Aid and Development Archive

It is often hard to figure out precisely what President Donald Trump’s security strategy is. He seldom talks about U.S. national interests and priorities other than trade. His broad regional policies are vague or missing altogether. This is particularly true for Africa. Nearly halfway through his term, Trump has made no speeches on Africa, has not visited the continent, and was slow to appoint an assistant secretary of state for African affairs, America’s key policy coordinator for that part of the world. All this suggests that after 50 years of modest involvement in African security, the United States may be […]

Although the Islamic State continues to carry out sporadic attacks in parts of Iraq, the focus across the country has largely turned to post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation. Harsh sentences are being meted out to suspected Islamic State militants and their collaborators. The Associated Press reported in March that 19,000 people have been detained or imprisoned on suspicion of connections to the extremist group. Of those, 3,000 have been sentenced to death. Meanwhile, a growing backlog of cases and a dearth of available evidence have stymied efforts to compensate victims. In an email interview, Ali Al-Mawlawi, head of research at the […]

On Monday, Argentine President Mauricio Macri announced he would further slash budgetary spending and reimpose previously discontinued agricultural export taxes, in an effort to stave off an ongoing currency crisis that has seen the Argentine peso plummet since December. The new measures are an effort to regain investor confidence and secure an enhanced bailout package from the International Monetary Fund. Despite a June deal with the IMF for a $50 billion credit line, Argentina’s currency has continued to depreciate, with the peso tumbling to new lows in the past week. Argentina’s liquidity crisis is the result of a perfect storm […]

El Salvador’s decision last month to cut diplomatic ties with Taiwan and establish relations with China came as a blow to Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, who condemned Beijing for “increasingly out-of-control international behavior.” The move also prompted a harsh response from the United States, as the White House expressed “grave concern” and accused China of “political interference in the Western Hemisphere.” However, according to R. Evan Ellis, a research professor of Latin American studies at the U.S. Army War College, both Washington and Taipei may be powerless to prevent more countries from following suit. In an email interview, he explains […]

Aug. 11 was the beginning of a very difficult week in Afghanistan. After several weeks of growing pressure from the Taliban, over 1,000 of its fighters attacked Ghazni, a city of 270,000 that straddles the vitally important Highway 1 linking Kabul with the south of the country. The attack on Ghazni brought back haunting memories of the battle for Kunduz in the summer of 2015, when the Taliban seized control of a major Afghan city for the first time since 2001. A series of Taliban attacks across several neighboring provinces compounded an already bad situation. In the Ghormach district of […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series about China’s ‘Belt and Road’ Initiative, a major infrastructure and development program across Eurasia. Speaking to reporters on the final day of a five-day visit to China last month, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad announced that his government would cancel three major Chinese-financed infrastructure projects due to concerns over the projects’ costs and debt burdens. The announcement came as other Chinese-financed projects in Pakistan and Sri Lanka—part of the country’s sweeping Belt and Road Initiative—ran into trouble. In an email interview, Yun Sun, director of the China Program at […]