Domestic Politics Archive

Amid a storm of domestic crises, and with less than five months until Election Day, President Donald Trump suddenly faces the prospect of having his signature foreign policy initiative, once quietly stalled, unravel spectacularly. Trump took personal charge of the daunting North Korea file early on, all but proclaiming victory after a groundbreaking, made-for-TV meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un in Singapore two years ago, immediately after which he announced on Twitter: “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” Back then, that sounded preposterously premature. Today, it brings faint echoes of Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 declaration […]

For the past four years, the United States has been trending, as they say about social media, and not in a good way. It began with a presidential campaign in which Donald Trump, the eventual winner, called Mexicans rapists and showered playground insults on his Republican rivals. For most of the postwar period, an underrated secret of American power has been to avoid this kind of spotlight. It made other countries and their problems, and not the United States itself, the focus of global attention: human rights here, massacres there, famines, rebellions, coups and more. The global diet of news […]

DUBLIN—As the world braces for a prolonged economic downturn due to the coronavirus pandemic, the United Kingdom and Ireland may have to face this crisis alongside another, partly self-inflicted one: a no-deal Brexit. The U.K. officially left the European Union in January and is currently in a transition period that is scheduled to end on Dec. 31. During that time, EU rules remain in effect, and London and Brussels are supposed to hammer out the details of their future trading relationship before the end of the year. Yet so far, there has been little progress. “We should be very concerned,” […]

The past two weeks may have marked a turning point in American civil-military relations. President Donald Trump threatened to deploy active-duty troops to subdue domestic political protests; the secretary of defense suggested governors should “dominate the battlespace” of major U.S. cities, only to later walk back his remarks; and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, the country’s highest-ranking military officer, appeared alongside Trump at a photo-op near the White House after National Guard troops had helped forcibly clear the area of protesters. Milley later apologized, saying he “should not have been there.” Although these events […]

MADRID—In late March, about 100 Moroccan migrants living in Spain paid smugglers 5,400 euros each—roughly $6,100—to make the treacherous journey home in inflatable rafts. In a curious case of reverse migration, they desperately fled a wealthy country that had been crippled by the coronavirus and could not offer them work for the foreseeable future. Yet when they finally reached the beaches of Larache, on Morocco’s western coast, they were hunted by the Moroccan authorities, who were concerned that the migrants would spread the coronavirus. Police conducted a door-to-door search, and at least one migrant was found hiding in a clay […]

The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other black Americans by police, and the sustained protests in their wake, present a test for the United States both at home and abroad. They underscore the structural racism that permeates American society and how far the nation remains from delivering on the Constitution’s promise of equal rights and justice for all. Globally, they threaten America’s longstanding, if uneven, role as the world’s leading champion of universal human rights. The success of the Black Lives Matter movement is critical, not only to achieve a more perfect union at home, but also to […]

In this week’s editors’ discussion on Trend Lines, WPR’s Judah Grunstein, Freddy Deknatel and Prachi Vidwans talk about the protests against police brutality and systemic racism in the United States and Europe, and the issues and grievances driving them. They also discuss what these movements share in common and what distinguishes them, the central role played by commemorative statues as legacies of historical racism, and the particular challenge the U.S. protests pose for civil-military relations. Listen: Download: MP3 Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | Spotify Relevant Articles on WPR:America’s Struggle for Racial Justice Is a Barrier—and a Bridge—to the WorldAmerica […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Burundi’s outgoing president, Pierre Nkurunziza, who took power in 2005 promising to unify a country emerging from civil war, only to oversee an increasingly brutal crackdown against his regime’s opponents, died suddenly Monday at the age of 55. Officials said he suffered a heart attack, but there is speculation he may have died of complications from COVID-19 after he spent months downplaying the risk of the coronavirus. Nkurunziza’s death ahead of the August inauguration of his hand-picked successor has officials in Burundi […]

It may be overshadowed by everything else roiling the United States right now. But the 82-page legal brief filed Wednesday rebuking the Trump administration for its controversial motion to dismiss federal perjury charges against former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn matters immensely for the future of American democracy. John Gleeson, a retired federal judge appointed to evaluate the government’s highly unusual move, argued that Justice Department prosecutors tried to conceal the real reasons for dropping the charges against Flynn last month and that its attempt to wipe Flynn’s record clean was a “gross abuse of prosecutorial power.” There […]

