Column Archive

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread, countries should be using every available tool to expand production of critical medical supplies and cooperating to avoid complete chaos. But instead, they are increasingly fighting over pieces of a too-small pie and going it alone. With dire, heartbreaking shortages of personal protective equipment for doctors and nurses and ventilators for the desperately ill, some governments have responded by restricting their exports. A few major grain exporters have begun restricting food exports. More inexplicably, some countries continue to collect duties on imports of essential medical supplies, though that is finally starting to change. […]

As the world grapples with COVID-19, it cannot afford to ignore an even more serious global emergency that will persist long after the pandemic has passed: climate change. Last month, the United Nations issued a dire multiagency report warning that the world is “way off track” on its commitments to cut emissions under the Paris Agreement. Without dramatic and sustained emissions reductions, higher atmospheric and marine temperatures will bring more deadly heat waves, catastrophic storms, rising seas, food insecurity, health crises and mass displacement. Although emissions have dropped sharply since January with the coronavirus pandemic virtually shutting down entire economies […]

The surprising decision this week by Russian oil giant Rosneft to pull out of Venezuela provides a textbook study of the intricacies of Russia’s global energy wars. It was only six months ago that Russia’s majority state-owned oil company was poised to take over its nationalized counterpart in Venezuela, PDVSA, in a bid to insulate President Nicolas Maduro’s regime from increasingly harsh U.S. sanctions. Now, it looks like Rosneft may be buckling under the pressures of a coronavirus-induced slump in oil demand, a price war with Saudi Arabia and continued American sanctions. Or, at least, that’s how it looks on […]

Political leaders around the world have responded to the coronavirus pandemic in a wide variety of ways. Some are strictly adhering to the advice of epidemiologists, like the presidents of South Korea and Taiwan. Others are brazenly launching autocratic power grabs, in the case of Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban. Still others are to trying to deny reality itself, as in Turkmenistan, where the government has banned the word “coronavirus.” In Latin America, the responses from national leaders have ranged from buffoonish irresponsibility to stern action. The region is a good place to try to identify what it is about […]

Rather than introducing a new world order, the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are reinforcing recent trends of strategic competition among the United States, Europe and China. As the potential magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic became clear in March, there was a lot of immediate speculation about just what its impact would be. Many of those initial predictions announced a radically transformed world order. A triumphant China, some declared, would capitalize on its success in containing the outbreak to emerge as the new global leader. A closer look at the subsequent responses to the pandemic by governments around the world […]