A man walks by a money exchange shop decorated with Chinese yuan banknotes and other countries currency banknotes, in Hong Kong, Aug. 6, 2019 (AP photo by Kin Cheung).

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR contributor Lavender Au and Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curate the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. In a further round of sanctions last week, the U.S. blacklisted virtually all of Iran’s financial sector. Perhaps in anticipation, Iran’s central bank announced that it had adopted the yuan, also known as the renminbi, as its main foreign reserve currency, replacing the U.S. dollar. With a 25-year strategic partnership with China under discussion, Iran will have a guaranteed market for its oil and gas exports, and with renminbi reserves, it will be able to […]

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer checks the documents of migrants who are on their way to apply for asylum in the United States, as they depart Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, Sept. 17, 2019 (AP photo by Fernando Llano).

Late last month, President Donald Trump told Congress that his administration plans to further slash the ceiling for refugee admissions during the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1, to 15,000 from an already historically low 18,000. The new limit is less than one-seventh the 110,000 slots that former President Barack Obama approved in 2016. As The New York Times put it, Trump has “virtually sealed off a pathway for the persecuted into the country and obliterated the once-robust American reputation as a sanctuary for the oppressed.” This comes as the number of refugees worldwide continues to grow. According to […]

Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden speaks in Cincinnati, Ohio, Oct. 12, 2020 (AP photo by Carolyn Kaster).

Since World Politics Review began publishing 14 years ago, we have refrained from political endorsements. This is in keeping with our mission, which states that we are “unbeholden to any partisan affiliation or party allegiance.” At the same time, nonpartisan does not mean disinterested. Over the past 14 years, we have published articles defending and supporting the foreign policy decisions of Republican and Democratic administrations alike. But in so doing, we have always referred to a certain vision of international politics and global order as our standard for judgment. As our mission statement also puts it, WPR seeks to strike […]

A woman sits overlooking Columbia University’s nearly empty campus, in New York, March 9, 2020 (AP photo by Mark Lennihan).

On university and college campuses, it’s been a back-to-school season like none other. COVID-19 outbreaks have forced entire residence halls and sports teams to quarantine, and, for some institutions, could prompt a premature end to the semester. Other campuses are ghost towns, as instruction has moved completely online. The pandemic has transformed teaching and learning, how research is conducted⎯the very rhythms of campus life. The contagion’s impact on international education has been especially acute. With closed borders, shuttered consulates and airline restrictions, study abroad and foreign exchange programs have been canceled, while the United States is all but off-limits for […]

Sweden’s then-foreign minister, Carl Bildt, at a press briefing in Berlin, Germany, Jan. 8, 2014 (AP photo by Markus Schreiber).

“On foreign and defense policy, absolutely, there is an ambition to be more united, and that vision is shared by all of the member countries,” says Carl Bildt, former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister, about the European Union. “Then in practice, as you’ve seen, there are divergences, and they are more or less clear in different areas.” Those divergences have frustrated advocates of a more forceful EU that operates on the world stage with “strategic autonomy,” a phrase Mr. Bildt finds “confuses more than it clarifies.” But he adds, as someone who has “been watching these things for a […]

Members of the House of Representatives walk down the steps of Capitol Hill after passing a coronavirus rescue package, Washington, March 27, 2020 (AP photo by Susan Walsh).

The global economy is gradually healing from the economic blows dealt by the coronavirus pandemic, but the recovery remains fragile and halting. Reduced trade is more a symptom than a cause of those trends—and what governments do in terms of additional fiscal stimulus will do far more to determine the shape of the recovery in the United States and other countries. Still, trade policy could be a factor, supporting or undermining the nascent recovery. President Donald Trump’s trade wars have already complicated the direct response to COVID-19 infections—by making imports of some critical products more expensive or harder to find—and […]

Former Defense Minister Bah N’Daw, right, is sworn in as transitional president, and Col. Assimi Goita, left, head of the junta that staged the August coup, is sworn as transitional vice president, in Bamako, Mali, Sept. 25, 2020 (AP photo).

The United States has mostly avoided in Africa the costly mistakes it made in Afghanistan and Iraq. If that is to continue, a good understanding of internal developments and issues in African countries will be crucial. Until now, the United States’ primary concern in Mali has been the jihadist insurgency in the northern and central parts of the country. A secondary priority was the promotion of democracy, which translated into an emphasis on regular, credible elections. With the military coup this summer—Mali’s second in less than a decade—and with mounting attacks by jihadists, that policy is not working. The current […]

Medical staff and nurses gather during a protest at La Paz hospital in Madrid, Spain, Oct. 5, 2020 (AP photo by Manu Fernandez).

The White House coronavirus cluster underscores a reality that no amount of happy talk can overcome. After more than nine months, 36 million cases and more than 1 million deaths worldwide, the COVID-19 pandemic is still raging. The infection rate in the United States and Europe is increasing, and a vaccine will not be widely available until well into 2021. It is not too early, however, to begin preparing for the next pandemic—and there will be a next one. Although it has become commonplace to describe COVID-19 as a once-in-a-century event, another pandemic could in fact be imminent. More than […]

Sweden's then-foreign minister, Carl Bildt, during a press conference in Kiev, Ukraine, March 5, 2014 (AP photo by Efrem Lukatsky).

