U.S. Foreign Policy Archive

Editor’s Note: Middle East Memo will be off for Martin Luther King Jr. Day next week. It will return Jan. 25. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive Middle East Memo by email every week. When President Donald Trump’s radical supporters stormed the Capitol building last week, attacking police and rampaging through the halls of Congress, hunting for lawmakers, many American news networks were quick to make breathless comparisons to somewhere else. This wasn’t Washington, they intimated; it was more like a scene out of Baghdad, or Beirut. Van Jones, the former Obama administration official who is now a […]

International expectations are high for Joe Biden’s presidency, but perhaps nowhere more than in Europe, where political leaders and observers see an opportunity to revitalize the trans-Atlantic relationship after years of drift and then downright antagonism under Donald Trump. They have reason to be optimistic. Biden and his pick for secretary of state, Antony Blinken, are confirmed Atlanticists. They recognize that, despite Asia’s rise, the United States and Europe are still the load-bearing pillars of any open and stable international system. The president-elect has pleased Europeans so far by pledging to return to the Paris Agreement on climate change, remain […]

Just days into the new year, Iran announced that “a couple of hours ago,” it had started enriching uranium to 20 percent—a level that experts say would put it within a six-month sprint of converting its entire nuclear stockpile to bomb-grade material. Tehran’s move Monday raises the pressure on President-elect Joe Biden, whose administration now has no time to waste in facing an adversary signaling that it has no intention of warmly embracing Biden’s diplomatic outreach. Iran is raising the stakes for Biden in the waning days of the Trump administration, trying to set the timetable for nuclear negotiations even […]

Nothing could be more normal than to regard the ceaseless spread of COVID-19 across the United States as a public health crisis. Indeed, as many commentators have called it, this pandemic is the preeminent public health crisis of the past century. As almost everyone knows by now, not since the 1918 flu pandemic have the lives and livelihoods of so many Americans—or people elsewhere, for that matter—been so gravely threatened by the uncontrolled spread of a single infectious disease. With the availability of new vaccines, however, this crisis is shifting into a new and completely different phase. The public health […]

Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Daniel McDowell is filling in this week. “The exchange rate is the most important price in any economy, for it affects all other prices,” as Harvard political economist Jeffry Frieden put it. Since the U.S. dollar is the most widely used currency for cross-border exchange and investment, it is fair to say its value is the most important price in the global economy. Though American presidents have limited control over the dollar’s value, their words and their policy choices still carry weight. After four years of an unconventional dollar policy under President Donald Trump, what should […]

As President-elect Joe Biden prepares to take office later this month, many U.S. allies and partners are eyeing an opportunity for better relations with Washington. But Turkey, under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will face an uphill battle to settle its ongoing disputes with the United States, not to mention its other NATO allies. There are three major impediments to a reset in Turkey’s ties with the West. First, the U.S. remains at loggerheads with Turkey over Erdogan’s decision to purchase an advanced missile defense system from Russia. Second, the European Union is considering tough sanctions against Ankara […]

VIENNA—As the clock ticks down to U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration this month, hopes are high that he will rejoin and preserve key arms control agreements that were abandoned or neglected by the outgoing president, Donald Trump. If Biden can successfully reverse course, it will go a long way to restoring America’s credibility, given that Trump has “bankrupted the United States’ word in the world,” as Biden put it in Foreign Affairs last March. “On nonproliferation and nuclear security, the United States cannot be a credible voice while it is abandoning the deals it negotiated,” he wrote. But how straightforward […]

The U.S.S. Nimitz was leaving the Middle East, until it wasn’t. The Pentagon’s abrupt reversal of its move late last week to send the aircraft carrier home is the latest sign of an ominous standoff with Iran in the last, chaotic days of Donald Trump’s presidency. A year ago, Trump ordered the brazen drone strike in Baghdad that killed Iran’s top military commander, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Fears that it would start a full-fledged war dissipated after Iran made a calculated show of retaliation, firing a barrage of ballistic missiles at bases in Iraq housing U.S. troops. There were no […]

Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Richard Gowan is filling in for Stewart M. Patrick, who will return next week. What lies in store for the United Nations Security Council in 2021? People unfamiliar with the council’s inner workings might be surprised to learn how much of it is routine, as diplomats update mandates for ongoing peace operations and sanctions regimes on a pre-set schedule. But unforeseen wars and crises always force their way onto the agenda. Addressing incoming diplomats of the council’s temporary members at an event in Brussels in December 2019, I warned that they must expect to address at […]