Diplomacy & Politics Archive

In this week’s editors’ discussion on Trend Lines, WPR’s Judah Grunstein, Elliot Waldman and Prachi Vidwans talk about the implications of the European Union’s new seven-year budget and coronavirus recovery fund, which were agreed after four days and nights of contentious negotiations in Brussels. They also discuss the Trump administration’s sudden decision to shut down China’s consulate in Houston, and what that could mean for the downward spiral in U.S.-China relations. Listen: Download: MP3Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | Spotify Relevant Articles on WPR:Is the EU’s COVID-19 Response Losing Central and Eastern Europe to China?The U.S. Can No Longer Ignore […]

At the opening of the World Health Assembly in mid-May, Chinese leader Xi Jinping announced his country would spend $2 billion over two years to help other countries fight the coronavirus pandemic. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, had already announced the U.S. would halt funding to the World Health Organization. His administration began the process of withdrawing from the WHO in early July. A week after Xi’s announcement, a 14-person medical team from China arrived in Tajikistan, which has had over 7,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 56 deaths. The Chinese squad brought 9 tons of medical equipment, bringing its total […]

News reports last week that U.S. President Donald Trump granted the CIA broad authority in 2018 to conduct offensive cyberattacks against Russia, China, Iran and North Korea have rightfully raised alarm among some in Washington’s national security set. Recent history indicates that when the White House has greenlighted items at the top of the CIA’s wish list, things haven’t always turned out well. See the Senate “Torture Report” and leaked documents on lethal drone attacks in South Asia for more details. In light of these past CIA transgressions, the current handwringing is not unwarranted. Yet, as often happens with sensational […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa appears to be using COVID-19 restrictions as cover for a growing crackdown on regime critics, even as his administration mismanages efforts to provide relief to people suffering under lockdown measures in response to the pandemic. In the latest of a string of arrests of politicians and activists, security forces this week detained a prominent investigative journalist, Hopewell Chin’ono, and opposition politician Jacob Ngarivhume, who heads the small Transform Zimbabwe party. The two are accused of organizing nationwide, anti-government […]

In a general election earlier this month, voters in the Dominican Republic dealt a stinging defeat to the ruling Dominican Liberation Party, or PLD, which has dominated politics in the country since 2004. Luis Abinader, an economist and businessman who has never held political office, was elected president, and his Modern Revolutionary Party, or PRM, emerged as the largest party in Congress. The vote was initially scheduled to be held in May, but was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic, which has taken a devastating toll on the Dominican Republic. The country has reported over 57,000 cases of COVID-19, including […]

During its 12 years of existence, the United Nations-backed International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, or CICIG, pursued corruption investigations into high-level political players and business figures. The commission’s efforts resulted in hundreds of arrests and indictments, including of a former president, Otto Perez Molina, and his vice president, in 2015. CICIG’s work also helped build anti-corruption-related capacity and expertise among Guatemala’s legal community. But CICIG was forced to shut down last year after then-President Jimmy Morales refused to renew its mandate. Since then, many judges and prosecutors have faced a campaign of harassment, verbal attacks and death threats, forcing […]

Polish President Andrzej Duda narrowly won a second term in a hotly contested runoff election earlier this month, opening the door for the ruling right-wing populist Law and Justice party, known as PiS for its Polish initials, to continue cementing its power. But the vote, which was postponed from May due to the coronavirus pandemic, also illustrated the depth of the political divide in Polish society. On one side, a largely rural and older cohort of conservative voters handed Duda a narrow victory with 51 percent. His challenger, Warsaw mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, took the remaining 49 percent, mostly from metropolitan […]

Over the past several months, China watchers have been closely following as Beijing tightened its grip on Hong Kong and continued its steady strangulation of the Uighur Muslim ethnic minority in Xinjiang. But the regime successfully avoided international attention and opprobrium as it carried out what could prove to be its most devastating push elsewhere, in Tibet. Years ago, Tibet had more success capturing the world’s attention. Under the leadership of the exiled Dalai Lama, Tibetans pared down their demands from China, from full-blown independence to genuine autonomy. The Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 and […]

“J’étouffe!”—I’m suffocating! Cedric Chouviat’s plea was repeated seven times as four French police officers sought to subdue him with a chokehold in early January, near the Quai Branly, which runs along the Seine River in central Paris. Chouviat, a 42-year-old father of five who worked as a deliveryman, went into cardiac arrest and died two days later. An autopsy revealed that his larynx had been crushed. His cry echoed that of Eric Garner, who also died after being put in a chokehold by a New York City police officer in 2014. A variation of the haunting refrain was heard in […]

