U.S. Foreign Policy Archive

American voters delivered the House of Representatives to the Democratic Party in yesterday’s midterm congressional elections, issuing a measured rebuke of President Donald Trump’s divisive and inflammatory style of politics. Trump himself had turned the elections into a referendum on his personal brand, putting himself front and center while stumping energetically for Republican candidates nationwide over the last few weeks of the campaign. Despite strong economic growth and historically low unemployment, however, voters in key districts—including many in the usually Republican suburbs—made it clear that the laws of political gravity still exist, and that even Trump cannot violate them indefinitely. […]

The Arab countries of the Persian Gulf are in a period of unusual turbulence. It’s not their declared enemy, Iran, that is causing the trouble, but the secondary effects of overly ambitious and high-risk policy choices by a new generation of leaders from Riyadh to Abu Dhabi. Their major security partners, including the United States, are worried that regional coordination and cooperation have become harder, with each Gulf state distracted by local crises, while Russia and Iran are benefiting from the disarray. It raises longer-term concerns about the future of their regional bloc, the Gulf Cooperation Council, which has never […]

Will the world’s middle powers save the liberal international system, or conspire to sink it? For the past decade, believers in international cooperation and multilateral institutions have invested a lot of hope in states like Brazil, India and South Korea. Such powers are big enough to play a major part in managing global order, the optimists argue. But unlike China and the U.S., they are not so big that they can disregard international rules and arrangements altogether. The not-quite-superpowers gained new diplomatic clout in 2008, when the U.S. and its European allies turned to the Group of 20 countries to […]

Amid worsening ties between Turkey and Saudi Arabia over the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Turkey’s previous tensions with the United States, which only months ago looked intractable, appear to be easing. This upswing reflects Turkey’s longstanding institutional comfort, if not always strategic preference, for its Western ties, and, more immediately, a certain tactical play against its rival in Riyadh. But Turkey’s Western moorings are hardly secure—a position that still looks increasingly out of step for a Turkish government with aspirations for regional and even global leadership. As new details continue to emerge about Khashoggi’s murder in the Saudi […]

The U.S. Treasury Department recently designated a network of 22 Iranian businesses as supporters of terrorism, including several banks and major commodities companies, imposing sanctions on them for their alleged financial ties to a powerful Iranian militia. The goal was to expose and discredit the paramilitary group they are said to finance, known as the Basij, which is linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and, according to the Treasury Department, has recruited child soldiers sent to fight in Syria to support the Assad regime. Yet like other forms of financial pressure from the Trump administration, these sanctions likely won’t […]