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In November, as the Ethiopian government escalated its military campaign against the northern Tigray region, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed quietly ordered a drawdown of Ethiopian peacekeepers from neighboring Somalia. The scale of the move is still unconfirmed, but as many as 3,000 Ethiopian troops were reportedly redeployed to fight against the regional ruling party in Tigray, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF. Around 200 to 300 ethnic Tigrayan soldiers in Somalia were also disarmed, and some may have even been purged from the ranks. The Ethiopian troops’ departure injects additional uncertainty into Somalia’s already precarious security situation, as it […]

The son of a Brooklyn Supreme Court judge. A masonry worker from Des Moines, Iowa. A one-time Cleveland educator who said a day after the siege that she was “switching paths” to expose the “global evil of human trafficking and pedophilia.” A guy wearing a knit cap bearing the logo of the Chicago Fire Department, known on Twitter only as #extinguisherman for the footage showing him wielding an extinguisher near the steps where Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick was beaten to death. These are the new anti-heroes of American democracy’s violent convulsions. There are hundreds more pro-Trump supporters implicated in […]

Saudi Arabia and three of its Gulf allies have agreed to end a three-and-a-half-year travel and trade blockade on neighboring Qatar. The deal was announced last week at a summit of the six-country Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC. But the embargo has done lasting damage to the bloc, says Sanam Vakil, a Middle East expert at Chatham House, and “there’s a lot of work to be done” to address persistent divisions within the GCC countries. Vakil joined WPR’s Elliot Waldman on the Trend Lines podcast this week to talk about how the Gulf states can move forward after years of […]

It is tempting to think that Joe Biden’s imminent inauguration will end the crisis of multilateralism. Yet while the new administration will undoubtedly change the way the United States engages with the world for the better, Donald Trump’s perceived withdrawal from global leadership is not the main reason for the current dysfunctional state of global affairs. Nor, for that matter, does it come down to the waxing great-power rivalry between China and the U.S., or the resurgence of Russia as a thorn in the side of the liberal international order. Larger forces are at work. The world has entered a […]

The last time China’s most famous billionaire, Jack Ma, was seen in public was October. It was an appearance that did not please the regime in Beijing. The founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba—something of a Chinese Jeff Bezos—may have grown too confident and too powerful for the Chinese Communist Party, which may have decided it was time to not just silence him and limit his power, but to send a message to other potential critics with wealth and influence. It would not be the first time that China has used repressive tactics to put elites in their place. And it […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR contributor Rachel Cheung and Assistant 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. Speaking at a financial conference in Shanghai last fall, Jack Ma, China’s most famous entrepreneur, started his speech with a disclaimer: “If you think my advice doesn’t make sense, just forget about it.” But Beijing never forgets and certainly does not forgive. The charismatic billionaire proceeded to dish out advice at the Bund Summit, as he loves to do in public speeches. He […]

Flights between Saudi Arabia and Qatar are resuming this week and the land border has reopened between the two countries—signs of a thaw in relations after three and half years of acrimony. Last week, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt agreed to end a travel and trade blockade they had imposed on Qatar in 2017. Those four countries, calling themselves the “anti-terror quartet,” had accused Qatar of supporting radical Islamist groups, among other charges. The crisis had divided the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC, and the United States had lobbied extensively for an end to the […]

In the week since a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to prevent Congress from certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s election victory, our picture of the day’s events has come into sharper focus. With every video and eye-witness account that appears, it becomes clearer that the attempt to subvert American democracy was far more violent than it initially seemed. But huge gaps remain in our understanding of how that violent mob managed to penetrate what should have been a heavily guarded and secure site, especially given the threats that had been circulating online about plans to […]

The shocking visuals of last week’s mob assault on the U.S. Capitol building, incited by President Donald Trump, stunned viewers around the world. But the more insidious assault on American democracy has been led by the faction of the Republican Party that perpetuated Trump’s lies about election fraud, voted against the certification Joe Biden’s election victory in Congress and duped millions of Americans. In my recent study of democratic erosion around the world, my co-author, Murat Somer, and I identified a common template for the gradual undermining of democratic institutions: A polarizing leader attempts to consolidate power by changing enough […]

