United States Archive

For the past four years, the United States has been trending, as they say about social media, and not in a good way. It began with a presidential campaign in which Donald Trump, the eventual winner, called Mexicans rapists and showered playground insults on his Republican rivals. For most of the postwar period, an underrated secret of American power has been to avoid this kind of spotlight. It made other countries and their problems, and not the United States itself, the focus of global attention: human rights here, massacres there, famines, rebellions, coups and more. The global diet of news […]

The past two weeks may have marked a turning point in American civil-military relations. President Donald Trump threatened to deploy active-duty troops to subdue domestic political protests; the secretary of defense suggested governors should “dominate the battlespace” of major U.S. cities, only to later walk back his remarks; and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, the country’s highest-ranking military officer, appeared alongside Trump at a photo-op near the White House after National Guard troops had helped forcibly clear the area of protesters. Milley later apologized, saying he “should not have been there.” Although these events […]

It is too soon to tell how the COVID-19 pandemic will affect international security. Whether it will provide opportunities for prolonged peace or create conditions for new rivalries and disputes depends on how long the pandemic lasts, how the world moves forward from bungled initial responses and how quickly countries recover from the virus’s societal and economic fallout. But already, the pandemic is exposing and accelerating trends that have made the world more vulnerable to international conflict. That may be surprising, since before the outbreak, most statistics indicated that, on the whole, the world had never been better. People were […]

The global, rules-based trading system that the United States helped to create after World War II is in deep trouble. President Donald Trump had already spent the past three years sparking trade wars and undermining the World Trade Organization. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic struck, hammering economies and sharply reducing trade flows worldwide. Panicked governments, including in Washington, have imposed export restrictions on critical medical supplies and, in some cases, food. To make things even worse, the White House has blocked the normal process for settling trade disputes, just when it is needed most. Because of the concerns about hosting large […]

The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other black Americans by police, and the sustained protests in their wake, present a test for the United States both at home and abroad. They underscore the structural racism that permeates American society and how far the nation remains from delivering on the Constitution’s promise of equal rights and justice for all. Globally, they threaten America’s longstanding, if uneven, role as the world’s leading champion of universal human rights. The success of the Black Lives Matter movement is critical, not only to achieve a more perfect union at home, but also to […]

In this week’s editors’ discussion on Trend Lines, WPR’s Judah Grunstein, Freddy Deknatel and Prachi Vidwans talk about the protests against police brutality and systemic racism in the United States and Europe, and the issues and grievances driving them. They also discuss what these movements share in common and what distinguishes them, the central role played by commemorative statues as legacies of historical racism, and the particular challenge the U.S. protests pose for civil-military relations. Listen: Download: MP3 Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | Spotify Relevant Articles on WPR:America’s Struggle for Racial Justice Is a Barrier—and a Bridge—to the WorldAmerica […]

It may be overshadowed by everything else roiling the United States right now. But the 82-page legal brief filed Wednesday rebuking the Trump administration for its controversial motion to dismiss federal perjury charges against former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn matters immensely for the future of American democracy. John Gleeson, a retired federal judge appointed to evaluate the government’s highly unusual move, argued that Justice Department prosecutors tried to conceal the real reasons for dropping the charges against Flynn last month and that its attempt to wipe Flynn’s record clean was a “gross abuse of prosecutorial power.” There […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. The coronavirus pandemic has brought tensions between the United States and China to a boiling point. But before the global health crisis, relations between Washington and Beijing were already heated on the tech front. The Trump administration’s latest moves in its campaign to stymie Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei have only stoked this “tech war.” Last month, the Commerce Department imposed new restrictions on Huawei that prevent the firm and its suppliers from using American technology and software. In response, […]

“We are living through a moment in which diplomacy as a tool of promoting American interests … is even more important than ever,” says William J. Burns, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former deputy secretary of state. “And yet, over the three and a half decades that I served as a professional diplomat, I’ve never seen a moment when it’s been more adrift.” Ambassador Burns joined WPR’s Trend Lines podcast this week to discuss the damage President Donald Trump has done to U.S. diplomacy and how to repair it. Over the course of a 45-minute interview, […]