When the Trump administration began publicly bandying about the idea of barring the popular Chinese social media app TikTok from the American market a couple of weeks ago, the mere possibility of it happening sent shock waves through Chinese society. One might have expected that most of the attention, including lots of predictable fury, would have centered on nationalist sentiments—which are easily aroused in China nowadays—about the alleged unfairness with which the country is being treated by Western competitors, none more so than the United States. Unbeknownst to Americans, who mostly see it as an almost addictive platform for distracting […]

During more than a dozen years in operation, the United Nations-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, known by its Spanish acronym CICIG, helped expose a shocking degree of high-level corruption. One case even resulted in the resignation and arrest of then-President Otto Perez Molina and his vice president in 2015. However, the commission was forced to shut down in September 2019 when Molina’s successor, Jimmy Morales, refused to extend its mandate. In the months since the commission shut down, there has been a concerning rise in verbal attacks and death threats against Guatemala’s anti-corruption community, forcing some of them […]

Authoritarian populism has returned to Sri Lanka. Since Gotabaya Rajapaksa became the country’s seventh president last November, he has, as many feared, brought back the repressive and undemocratic policies of his older brother, Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was president from 2005 to 2015. In the first few months of Gotabaya’s presidency, the Rajapaksas—Sri Lanka’s most prominent political family—moved swiftly to centralize power, with Gotabaya immediately appointing Mahinda as prime minister. The two other Rajapaksa brothers, Chamal and Basil, hold important political positions as well; the former is a Cabinet minister, and the latter is both Gotabaya’s “chief strategist” and the national […]

Editor’s Note: WPR editor-in-chief Judah Grunstein is filling in for Kimberly Ann Elliott this week. Should the four-year-long polar night of Donald Trump’s presidency come to a definitive end this November, most observers of his catastrophic handling of U.S. foreign policy will rejoice. After all, Trump has done significant damage to America’s national interests—and has done so in a uniquely corrosive way. He has undermined America’s alliances and partnerships while emboldening its adversaries, all in pursuit of an ad hoc, incoherent and personalized foreign policy devoid of strategic planning. Meanwhile, he has overseen domestic shifts that leave the U.S. more […]

Foreign ministers from China and the Arab world held their ninth meeting of the biennial China-Arab States Cooperation Forum earlier this month, at which they pledged to “deepen cooperation in various fields, and embrace new prospects in building a China-Arab community with a shared future,” according to Chinese state media outlet Xinhua. The meeting is sure to renew debates over the nature of Chinese influence in Gulf Arab states. China hawks in the United States often overemphasize China’s economic power in the region by focusing on the threats posed by companies like the telecommunications giant Huawei or BGI Group, a […]

The new coronavirus field hospital, in a Cairo convention center, has enough space for 4,000 beds. Like so many things in Egypt, it was built by the armed forces. When President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who had once described the virus’s trajectory in Egypt as “reassuring,” toured its vast halls in late June, he didn’t look like he was worried about a surge of COVID-19 patients. Instead, flanked as usual by men in army fatigues, Sisi turned the hospital into another stage to project his authority. But after calling any and all critics of his government’s handling of the pandemic “enemies […]

The global environmental crisis, encompassing runaway climate change, collapsing biodiversity and the slow death of the world’s oceans, has exposed the limitations of traditional political realism as a guide to statecraft in the 21st century. The time has come for the nations of the world to embrace a new approach to world politics that treats the preservation of the biosphere as a core national interest and a central objective of national security policy. Call this new mindset ecological realism. Political realism, which has long dominated the teaching and practice of foreign policy, including in the United States, is a venerable […]

As the coronavirus pandemic takes a terrible toll across Latin America, with over 3.5 million cases and nearly 150,000 deaths, the region is increasingly facing a financial and humanitarian emergency. Across Latin America and the Caribbean, GDP is forecast to contract by 9.3 percent in 2020, according to the International Monetary Fund—the region’s largest economic contraction on record, and far worse than the outlook for African and Asian economies. The United Nations expects the value of South America’s exports to fall by nearly a fifth this year due to shrinking international demand and weaker commodity prices. Foreign investment has also […]