New Zealand’s police don’t carry guns. But after a white supremacist armed with semiautomatic weapons killed 51 Muslim worshippers at two mosques in the city of Christchurch in March 2019—the worst mass shooting in the country’s history—some New Zealanders thought they should. “The operating environment has changed,” the former New Zealand police commissioner, Mike Bush, said in a statement several months after the massacre. “Police must ensure our people are equipped and enabled to perform their roles safely and to ensure our communities are, and feel, safe.” In October that year, the national police announced a project that would see […]

Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Daniel McDowell is filling in this week. Presidential pledges to revitalize American manufacturing are one of the few remaining vestiges of bipartisanship in Washington. Back in 2012, President Barack Obama used the word “manufacturing” 15 times in his State of the Union address—more than “security” and even the “economy” itself. Striking an optimistic tone about the potential for an industrial comeback, Obama criticized policies that encouraged American manufacturers to move jobs overseas, and he called on U.S. business leaders to consider bringing production home. Four years later, then-candidate Donald Trump blamed Obama’s love of globalization for […]

Despite prevailing early sentiment that the coronavirus pandemic and the anxieties associated with it could further fracture the European Union as a tumultuous Brexit process wound to a close, the bloc now finds itself more integrated and united than it has been in years. As COVID-19 spread across the continent last year, mainstream EU leaders overcame their differences and found compromises on politically sensitive issues, ranging from pandemic recovery to climate change to the rule of law—and even a last-minute post-Brexit trade agreement with the United Kingdom. The many populist and euroskeptic parties that enjoyed surging support in the aftermath […]

The trans-Atlantic relationship has suffered during the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, largely due to Trump’s hostility toward the European Union, which he saw as a trade competitor, and toward the NATO alliance, which he saw as a costly liability. The tensions that have arisen under Trump have made the debate in Brussels and across the EU over European strategic autonomy all the more urgent, especially in the past year. With the arrival in the White House of President-elect Joe Biden, many observers expect the return of smoother relations between the U.S. and its European allies. But what will […]

Editor’s Note: Middle East Memo will be off for Martin Luther King Jr. Day next week. It will return Jan. 25. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive Middle East Memo by email every week. When President Donald Trump’s radical supporters stormed the Capitol building last week, attacking police and rampaging through the halls of Congress, hunting for lawmakers, many American news networks were quick to make breathless comparisons to somewhere else. This wasn’t Washington, they intimated; it was more like a scene out of Baghdad, or Beirut. Van Jones, the former Obama administration official who is now a […]

International expectations are high for Joe Biden’s presidency, but perhaps nowhere more than in Europe, where political leaders and observers see an opportunity to revitalize the trans-Atlantic relationship after years of drift and then downright antagonism under Donald Trump. They have reason to be optimistic. Biden and his pick for secretary of state, Antony Blinken, are confirmed Atlanticists. They recognize that, despite Asia’s rise, the United States and Europe are still the load-bearing pillars of any open and stable international system. The president-elect has pleased Europeans so far by pledging to return to the Paris Agreement on climate change, remain […]

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso—Not long before the New Year, I paid a visit to an Islamic teacher, known as a marabout, who lives in an unfinished house here on the outskirts of Burkina Faso’s capital. I had first spoken with him earlier in 2020, after he was displaced from his home near the northern city of Djibo, in Soum province, near the border with Mali—a part of the country that has become a major frontline in the campaign against violent jihadist organizations. The marabout belongs to the Fulani ethnic group, often the target of persecution despite being one of the largest […]

In early December, amid rising tensions between Australia and China, Prime Minister Scott Morrison posted a statement on the Chinese social media platform WeChat to voice his outrage at an incendiary tweet from a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson. Within a day, WeChat, which routinely polices sensitive content on its platform, had blocked Morrison’s post, ostensibly for violating the company’s policies. It was not the only instance of a foreign official being censored on a Chinese social media platform. The most prominent offenders are WeChat—the largest social media site in China, with over 1 billion active users—and Weibo, a microblogging platform […]