Briefing Archive

BELFAST, Northern Ireland—Sinn Fein’s historic victory in Northern Ireland’s elections last week, which made it the largest party in the state’s devolved parliament, is significant in numerous ways. For the first time in Northern Ireland’s 101-year history, a nationalist party is now dominant in a state that was specifically designed to ensure a pro-Union majority. But Sinn Fein is not simply a nationalist party. Having originated as the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, or IRA—the foremost paramilitary in the Northern Ireland conflict—it is a republican party that once supported armed struggle and vowed to destroy the very state […]

Chile’s recently inaugurated president, Gabriel Boric, campaigned on a platform emphasizing urgent reforms to shore up social rights in Chile, particularly health care, education and pensions, all of which were a focus of the protests that erupted across the country in October 2019. He also emphasized the need to establish a new relationship with Chile’s historically marginalized and oppressed Indigenous peoples, which represent around 12 percent of the country’s population. But to do so, he will have to overcome formidable obstacles, including the daunting prospects facing the Constitutional Convention that is currently drafting a new constitution which is central to […]

For everything else that makes Jair Bolsonaro unique as a Brazilian president, he is also the first in the country’s recent history to pursue an explicitly anti-environmental agenda. Since taking office in January 2019, he has promoted deforestation in the Amazon for the sake of economic development, criticized the Paris Agreement and used nationalist rhetoric to vehemently reject European criticism of his handling of the massive Amazon wildfires in 2019. Since U.S. President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, Bolsonaro has slightly moderated his discourse, but has changed little in terms of his policies. Moreover, in what could be […]

A recent investigative report by Reuters detailed the close ties between Philip Morris International and Igor Kesaev, the founder and until recently board chairman of Russia’s largest cigarette distributor, TC Megapolis. Relationships between Big Tobacco companies and wholesale distributors tend to raise eyebrows in the industry-watching community, given their long history of involvement in smuggling. But what sparked Reuters’ interest in Kesaev is that he also happens to own a company that produces arms for the Russian military, for which he was sanctioned by the European Union on April 8 and the United Kingdom on April 13. That, too, is […]

As China leveraged its state capitalist model to become a global superpower, it increasingly challenged the market-oriented basis of the liberal economic order founded by the United States and its allies 75 years ago. When this competition between the Chinese and Western economic systems gained steam in the 2010s, the main battlefield of international relations also began to shift from the classical realm of security to the normally “civilian” fields of trade, investment, technology and finance—in other words, from geopolitics to geoeconomics. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, military force is front and center once again, even before the United States […]

It has not even been three months since Russia invaded Ukraine, and it remains far from clear as to when and how this conflict will end. Nevertheless, a robust discussion is already underway over the potential impact of Moscow’s aggression on U.S. foreign policy toward China as well as on Washington’s broader strategic outlook. In the short term, it seems likely that the war will undercut U.S. efforts to rebalance its focus to the Asia-Pacific and strategic competition with China—ironically, because Ukrainian forces have performed far better than expected. Given the vast imbalance between Russia’s conventional military capabilities and those […]

Kenyans paid their final respects to former President Mwai Kibaki in a state funeral Friday that was attended by several African leaders. Kibaki, who served two terms as Kenya’s third president from 2002 to 2013, died last month at the age of 90. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Ethiopian President Sahle-Work Zewde and South Sudanese President Salva Kiir were among the thousands present at the service in Nyayo National Stadium in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital. Ramaphosa, who spoke at the funeral, eulogized Kibaki as a great statesman “in the mold in which we saw our own first president, President Nelson Mandela.” Similarly, Zewde praised Kibaki, calling him “a true […]

Indonesian President Joko Widodo won the country’s presidential election in 2014 by presenting himself in part as a democratic reformer, a man of humble origins who would fight graft and curtail the self-dealing elite politics that dominate Jakarta. If at the start of Jokowi’s first term there was some hope that he would follow through on his lofty campaign promises, that all seems like a distant memory today. For most of his second term since being reelected in 2018, he has proven to be the opposite of a reformer, undermining democracy, advancing insider politics in which political dynasties are blossoming, cracking […]