Global Archive

The Christmas story is full of joy and wonder, but it also includes a cautionary tale about a diplomatic blunder. The blunderers are the three ostensibly wise men from the east who visit King Herod in Jerusalem to ask: “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star in the east and have come to worship him.” This query sets in motion a chain of events that culminates in Herod’s decision to massacre the baby boys of Bethlehem and its environs in a failed attempt to kill Jesus. This atrocity ensures that […]

LIMA, Peru—Divisions among governments about how to deal with global warming pushed the United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP20, nearly two days past its deadline. But the agreement approved in the Peruvian capital in the early hours of Dec. 14 was groundbreaking in that all of the 196 participating nations promised to formulate a plan to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. After two decades of negotiations in which developed nations were expected to cut their emissions while the rest got a free pass, that shared commitment is an important step. But it remains to be seen what each […]

International crisis management does not evolve in a linear or rational fashion. It develops in fits and starts, almost always in response to specific shocks. Just as the Rwandan genocide and Srebrenica massacre reshaped United Nations peacekeeping in the 1990s, forcing the U.N. to professionalize its management systems and start thinking systematically about protecting civilians, 9/11 led NATO to shift from regional stabilization in the Balkans to long-range expeditionary warfare in Afghanistan. Had U.N. or NATO officials known at the time that, by adapting to these events, they were heading for the quagmires of Darfur and Helmand respectively, they might […]

LIMA, Peru—The thousands of national delegates and observers who have gathered here for the two-week United Nations Climate Change Conference known as COP20 have endured exceptionally hot weather. Air-conditioning units are barely able to cool the tent pavilions erected on the grounds of Peru’s Defense Ministry for the event, and delegates frequently remove their suit jackets when walking between pavilions or dining in the venue’s open-air restaurants. The heat wave roasting Lima several weeks before the start of the Southern Hemisphere’s summer serves as a reminder of the need for international cooperation to halt global warming, which has been an […]

This festive season, spare a thought for all the frustrated diplomats and politicians who have spent their time, if often in vain, trying to make the world a less bloody place in 2014. This week brings the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo. This year’s prizewinners, the Pakistani champion of girls’ education Malala Yousafazi and Indian children’s rights defender Kailash Satyarthi, are both unimpeachably impressive honorees. Yet traditionalists grumble that the Nobel committee rarely recognizes the diplomats and mediators who engage in the grinding work of negotiating the end to civil wars: The last time an old-school peacemaker earned a […]

Editor’s note: The following article is one of 30 that we’ve selected from our archives to celebrate World Politics Review’s 15th anniversary. You can find the full collection here. A quarter-century ago, a virtually unknown State Department official published an article in a neoconservative policy journal. The title of the piece as well as its author would go on to acquire global fame—or perhaps notoriety. Critics did not hesitate to dismiss Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” Strobe Talbott, for instance, called it “the beginning of nonsense.” Yet the article, and the subsequent book that grew out of it, was often […]