Strategic autonomy has long been a recurring refrain for advocates of a more forceful European Union on the global stage. Upon taking office in December 2019, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that hers would be a “geopolitical commission.” The sense of urgency has only grown since then. Ongoing tensions with Russia over its role in Eastern Europe and new ones with Turkey in the Eastern Mediterranean have called attention to the threats the EU faces in its own neighborhood. Managing strained ties with the United States and defining the new terms of relations with the post-Brexit United […]

John Demers, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, announces charges against two British men who joined the Islamic State, at a press conference in Washington, Oct. 7, 2020 (Photo by Jim Watson via AP).

The extradition to the United States this week of two of the Islamic State’s most notorious members on terrorism charges was a poignant reminder of the dark and lingering legacy of the so-called caliphate. As much as the case marks a major milestone in America’s 20-year-long “global war on terror,” it is also a sad testament to how much remains unresolved about the status of thousands of foreign fighters who traveled to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State and are now in detention in various countries, along with the women and children they brought with them. In its […]

Then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, right, speaks with Jimmy Morales, Guatemala’s president-elect at the time, in Guatemala City, Jan. 14, 2016 (AP photo by Moises Castillo).

From the start of the 2016 election campaign, it was all too clear that a Donald Trump presidency would bring dramatic and destabilizing changes to U.S. foreign policy, especially in Latin America. Candidate Trump publicly pummeled the region, fulminating about “rapists” and drug traffickers crossing from Mexico, and vowing to build a wall to keep Central American migrants from “invading” the United States. The rhetoric was jarring in itself, but it was even more startling because it represented such a sharp departure from President Barack Obama’s administration, when even the most critical measures or sanctions came wrapped in diplomatic language. […]

Workers dig at a rare earth mine in Ganxian county in central China, Dec. 30, 2010 (Chinatopix photo via AP Images).

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR contributor Lavender Au and Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curate the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. The world is in little danger of running out of rare earth minerals, despite their name. They are neither hard to find, nor difficult to mine. But they are in demand, since they are used in components of popular high-tech devices like smartphones, as well as electric cars, wind turbines and even military hardware. Although researchers found a huge trove of rare earth metals in Japanese waters two years ago—enough to supply the world on […]

Mexican National Guard troops stand guard at Las Pilas dam in Camargo, Mexico, Sept. 10, 2020 (AP photo by Christian Chavez).

For nearly 75 years, the United States and Mexico have transferred giant quantities of water to each other each year as part of a system set up to ensure the equitable sharing of water sheds that straddle their border. The terms and obligations are clearly laid out in a treaty the two sides signed in 1944: The U.S. sends 489 billion gallons of water southward via the Colorado River, and Mexico allocates 114 billion gallons northward, from the Rio Grande and the Rio Conchos. To deal with the technical aspects of this water exchange and settle any issues, the two […]

The Dave Johnson coal-fired power plant in Glenrock, Wyoming, July 27, 2018 (AP photo by J. David Ake).

All the interruptions, taunts and empty bombast from President Donald Trump during his first debate with Joe Biden left little room for actual discussion of major issues, from the coronavirus pandemic to U.S. foreign policy. Lost especially amid all the noise was climate change, which looms as an existential threat to life in this century. Climate change was only briefly mentioned in last month’s debate, when it was peculiarly framed. For a challenge this important, the battle lines were oddly drawn around questions of extremism. Trump, as unserious as ever, boasted vaguely about the quality of America’s “beautiful” and “crystal […]

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate, speaks at United Food & Commercial Workers Union Local 951 in Grand Rapids, Mich., Oct. 2, 2020 (AP photo by Andrew Harnik).

Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Edward Alden is filling in for Kimberly Ann Elliott, who will return next week. The latest opinion polls in the United States show former Vice President Joe Biden with what looks like a commanding lead over a COVID-stricken President Donald Trump, less than a month away from the presidential election on Nov. 3. If Biden can sustain that lead and win a decisive victory, the country would avoid the damage of a long and contested ballot count that would leave America even more internally divided. For much of the rest of the world, it would rekindle […]

A woman walks past American, United Arab Emirates, Israeli and Bahraini flags on the Peace Bridge in Netanya, Israel, Sept. 14, 2020 (AP photo by Ariel Schalit).

The Middle East is “a place that is both remarkably impervious to change…and at the same time always sort of on the verge of an explosion, where you always think that something quite catastrophic could happen,” says Robert Malley, president and CEO of International Crisis Group and a former special adviser on the region to former President Barack Obama. This volatility grows out of the tension between popular demands for greater responsiveness and accountability from governments, especially since the 2011 uprisings, and the “sclerotic nature…of the Middle East system,” Malley explains. “On the one hand, it’s the stagnation that leads […]

World leaders attend a ceremony during the NATO Leaders Meeting in Watford, U.K., Dec. 4, 2019 (AP photo by Francisco Seco).

Documenting the demise of the liberal international order has become a growth industry in the foreign policy sector. In a terrific new book, “A World Safe for Democracy,” G. John Ikenberry, the premier analyst of liberal internationalism, contends that reports of its death are greatly exaggerated. The rules-based, international system may be in crisis, but its strategic and normative logic is as compelling as ever. Ikenberry, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, has written extensively on this topic before, but his new book is his most impressive work to date. He refutes the critiques of both […]

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