Global Archive

Is Ban Ki-moon the emblematic international figure of our times? This is probably not a proposition you have considered before. Although it is only 15 months since Ban ended his 10-year tenure as secretary-general of the United Nations, he feels like a distant memory. Ban was a cautious and often marginal figure in a world of mounting crises. While he played a significant role in ensuring the ratification of the Paris climate change agreement in his last year in office, he could only do so because the United States, China and other major states were on his side. A little […]

When Vladimir Putin won a landslide victory to a fourth term as Russia’s president on Sunday, it came as a surprise to no one. Still, his re-election was noteworthy for many reasons, including how apparent it is that as democracy loses ground around the world, Putin embodies the model for the 21st-century descent into authoritarianism—a model that is being emulated by other aspiring autocrats. That Putin’s re-election has repercussions far beyond Russia was evident in the headlines that dominated the news in the days leading up to the vote. A former Russian spy and his daughter were found slumped on […]

The emergence of nativist movements and populist leaders in Europe and America has had Western liberal democracy on the ropes over the past few years. Two developments in the past week suggest that things could get worse before they get better. The implications of the first development were clear. The two most formidable long-term challengers and counterweights to Western power—Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin—were returned to office, perhaps indefinitely. The second might take some time to sort through and make sense of. Revelations about the practices of a British political consultancy, Cambridge Analytica, have put the […]

The United Nations has weathered the first phase of the Trump era, starting out 2018 in better shape than seemed possible a year ago. But U.S. relations with the U.N. could take a sharp and sudden turn for the worse quite soon. President Donald Trump took office promising to slash the U.N.’s budget and rip up international agreements. But he has often shied away from delivering on his direst threats. His ambassador in New York, Nikki Haley, has shaved significant sums off U.N. budgets but avoided more severe cuts that would halt the organization’s operations. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has […]

More than a year into the Trump administration, it is obvious that the White House has little interest in using the bully pulpit or U.S. economic clout to promote democracy and human rights around the world. With a few exceptions, such as Venezuela, Iran, Cambodia and Cuba, the administration rarely speaks about human rights abuses in other countries. As president, Donald Trump has held meetings with autocratic leaders whom the Obama administration refused to invite to the White House, like Thai junta leader Prayuth Chan-ocha and Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi. Trump has also praised some foreign leaders’ abuses of the […]

It is revealing of current American political obsessions that a recent book about the Marshall Plan’s relationship to the Cold War might be seen first and foremost as having lessons for today’s troubled ties between the United States and Russia. In that book, Benn Steil, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that with the Marshall Plan’s launch in 1947, the U.S. and the Soviet Union “became irrevocably committed to securing their respective spheres of influence.” Yet despite widespread concern about Russia, the most consequential great power struggle today is the one between the U.S. and China. […]

From the homeland security folks who respond to national disasters to the armed forces planning for hostile encounters with state or nonstate adversaries, the U.S. security community understands that climate change affects what they do, often profoundly. Despite the skeptics in the highest ranks of government, there is quiet and steady progress being made to integrate greater knowledge about climate change and its impacts into threat assessments, planning and training for future security contingencies. For more than 20 years, the defense community has been studying the environment and climate change, and their implications for how the U.S. prepares for military […]

This is an era of diplomatic bluster, bluff and buffering. The blusterers and bluffers get most of the attention. U.S. President Donald Trump is a master of the crude threat, encapsulated in his promise to unleash “fire and fury” on North Korea. Yet such rhetoric is now the common currency of international affairs. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has lambasted Trump as a “dotard.” Russian President Vladimir Putin boasts about his country’s unstoppable nuclear missiles. Foreign policy analysts, once accustomed to parsing the careful phrases of former U.S. President Barack Obama, now spend days trying to distinguish between meaningless […]