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso—Liberia is preparing to lift the state of emergency that has been in place since April to curb the spread of the coronavirus, as President George Weah declared that the outbreak had been sufficiently contained. But the pandemic has raised troubling questions about freedom of the press in the country, with senior members of Weah’s administration publicly threatening journalists at its onset. “Press freedom in Liberia has taken a nosedive,” James Harding Giahyue, a Liberian journalist and former colleague who reports for both local and domestic media, told me recently. In April, Liberia’s solicitor general, Sayma Syrenius Cephus, […]

In the months since the coronavirus pandemic effectively shut down large parts of the world, the changes to the environment have become one of the most visible backdrops to life under lockdown. Suddenly blue skies have provided a welcome setting for more varieties of birds, whose songs can now be heard without the roar of airplanes and car traffic. From Istanbul to New Delhi, vistas reappeared that no one alive remembered seeing. Animals started exploring what had once been their usual habitats, with flamingoes venturing in Mumbai, deer clambering through East London, and all manner of animals strolling into cities […]

A month ago, in a column about how divisions in America would undermine the country’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, I mentioned the U.S. soldiers who in World War II liberated the South of France as well as Nazi-occupied Belgium, where my father spent the war. It is with some embarrassment that I revisit that reference to include a mention of how those soldiers, too, were divided—along the lines of race, reflecting the segregation of much of American society at the time. My failure to mention that was not due to a lack of knowledge, but simply the result of […]

Russia’s COVID-19 story is one of paradoxes. Despite an underfunded public health system, new cases have plateaued since mid-May, and the country has not seen the explosion in deaths from the coronavirus that some experts predicted. Yet President Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings have been sinking. Why? Russians seem to realize that they have so far avoided the worst in spite of Putin’s government, not because of it. As of June 8, the official total of infections was just over 450,000—the third-highest count in the world after the United States and Brazil—but Russian officials say that is because of their high […]

After nearly two months of a belatedly imposed and patchwork lockdown to contain the coronavirus, some regions of Indonesia are slowly reopening. Throughout June, authorities will gradually loosen restrictions on establishments like restaurants and shopping areas in parts of Indonesia where the reproduction rate of COVID-19—known as R0 or “R-naught,” the average number of new infections stemming from a single case—is judged to be less than one. But Indonesia is opening up without a clear handle on the scope of its COVID-19 crisis, which is the worst in Southeast Asia, with 32,000 confirmed cases and nearly 1,900 deaths as of […]

In the early weeks of 2020, the signs pointed to progress in Myanmar’s convoluted effort to finally end 70 years of ethnic strife in its border areas. On Jan. 8, representatives from the government and the 10 ethnic armies that are party to a 2015 cease-fire deal convened in the capital, Naypyidaw, where they reached an eight-point agreement on the next steps to continue implementing that cease-fire. They also vowed to meet for a fourth national peace conference by the end of April, to build on three earlier summits held between 2016 and 2018. That fourth summit would have signaled […]

In this week’s editors’ discussion on Trend Lines, WPR’s Judah Grunstein, Freddy Deknatel and Prachi Vidwans talk about the demonstrations in cities across the U.S. to protest police killings of black Americans, the militarized response to the protests, and the international dimensions of both racial injustice in America and the popular movements to end it. Listen: Download: MP3Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | Spotify Relevant Articles on WPR:America Is in Crisis Because It Won’t Confront Its Grave Racial DivideThe Looming American NightmareAfter Years of Turmoil, There Is Hope for Stability and Reform in LesothoThe Importance of Gender Inclusion in COVID-19 […]

When the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, agreed to demobilize as part of Colombia’s landmark 2016 peace agreement, it ended 50 years of armed conflict. It also left the Colombian army without its chief adversary. The country still faces internal armed threats, like the smaller guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army, and about 10,000 fighters are scattered across dozens of smaller militias, some of them led by former FARC members. But for Latin America’s largest army, the adjustment has been fraught with difficulty. The army built up a formidable intelligence apparatus during the country’s decades of internal conflict, […]