Column Archive

It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment when this feeling of suffocation began. For so many born and raised here in Washington, D.C., it probably began early in life when their parents sat them down for “the talk,” about how to comport themselves safely during encounters with the police. But for me, the air in Washington became almost unbreathable on Monday when I saw Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, striding along Lafayette Square in his battle fatigues as helicopters in the sky above my neighborhood roared westward across Capitol Hill to the […]

Long before the upheaval of the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump’s ideas for hosting this year’s summit of the Group of Seven in the United States had created turmoil and controversy. His plans have only gotten more disruptive and divisive in recent days. The meeting of the club of major industrialized nations was supposed to happen on June 10, but the guest list, date and format of the summit are all still undecided. Instead of a showcase for the president and the country, America’s turn to hold the annual gathering of the G-7 has so far turned into another series […]

As a young boy in an internationally minded African American family in the Washington D.C. of the 1960s, I avidly collected stamps from other countries and visited the city’s embassies for the kinds of promotional publications countries put out about life back home in their societies in the pre-internet age. One of those embassies represented Moscow. It was the height of the Cold War, not many years after the famous 1956 remarks by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, in which he vowed to “bury” the United States and its Western allies. Less well remembered, during a visit to Los Angeles three […]

Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Edward Alden is filling in for Kimberly Ann Elliott, who will be back next week. The first rule when you find yourself stuck down a hole is to stop digging. After more than three years of the Trump administration’s go-it-alone “America First” strategy, the United States now finds itself in a very deep hole indeed. Trump has alienated once-close allies in Europe, Japan, Canada and Mexico by imposing tariffs on their exports to the U.S. and threatening more. His administration has pulled out of major international agreements like the Iran nuclear agreement and the Paris climate […]

Fifteen years ago this September, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick famously challenged the People’s Republic of China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system. For too long, he suggested, China had been freeriding on the stable, open world created by the United States and its Western allies, while failing to internalize and embrace some of its most important norms and standards of conduct. It was time, Zoellick argued, for China to become a custodian of the rules-based international order, rather than a mere participant or bystander. The premise behind Zoellick’s argument was the “Spiderman rule”: […]