U.S. President Barack Obama and other leaders of the Trans-Pacific Partnership countries at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Manila, Philippines, Nov. 18, 2015 (AP photo by Susan Walsh).

There is no other area of global governance—not climate change, not management of the oceans, not monetary policy, not peacekeeping—in which the nations of the world have agreed to cooperate more closely than on the rules governing international trade. But over the past half-century, each step toward greater trade cooperation has been a bit harder than the last. The fate of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement—the recently concluded mega-regional deal linking the United States, Japan and 10 other Pacific Rim countries—will likely decide whether the historic project of building better global rules for trade continues, or collapses under its […]

Secretary of State John Kerry arrives to brief the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Washington, Oct. 27, 2015 (AP photo by Cliff Owen).

After World War II, the United States had to learn how to be a global power. To do this it drew foreign policy and national security expertise from among university academics, civil service workers, senior policymakers, private sector specialists, some influential members of Congress and journalists from major national media. After a few years of debate, the foundational “big idea” for America’s Cold War strategy came from George Kennan, a career State Department official and a top expert on the Soviet Union and Russian history. Kennan argued that rather than bear the costs and risks of direct confrontation with Moscow, […]

Argentine President-elect Mauricio Macri at the botanical gardens, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Dec. 2, 2015 (AP photo by Ricardo Mazalan).

When Venezuela’s charismatic revolutionary, the late Hugo Chavez, won the presidential election in his country for the first time in 1998, he launched a new political era in Latin America. For the next 17 years, leftist politicians—many of them emerging from humble beginnings, as Chavez had—rose to power through democratic means in a region where that path had seldom been successful for the left or the poor. Chavez’s model of modified socialist economics and modified democratic governance soon spread to a number of countries and became the dominant political phenomenon of the 21st century in Latin America. That period of […]

President Barack Obama, French President Francois Hollande and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo at the Bataclan theater, Paris, Nov. 30, 2015 (AP photo by Evan Vucci).

A somber weariness has settled in across Western democracies in the aftermath of the Paris attacks. Defeating and destroying the so-called Islamic State with military force has won broader support. But most realize that the challenge will require a complex set of policy responses, far beyond aerial bombardments to liberate territory controlled by the group in Syria and Iraq. Although there is not yet any consensus about what such a long-term strategy should look like, some new ideas are emerging. To begin with, the old debate over how to distinguish between the threat posed by al-Qaida and the newer one […]

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