Diplomacy & Politics Archive

Pro-democracy activists once held up Latin America as a crowning achievement, a region notorious for 19th-century caudillos and Cold War military strongmen that was almost universally electing its leaders by the early 1990s. In 2001, the Western Hemisphere’s premier political institution, the Organization of American States, adopted the Inter-American Democratic Charter, which commits members to uphold and defend democracy. Nowadays, it is more common to hear about Latin America as a cautionary tale, a flashing red light reminding us of the fragility of new democratic institutions and the allure of old habits. The overachiever of what Samuel Huntington called the […]

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 latest attempt by Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia to negotiate a resolution to their decade-long dispute over Addis Ababa’s controversial dam project on the Nile River’s largest tributary failed this week, bringing the region closer to a crisis. Tensions were already high heading into the meetings in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital, with Egyptian officials warning that it was the last chance to reach an agreement […]

When it comes to armed drones, is smaller and more precise necessarily better? The question came to my mind upon seeing the news that the U.S. Air Force just successfully test-launched a new weaponizable drone, the ALTIUS-600, making it the smallest drone in operation. Even more remarkably, this tiny aircraft was launched from the second-smallest-drone, the Kratos XQ-58A Valkyrie, while the Valkyrie was in flight. There is nothing objectionable about the development of mini-drones. One could even argue they would be improvements, in humanitarian terms, over the use of the much larger Reaper to deliver 500-pound bombs in allegedly “precise” […]

As President Joe Biden’s foreign policy takes shape, one issue that still needs clarification is the role of Central Asia. Discussions in Washington about the region usually occur not on its own terms, but in the context of broader issues about Russian and Chinese influence, or security concerns around terrorism and the war in Afghanistan. However, Central Asia is important to the U.S. in its own right. For one thing, it is composed of frontier markets that can be attractive to U.S. companies, apart from the energy firms that already operate there. And some governments share the Biden administration’s interest […]

Over the course of the past five years, a number of figures on the Democratic Party’s left wing, supported by grassroots organizations and advocacy groups, have been expanding the range of discussions about U.S. foreign policy. The progressive agenda that has emerged, although not a formal platform, is beginning to play a more prominent role in policy debates in Washington’s foreign policy establishment, including within the Biden administration. In this week’s Trend Lines interview, Matt Duss, foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, joins WPR’s editor-in-chief Judah Grunstein to discuss what a progressive foreign policy would look like and how […]

The White House’s announcement last month that the United States will offer millions of coronavirus vaccines to its two immediate neighbors, Mexico and Canada, is a welcome step toward the reversal of the Trump administration’s “America First” policies. But for humanitarian, economic and strategic reasons, it must be just the first step toward an intentional program of U.S. leadership to vaccinate the Americas. In the global struggle against COVID-19, Latin American and Caribbean countries have fallen behind. Weak health systems, uncertain leadership, high numbers of informal workers and bad luck have created a perfect storm in the region. Even as […]

TEL AVIV, Israel—As the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history, Benjamin Netanyahu has dominated the country’s politics for over a decade. Despite his ongoing trial on corruption charges, he made a bid for yet another term in last month’s elections. He did not succeed, but neither did any of his rivals, resulting in what the Israeli mainstream media are calling the “imbroglio.” It is the same logjam that triggered the vote: Neither the pro- nor the anti-Netanyahu bloc secured the parliamentary majority needed to form a stable governing coalition. The election also did little to alter Israel’s rightward trajectory on […]

It was exactly two weeks ago when my column about the Dutch election proclaimed Prime Minister Mark Rutte the “clear winner,” after leading his Party for Freedom and Democracy, or VVD, to a comfortable victory the previous week in an otherwise muddled race. In the wake of a VVD election campaign successfully centered on him, Rutte looked like he stood on solid ground, unquestionably the most powerful politician in the Netherlands, a decade after taking the top job. He was strongly positioned to form a new government and easily hold the job until next summer, when he would become the […]

