For U.S. officials who worked under former President Barack Obama, many of whom are now beginning or contemplating jobs in Joe Biden’s administration, the war in Yemen casts a long shadow. What started on their watch as a primarily internal power struggle has since metastasized into a messy and multilayered conflict. It is the world’s most dire humanitarian crisis, involving alleged violations of international law—many of them perpetrated with American-made arms—and has become a potential trigger for a region-wide conflagration. For much of Biden’s foreign policy team, then, Yemen represents both unfinished business and, potentially, a small but significant piece [...]
Can there be Trumpism without Trump? In the wake of the Capitol riot, this is an urgent, but also surprisingly complicated question. After half a decade of debate, it is still far from obvious that we know what “Trumpism” actually is. Some have taken it as a local instance of a global phenomenon often described as the “wave of populism,” or as part of a worldwide revolt against neoliberalism. For example, as social scientists Jonathan Hopkin and Mark Blyth have put it, “Trump is a data point. Global Trumpism is a structural shift.” But it is important to recognize that [...]
When riots erupted across the Netherlands last weekend against a new coronavirus lockdown, the scenes of mayhem triggered a cascade of emotions. “My city is crying, and so am I,” said John Jorritsma, the mayor of Eindhoven, the country’s fifth-largest city, contemplating the damage from all the violence. But the sentiment was not just sadness. Furious, and perhaps a bit frightened, Jorritsma called the rioters “the scum of the Earth” and warned that the country could be “on our way to civil war.” The protests in nearly a dozen Dutch cities erupted under the banner of rejecting stricter measures to [...]
