U.S. Foreign Policy Archive

Since President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the international deal designed to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb, the time it might take Tehran to build such a weapon if it so chooses has dropped from more than a year to just a few months. The world now has much less time to react if that happens—and no good options in response. After Washington, to the dismay of its allies, reimposed economic sanctions and demanded that Iran do more to change its behavior, there have been no new negotiations and no clarity on exactly what the Trump […]

As Democratic voters in America enter a decisive stage in determining who should face Donald Trump in the November presidential election, Freedom House has issued an alarming report on the status of representative government worldwide. The annual report, titled “Freedom in the World 2020,” makes for sobering reading. For the 14th consecutive year, democracy lost ground to tyranny in 2019. Authoritarian regimes are emboldened. Long-established democracies are slipping. And attacks on religious minorities and other vulnerable populations are surging. The human yearning for freedom remains powerful, as evinced by recent protest movements in Hong Kong, Algiers, Khartoum and Tehran. Unfortunately, […]

The United States and the Taliban signed an agreement in late February that sets a timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. The negotiations leading up to the deal were long and fraught, and they almost fell apart last September, after President Donald Trump suspended talks and canceled a planned summit with Taliban leaders at Camp David. But as difficult as the talks were, they pale in comparison to what lies ahead: launching, sustaining and successfully concluding a formal intra-Afghan peace process between the government in Kabul and the Taliban, as well as other Afghan political leaders. Questions abound […]

U.S. President Donald Trump’s first official visit to India last week was meant to highlight the strength of the U.S.-India partnership and the high priority that Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi place on the relationship. Trump ingratiated himself with his hosts by refusing to publicly criticize the controversial citizenship law that has unleashed mass protests across India. As deadly communal riots raged in Delhi, Trump and Modi stayed on script, enthusiastically declaring that the state of the U.S.-India relationship is strong. Lending credence to that message, the two leaders signed important deals on defense, energy and counterterrorism during […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. In a setback for Beijing’s efforts to raise its profile at the United Nations and other multilateral organizations, a Chinese candidate failed to win a leadership contest for the U.N.’s intellectual property agency on Wednesday. Wang Binyang’s bid to head the World Intellectual Property Organization, or WIPO, had been opposed by the United States due to concerns about China’s respect for intellectual property rights. Fifty-five out of 83 countries on WIPO’s steering committee voted in favor of Daren Tang, […]

The U.S. military recently confirmed that it has fielded controversial low-yield nuclear warheads on certain submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Plans for the new warhead were included in President Donald Trump’s 2018 nuclear posture review, and its explosive yield is roughly a third of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima during World War II. Trump administration officials argue that the new warhead will serve as a deterrent for Russia’s so-called tactical nuclear weapons, but experts fear that the prevalence of these low-yield nuclear weapons will make an eventual conflict more likely. The news of their deployment comes amid broader scrutiny of […]

Toward the end of his second term in office, former U.S. President Barack Obama said in an interview with The Atlantic that “we have more to fear from a weakened, threatened China than a successful, rising China.” It would be hyperbole to claim that the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak will create the weakened, threatened China that Obama warned about. But it could give us a glimpse. The draconian measures China took to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus that emerged from Wuhan, the capital of central Hubei province, seem to have prevented a worst-case scenario for now. But […]

The status of developing countries under international trade rules has long been a divisive issue. The World Trade Organization does not explicitly define what “developing” means, leaving members to determine for themselves where they fall. Even countries that have become relatively rich or are major export powers have been loath to give up the preferential access to foreign markets—or “special and differential treatment”—that developing country status entails. After decades of negotiation, the practical impact of special and differential treatment is less than it once was. But it is nevertheless a major irritant for developed country members of the WTO. And […]