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. China’s “wolf warrior” diplomacy may have backfired in Australia, Canada and most recently France, but in a sign of its hardening attitude toward the West, Beijing is not backing down from its aggressive posture. Defying diplomatic norms, a growing number of Chinese envoys are adopting a belligerent tone in their speeches and tweets, which Chinese authorities have justified as a necessary response to […]

Throughout Donald Trump’s presidency, a recurring theme among the Washington foreign policy establishment was how to repair the damage he was doing to America’s global standing. For many, particularly the centrist current of the Democratic party, that meant restoring the traditional approach to American foreign policy that Trump consistently undermined during his four years in office. But some figures on the party’s more progressive left wing saw returning to the status quo ante as insufficient. People like Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ro Khanna, as well as Sen. Bernie Sanders, began expanding the range of policy discussions and debates, […]

There is perhaps nothing so difficult or so important as thinking independently in the face of a gathering consensus. Very few people have the courage displayed by Rep. Barbara Lee, who just three days after the attacks of 9/11 cast the sole vote in Congress opposing the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which gave the Bush administration broad discretionary powers to wage war against terrorists. Lee’s opposition was not based on naïveté or ideological purity, both of which can be the source of what otherwise resembles iconoclastic thinking. Rather, she had the prescience and lucidity to see the dangers […]

Facing his most severe political crisis since taking office in 2019, Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, resorted to a broad reshuffle of his Cabinet last week, giving more of a voice to center-right parties in order to shore up his support and reduce the risk of impeachment while ousting three military commanders whom he considered insufficiently loyal. As Brazil heads into a perfect storm—an out-of-control pandemic combined with economic collapse and growing political discontent—Bolsonaro appears to be surrounding himself with loyalists who are willing to protect him and his four sons, all of whom are under investigation for crimes ranging […]

It all started with an accusation of rape. In early February, the Senegalese press reported that a young woman who works at a massage parlor in Dakar had filed a complaint against Ousmane Sonko, a prominent opposition leader and a member of parliament, accusing him of raping her and threatening her life. On hearing the news, Sonko, who came in third in the country’s last presidential election in 2019, cried conspiracy, accusing Senegal’s president, Macky Sall, of fabricating the claim in order to destroy his political career and send him to prison. As a member of parliament, Sonko was in […]

Millions of people in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region are facing starvation. Until now, it’s been a crisis without pictures. Those wrenching images of emaciated children and mothers with dull-eyed gazes, so sadly familiar from famine zones, have yet to emerge. But that’s because journalists aren’t permitted to travel to the worst-hit areas of Tigray, where hunger is deepening by the day. When the media can finally get access, or when starving villagers abandon their homes and flee to towns, the pictures will surely remind viewers of drought victims from Ethiopia’s 1984 famine, which prompted the famous LiveAid benefit concert and […]

Ever since the 2016 referendum on Brexit, the U.K. has been busy reimagining its place in the world. Now, with the umbilical cord between the U.K. and the European Union finally cut, London will have to put into practice its long-stated ambitions for a “Global Britain.” The British government’s Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, published on March 16, offers the first official and comprehensive expression of how it plans to do so. The Integrated Review has a great deal of interest for cyber-watchers. For example, the word “standards” appears more times in the document than “China.” […]

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. A former crown prince is under house arrest, accused of a plot to apparently destabilize the kingdom. He denies all that and has instead vowed to defy the orders to keep him quiet at home. He has already shared one video with the media and another audio message to his supporters online, declaring his innocence and […]

In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, two luminaries of the U.S. foreign policy establishment make a provocative, seductive but ultimately unpersuasive case for creating a new “global concert of major powers” for the 21st century, modeled on the Concert of Europe. The authors are Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan—my boss and my colleague, respectively—at the Council on Foreign Relations. I’ve learned an immense amount from both of them over the years. But in the interest of vigorous debate, let me suggest that their nostalgia for the 19th century is misplaced. The anachronistic mechanism they propose would not cure what […]