In many ways, the foundations of American foreign policy have withstood President Donald Trump’s efforts to fundamentally remake them since taking office in January 2017. But if there is one area where Trump has had a clear and consistent impact, it is on American diplomacy. A hollowed-out State Department, a chaotic policy process and Trump’s transactional approach to foreign policy have undermined ties with America’s closest allies and partners, while creating uncertainty and confusion for both partners and adversaries. For this week’s interview on Trend Lines, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, is joined by William J. Burns to discuss the damage […]

A month ago, in a column about how divisions in America would undermine the country’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, I mentioned the U.S. soldiers who in World War II liberated the South of France as well as Nazi-occupied Belgium, where my father spent the war. It is with some embarrassment that I revisit that reference to include a mention of how those soldiers, too, were divided—along the lines of race, reflecting the segregation of much of American society at the time. My failure to mention that was not due to a lack of knowledge, but simply the result of […]

Editor’s Note: Guest columnists Neil Bhatiya and Eric Lorber are filling in for Kimberly Ann Elliott, who will be back next week. At the end of May, responding to efforts by Beijing to decisively assert control in Hong Kong, the Trump administration declared that it no longer recognized the city as sufficiently autonomous to enjoy special economic and financial privileges under U.S. law. The decertification sets the stage for a range of measures the United States could pursue, some of which could be economically damaging to Hong Kong’s status as a global financial hub. While China’s violations of the agreed-upon […]

Pity the U.S. officials in charge of planning this year’s Group of 7 summit. President Donald Trump initially planned to convene the annual summit at his own private golf resort in Miami. When this bit of self-dealing elicited bipartisan blowback, he shifted the site of the meeting, originally scheduled for this week, to Camp David. Then COVID-19 intervened, and the White House announced plans for a virtual summit, only to have Trump propose on May 20 that the leaders would gather in person after all. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel demurred, the peeved president pivoted again. On May 30, without […]

In this week’s editors’ discussion on Trend Lines, WPR’s Judah Grunstein, Freddy Deknatel and Prachi Vidwans talk about the demonstrations in cities across the U.S. to protest police killings of black Americans, the militarized response to the protests, and the international dimensions of both racial injustice in America and the popular movements to end it. Listen: Download: MP3Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | Spotify Relevant Articles on WPR:America Is in Crisis Because It Won’t Confront Its Grave Racial DivideThe Looming American NightmareAfter Years of Turmoil, There Is Hope for Stability and Reform in LesothoThe Importance of Gender Inclusion in COVID-19 […]

It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment when this feeling of suffocation began. For so many born and raised here in Washington, D.C., it probably began early in life when their parents sat them down for “the talk,” about how to comport themselves safely during encounters with the police. But for me, the air in Washington became almost unbreathable on Monday when I saw Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, striding along Lafayette Square in his battle fatigues as helicopters in the sky above my neighborhood roared westward across Capitol Hill to the […]

In late January, President Donald Trump announced the formation of a Coronavirus Task Force, made up of 12 senior officials who would be responsible for leading the U.S. response to COVID-19. All were men. On Feb. 29, Vice President Mike Pence, the head of the task force, posted a now infamous photo to his Twitter account of a “very productive meeting,” with more than a dozen men and no women sitting around a table in the White House’s Situation Room. By early March, two women had been appointed to the team: Deborah Birx, who took the high-profile role of response […]

One sweltering night some years ago, well after I had finished eating dinner, I received an urgent knock on my front door. I was spending a summer in Hanoi, and had just moved into an apartment in a quiet, residential area. My late-night visitor turned out to be a young Vietnamese police officer in uniform. As I often did in such encounters, I tried to keep the interaction as brief as possible by acting confused and answering his questions in English. But then, a middle-aged woman, whom I recognized from the neighborhood, emerged from the shadows and said, “He speaks […]