United States Archive

In this week’s editors’ discussion episode of the Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief Judah Grunstein, managing editor Frederick Deknatel and associate editor Elliot Waldman talk about the latest repercussions of Trump’s pressure campaign on Iran and trade war with China, both of which escalated this week. They also take a look at some important election-related developments in South Africa, Thailand and Turkey. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free […]

When America’s founding fathers gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to design a political system for their young nation, national security was not a high priority. Other than Britain, there were no major enemies nearby, and the founders undoubtedly thought—incorrectly as it turned out—that the British had learned that fighting the feisty Americans was more trouble than it was worth. What did concern the framers of the Constitution was protecting the liberty of American citizens. To do that, and to avoid a potentially dangerous concentration of power in one branch of government, they created a system of checks and balances with […]

Exactly one year after the Trump administration pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, tensions between Washington and Tehran are escalating sharply amid confusion about what, exactly, the U.S. sees as its end goal. For Iran, uncertainty about what President Donald Trump wants to achieve and what he is prepared to do to get there presents a menu of risky choices. On Wednesday, Iran announced it was withdrawing from parts of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, the initially seven-nation agreement struck in 2015 curbing Iran’s nuclear program that was central to former President Barack Obama’s foreign policy. […]

The 2020 U.S. presidential election is still a year and a half away, but the debate over the future of American foreign policy is already taking shape. For now, that debate is primarily taking place among foreign policy experts, with a few of the Democratic presidential hopefuls also offering outlines of their priorities for American engagement with the world. But a report published this week by the Center for American Progress unintentionally raises an interesting question: Is expert opinion among the foreign policy elite driving that debate, or is it the popular attitudes of everyday Americans? If I say the […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. The United States has offered its harshest assessment yet of the mass detention of Uighur Muslims in China’s western Xinjiang autonomous region. Speaking at a press briefing Friday, Randall Schriver, the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, said China is “using the security forces for mass imprisonment of Chinese Muslims in concentration camps.” Pressed on his use of the term “concentration camps,” Schriver defended it as “appropriate.” He also said that “at least a million but likely […]

The World Trade Organization recently released a decision that it surely would have preferred to avoid. Ukraine had challenged restrictions on its exports imposed by Russia in the wake of its 2014 takeover of Crimea. The Russian government claimed that an exception to international trade rules allowed it alone to decide when trade restrictions are “necessary” for national security reasons. Moscow argued that the WTO should have no role in adjudicating the dispute. Since the WTO had never previously ruled on the national security justifications for trade restrictions, the Russia-Ukraine case is important in its own right. But lurking behind […]

The United States and Turkey have engaged in extensive diplomacy for over a year and a half now to try and resolve the festering dispute over the Turkish government’s decision to buy the advanced S-400 missile defense system from Russia. President Donald Trump and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have spoken about it personally several times, including in a phone call late last month. But the rift between the two is still too great to bridge. How this standoff is resolved, if at all, could permanently alter the trajectory of U.S.-Turkey relations, and by extension, Turkey’s role in NATO and its […]

The pursuit of an open world, I wrote last week, animated U.S. postwar planning during President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. The United States sought an international order based on collective security, nondiscriminatory commerce and political self-determination, governed by multilateral institutions. As an objective that promised to balance national sovereignty with common rules of coexistence, it was deeply in U.S. national interests. That same vision has never been more relevant than it is today, when the defining global struggle pits defenders of openness against forces of closure. Preserving an open world—as scholars Mira Rapp-Hooper and Rebecca Friedman Lissner have recently argued—should […]

The United States, especially the American military, hates counterinsurgency. It is ethically and politically difficult, at times impossibly so. To do it, American troops and government officials must prod a problematic ally to undertake deep reforms while facing off against an often ruthless enemy. Terrorism, assassination, subversion and sabotage are persistent and more common than the type of pitched but conventional battles that the U.S. military prefers, in which it can assert its technological advantages. Whenever the United States becomes involved in counterinsurgency, it eventually wishes that it hadn’t. As Judah Grunstein wrote this week, the recent counterinsurgency campaigns in […]

In this week’s editors’ discussion episode of the Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief Judah Grunstein, managing editor Frederick Deknatel and associate editor Elliot Waldman talk about the challenges facing Japan as a new emperor ascends to the Chrysanthemum Throne, as well as the burgeoning debate among Democratic Party presidential candidates over America’s Middle East policy as they vie for the role of challenging President Donald Trump in 2020. The editors also discuss the ongoing crisis in Venezuela and what it says about the Trump administration’s stance on regime change. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what […]

In mid-April, a panel of judges at the International Criminal Court rejected Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s request to open an investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity that may have been committed during the long U.S. war in Afghanistan. Ahead of the decision, the Trump administration had waged an aggressive campaign against the case, which threatened to reveal atrocities committed by U.S. forces, including American troops and Central Intelligence Agency officials. Though the ICC judges acknowledged that war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed in Afghanistan, they determined that a successful investigation was not feasible. Essentially, they acknowledged […]

The surprise reappearance of the leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in a recently recorded video seems like a throwback to the mid-2000s. The most visible difference from the video recordings Osama bin Laden used then to remind al-Qaida followers he was still alive—and persuade them he was still relevant—is that al-Baghdadi, who was last seen in 2014, is seated on the floor of what seems like a furnished living room, rather than a cave. In other ways, too, the defeat of the Islamic State as a self-declared caliphate and its return as a transnational terrorist network would […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Chinese and American trade negotiators are meeting in Beijing this week, with another round of talks scheduled for next week in Washington. Negotiators appear to be closing in on a deal to end the trade war that has been the focal point of tensions between the world’s two largest economies since last summer, but key details have yet to be finalized. That has not stopped some observers from envisioning how a prospective U.S.-China agreement will affect the international trading […]