security policy. His efforts to save the global environment should not stop there, however. Beyond climate change, the planet is experiencing a historically unprecedented collapse in biodiversity, undermining the countless benefits humanity gets from nature. To slow this disastrous loss of species and ecosystems, the incoming administration should spearhead a multilateral effort to reverse the multiple drivers of global ecological degradation, which go well […]

Although President Donald Trump has not conceded the United States presidential election and is mounting multiple dubious legal challenges to the results, President-elect Joe Biden is moving ahead with the transition. While Biden did not focus on Southeast Asia during his time as vice president from 2009 until 2017, he probably has more extensive foreign policy experience than any incoming president in decades, save perhaps George H. W. Bush. In addition, his policy team includes a deep bench of experts on the Asia-Pacific region. When it comes to Biden’s approach to Southeast Asia, persistent tensions in the U.S. relationship with […]

LIMA, Peru—If there was ever a moment when this Andean nation could have used the soothing influence of a wise and binding decision from its Constitutional Court, it was this month, with regard to the legality of the shock ouster of President Martin Vizcarra. The popular, corruption-busting leader’s abrupt removal on Nov. 9 by a scandal-wracked Congress that most Peruvians regard with contempt convulsed the country. The subsequent wave of vibrant and largely peaceful national protests were unlike anything seen here since the fall of the authoritarian regime of Alberto Fujimori two decades ago. One poll taken a few days […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR contributor Lavender Au and Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curate the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive China Note by email every week. When the huge Pacific Rim trade deal formerly known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership was first proposed, many Chinese observers saw it as a U.S. attempt to economically contain and exclude China. They worried that, with a new, American-led trade bloc surrounding China, Chinese exports would become less attractive throughout Asia. Because of the TPP’s rigorous terms as a high-standard trade deal, […]

The U.S. military has played a prominent role in Donald Trump’s presidency, at times serving as a prop to flatter his ego, at others as a tool for political gain, but also often as a punching bag to deflect blame. In the early days of his administration, Trump filled his Cabinet and White House staff with retired generals, only to successively fire them or watch them resign over policy differences. Later, his repeated pardons of U.S. soldiers convicted by military courts of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan drove a wedge between himself and a military leadership committed to upholding […]

During a long campaign that was, for both tactical and public health purposes, deliberately subdued, Joe Biden frequently offered a pithy, two-word answer to the question of how he would change America’s message to the world: “We’re back.” Biden’s first major Cabinet choices were also intended to reinforce this theme, as literal returnees. People like Antony Blinken, Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, and other members of his national security team are all veterans of the Obama administration. Despite Biden’s evident comfort with the familiar, though, as I argued in one of my earliest columns for WPR, there will be […]

Jutting into the Atlantic Ocean 65 miles south of Lisbon, Portugal’s Sines peninsula has long been recognized by foreign powers for its geostrategic importance. The Romans, Visigoths and Moors all established settlements alongside the natural deepwater port. Today, however, plans to redevelop the port have become the latest source of friction between the U.S. and China, suggesting that Portugal’s diplomatic strategy of courting both rivals is running out of runway. Sines is the closest port in mainland Europe to America’s eastern shale basins. U.S. firms want to expand the port’s liquid natural gas terminal in order to increase gas exports […]

President-elect Joe Biden is about to inherit a trade dispute that gives him an early chance to show whether he is prepared to break not just with Donald Trump, but with the corporate-friendly trade policies championed by his Democratic predecessors. The outgoing administration is set to impose new tariffs over France’s recent decision to tax the revenue of U.S. digital giants like Facebook, Apple and Google, charging that the move discriminates against U.S. companies. For Trump, the fight is a simple matter of protecting the profits of rich American companies against what he sees as a European cash grab. Barack […]

When President-elect Joe Biden enters the Oval Office on Jan. 20, he is unlikely to have North Korea at the front of his mind, given the many other urgent crises he will confront. But the Korean Peninsula has a way of forcing American presidents to pay attention. Crucial decisions about how to approach negotiations with Pyongyang over its nuclear program, as well as how to manage the U.S. alliance with South Korea, are now overdue. If Biden chooses wisely, his administration could prove transformational for the Korean Peninsula. If he errs or defers meaningful decisions to his successor, he risks […]

Editor’s Note: Every Monday, Managing Editor Frederick Deknatel highlights a major unfolding story in the Middle East, while curating some of the best news and analysis from the region. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive Middle East Memo by email every week. Plainclothes security agents showed up at a beach resort in the Sinai last week, looking for Karim Ennarah, the director of the criminal justice unit at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a Cairo-based NGO. Egyptian state security officers had apparently looked for Ennarah at his home in Cairo the day before, only to learn he […]

Joe Biden’s election as president offers the United States an opportunity to recast its relationship with the United Nations after four years of “America First” disengagement under Donald Trump. The president-elect is already declaring that “America is back.” But to make good on his promise, Biden needs to reinvigorate American leadership within the U.N. itself, while tempering expectations about what the world body can deliver at a time of intense geopolitical rivalry. Beyond reversing Trump’s misguided assaults on the U.N., Biden must strengthen U.S. capabilities to conduct multilateral diplomacy, promote institutional reforms to bring the U.N. into the 21st century, […]

The architects of India’s foreign policy have long preferred a multipolar world. They believe that India, with its limited economic and military capabilities, can play a prominent role on the global stage only when it is not dominated by one or two superpowers. That view led New Delhi to champion the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War, and a preference for multipolarity endured in Indian foreign policy thinking after the fall of the Soviet Union. Even while India in the 21st century drew closer to the sole remaining superpower, the United States, its leaders spoke of strategic autonomy, which some […]

In a long-anticipated move, the White House recently notified Congress of its intent to sell advanced F-35 fighter jets to the United Arab Emirates. The Trump administration was able to overcome Israel’s initial objections to the move, which followed the normalization agreement that the U.S. brokered between the UAE and Israel. If the deal goes through, it will make the UAE only the second Middle Eastern country after Israel to fly the F-35, though Saudi Arabia and Qatar have also expressed interest. Turkey had been a partner in developing the F-35 but was kicked out of the program by the […]

If American policy in Afghanistan was a Hollywood thriller, acting Pentagon chief Christopher Miller’s announcement Tuesday that President Donald Trump plans to reduce the number of American troops in the country from 4,500 to 2,500 by the time he leaves office in January might have made for a riveting plot twist. The trouble for White House script writers is that we’ve all seen this movie before, and it never seems to end with a better outcome for the Afghan people. The one hidden benefit of Trump’s drawdown announcement is that it could free up Joe Biden to write an alternative […]

DAKAR, Senegal—Mohammed Ouattara, an activist from Cote d’Ivoire who lives in exile in Senegal, doesn’t mince words when speaking about his country’s recent presidential elections. “It’s a constitutional coup d’état,” he told me, as we sat in a café along the corniche in Dakar. “He doesn’t have the right to be a candidate,” he said, his eyes wide and intense. “He stole the elections.” Ouattara was referring to Cote d’Ivoire’s president, Alassane Ouattara, who was reelected to a controversial third term last month in a landslide, according to election officials, although his two main opponents had boycotted the vote and […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive Africa Watch by email every week. The decades-long dispute between Morocco and the pro-independence Polisario Front in the region of Western Sahara is threatening to erupt into a full-blown war. Frustrated by the lack of international attention to its cause and angered by a recent Moroccan military operation in a United Nations-monitored buffer zone, the Polisario Front broke a three-decade-long cease-fire agreement last weekend. U.N. officials are scrambling to restore the broken deal, as […]