United States Archive

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 […]

As a young boy in an internationally minded African American family in the Washington D.C. of the 1960s, I avidly collected stamps from other countries and visited the city’s embassies for the kinds of promotional publications countries put out about life back home in their societies in the pre-internet age. One of those embassies represented Moscow. It was the height of the Cold War, not many years after the famous 1956 remarks by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, in which he vowed to “bury” the United States and its Western allies. Less well remembered, during a visit to Los Angeles three […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo criticized China after police in Hong Kong barred an annual vigil in the city scheduled to mark the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. “If there is any doubt about Beijing’s intent,” he wrote on Twitter, “it is to deny Hong Kongers a voice and a choice, making them the same as mainlanders.” Hong Kong authorities cited public health concerns due to the coronavirus pandemic to justify banning the event, […]

Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Edward Alden is filling in for Kimberly Ann Elliott, who will be back next week. The first rule when you find yourself stuck down a hole is to stop digging. After more than three years of the Trump administration’s go-it-alone “America First” strategy, the United States now finds itself in a very deep hole indeed. Trump has alienated once-close allies in Europe, Japan, Canada and Mexico by imposing tariffs on their exports to the U.S. and threatening more. His administration has pulled out of major international agreements like the Iran nuclear agreement and the Paris climate […]

Fifteen years ago this September, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick famously challenged the People’s Republic of China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system. For too long, he suggested, China had been freeriding on the stable, open world created by the United States and its Western allies, while failing to internalize and embrace some of its most important norms and standards of conduct. It was time, Zoellick argued, for China to become a custodian of the rules-based international order, rather than a mere participant or bystander. The premise behind Zoellick’s argument was the “Spiderman rule”: […]

President Donald Trump’s recent decision to withdraw from the 1992 Open Skies Treaty, which has helped keep the post-Cold War peace, raises the long-term risk of armed conflict in Europe. While unfortunate, abandoning this 34-nation confidence-building measure is consistent with Trump’s years-long policy of confidence-demolition. First proposed by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1955 and negotiated under the George H.W. Bush administration, Open Skies allows signatories, including the United States and Russia, to fly unarmed observation aircraft over one another’s territory. This helps build a measure of transparency and trust regarding each countries’ military forces and activities, thereby enhancing stability and […]