Briefing Archive

Joao Lourenco marked his first anniversary as Angola’s president with his address at the United Nations General Assembly in New York late last month, promoting a “new Angola.” He was riding high, having just consolidated his power base at the party congress for his People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or MPLA, in Luanda, where he stood unopposed and secured 98 percent of the votes, formally replacing Jose Eduardo dos Santos as party leader. Dos Santos’ nearly four-decade presidency came to an end last year when he didn’t stand for re-election, stepping aside in favor of his chosen successor. […]

Last month, the European Parliament took the unusual step of formally censuring a member state, voting by a wide margin to condemn Hungary under far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban as a “systemic threat to the rule of law” and trigger the Article 7 process of the Lisbon Treaty that could suspend its EU voting rights. The vote followed a report from the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs warning that the Hungarian government was abusing the rights of asylum-seekers, migrants and women and restricting freedom of the press, while it permitted corruption and suffered from a […]

CALGARY, Canada—After years of campaign promises, delays and contentious Senate debates, marijuana legalization is finally coming to Canada on Oct. 17. The milestone will make Canada the second country—and the largest—to legalize the drug for recreational use; Uruguay made the same move in 2013. It therefore offers unique opportunities for other countries to learn from the resulting triumphs and pitfalls. The Cannabis Act was originally tabled in the spring of 2017 with the goal of legalization by Canada Day—July 1—of this year. Demands for more research input and coordination with the various levels of government and industry stakeholders slowed the […]

In the wake of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2014, the United States embarked on a two-pronged policy of sanctions and isolation to punish Moscow. At the time, some Russian analysts predicted it would be impossible to isolate Russia, and that those seeking to do so would only isolate themselves. That has proven to be right in more respects than those analysts and the Kremlin may have realized. While Russia has suffered significant economic harm from the U.S.-led international sanctions regime—a collapse in the ruble, near stagnant GDP growth, exclusion from international credit markets—it has nonetheless expanded its exports, deepened […]

In Liberia, one of the surest signs that a news story has captured the attention of the general public is when someone starts singing about it on the radio. In August 2014, the Auto-Tune-heavy hit “Ebola in Town,” by Samuel “Shadow” Morgan and Edwin “D-12” Tweh, caught fire right around the time the World Health Organization began describing the West African epidemic as an international emergency. During the most recent presidential campaigns, in 2011 and 2017, the candidates’ catchiest theme songs saturated the airwaves as Election Day approached. Recently, to the consternation of President George Weah, a new topical jam […]

Despite recent statements from President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, that things are back to “normal” after their response to what they described as an “attempted coup,” there is nothing normal about what’s happening in Nicaragua. Following the release of a United Nations report detailing the suppression and criminalization of protests that began in April, there have been further efforts to silence government critics. In late August, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a blistering report on the political violence in Nicaragua that has killed more than 300 people and […]

The disappearance of the prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has focused much attention in Washington, D.C., where Khashoggi had been living in self-imposed exile, on the stream of bad news coming out of Saudi Arabia in recent months. Ever since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman returned from a month-long trip abroad in March and April, with stops in Egypt, the United Kingdom, the United States, France and Spain, a succession of developments have cast serious doubt on the credibility of the reform narrative the crown prince and his entourage were so energetically pushing, to often eager applause. Given the opaque […]

As American power wanes in absolute and relative terms, the earnest officials who have designed and led U.S. foreign assistance programs are working hard to sustain and even strengthen this key component of America’s international engagement. It’s a daunting task, given the pressures to reduce funding, stop nation-building and comply with a commander-in-chief who devalues their work and has cut across the bow to eliminate categories of countries where needs and U.S. interests may be greatest. In June, officials from the Defense and State Departments and the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, released their first-ever interagency Stabilization Assistance […]

Last week, Chile’s president, Sebastian Pinera, was at the White House for a meeting with President Donald Trump. During a photo-op in the oval office, Pinera held up a printout of the American flag. Outlining one white star and a pair of red and white stripes, he had managed to draw a smaller, Chilean flag inside of it. “Chile is at the heart of the United States,” Pinera explained, with a smile. “And the best proof of this: This is the American flag, and there is a Chilean flag right at the very heart of the US flag.” It was […]

On Sept. 30, residents of Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost prefecture, were busy with an almost ritualistic activity this time of year: cleaning up after a tropical storm. Typhoon Trami had struck the day before, causing dozens of injuries, power outages and transportation disruptions. But this year, Okinawans had something else on their minds beyond the recovery efforts. They were preparing to go to the polls to elect their next governor. The election, initially scheduled for November, had been moved up due to the death of Gov. Takeshi Onaga in August, from pancreatic cancer. Onaga was a staunch opponent of a contentious […]

A little more than a year after the launch of its new South Asia strategy, the Trump administration—without officially announcing a change in approach—appears to have refocused much of its efforts in Afghanistan around a long-elusive peace process. Gen. John Nicholson, the departing top military commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, backed up the Afghan government’s extended cease-fire with the Taliban during the Eid al-Fitr holiday in June, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently appointed former Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad as a new special envoy tasked with leading reconciliation efforts. But despite that summer cease-fire and some preliminary […]

On Sept. 26, in a tense, crowded courtroom in Guatemala City, a three-judge panel ruled unanimously that genocide and crimes against humanity occurred in the Maya-Ixil region of northern Guatemala in 1982 and 1983, at the height of the country’s civil war. But in a split 2-1 vote, the court determined that the defendant, retired Gen. Jose Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez, did not bear criminal responsibility for the crimes and acquitted him on all charges. Ixil witnesses who testified during the trial described the court’s ruling as “bittersweet” and vowed to continue their fight for justice. This was the second acquittal […]

Last month, Turkey and Russia, largely on opposites sides of the Syrian civil war, struck an 11th-hour deal to prevent a military assault by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces on the last remaining rebel stronghold of Idlib in northwestern Syria. While the agreement, which was reached in the Russian Black Sea resort town of Sochi, won’t end the Syrian conflict, it buys some time to attempt to find a sustainable resolution in Idlib, where there are some 30,000 rebel fighters, perhaps a third of them al-Qaida-linked extremists. But if all things fail, Russian President Vladimir Putin has crafted the agreement in […]