It’s common knowledge that the possibility of a second term for former U.S. President Donald Trump is sending shivers up the spines of Washington’s NATO allies. But the prospect of a second Trump presidency is also heightening anxieties among U.S. allies in Asia, which have also relied on U.S. security assurances for decades.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump upended what was once a relatively staid global economic and trade system. For all of the upheaval he created, though, Trump left office with only one clear-cut accomplishment: an updated NAFTA deal. And even as Trump sowed chaos in America’s trade relationships, most of the world reinforced its commitment to trade liberalization.
How durable are alliances? And how believable are alliance commitments? Stated differently, if the U.S. under Donald Trump or another president ends up being an unreliable ally when push comes to shove, would it be consistent with what we should have expected all along? It turns out these are surprisingly difficult questions to answer.
President Joe Biden took office with an ambitious U.S. foreign policy agenda summed up by his favorite campaign tagline: “America is back.” Above all, that meant repairing the damage done to America’s global standing by his predecessor, former President Donald Trump.
The Best International Feature Film category at the Academy Awards is supposed to help Hollywood forge closer ties with foreign film industries. But flaws in the category’s rules and process have not only have made it highly politicized and often unfair, but have also prevented it from fulfilling its purpose.
Amid the debates over U.S. President Joe Biden’s foreign policy, one thing is clear: Biden is an internationalist trying to keep the U.S. engaged globally actor. But should he be? More broadly, is it the United States’ place to be highly engaged in the world? Would the U.S. and the world be better off if Washington sat some things out?
In April 2021, Cuba experienced a watershed moment when Miguel Diaz-Canel became the leader of the Cuban Communist Party, completing a political transition that began three years earlier when Diaz-Canel was inaugurated as president. Now, for the first time since the 1959 revolution, a Castro leads neither the country nor the party, making way for a new generation of leaders to chart the island nation’s path forward.
Is U.S. President Joe Biden too focused on defending democracy, as some observers have claimed recently? One can argue that the Biden administration is too maximalist in its aims, even to the point of trying to do too much. But is it truly due to a hyper-focus on the defense of democracy, both at home and abroad?
One of the most important elections of the year, especially for the United States, will be in Mexico, where the next president will have to navigate not only the country’s internal problems, but also manage ties with Washington and deal with the increasingly negative attention the country receives north of the border.