Late last month, President Donald Trump told Congress that his administration plans to further slash the ceiling for refugee admissions during the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1, to 15,000 from an already historically low 18,000. The new limit is less than one-seventh the 110,000 slots that former President Barack Obama approved in 2016. As The New York Times put it, Trump has “virtually sealed off a pathway for the persecuted into the country and obliterated the once-robust American reputation as a sanctuary for the oppressed.” This comes as the number of refugees worldwide continues to grow. According to [...]
Strategic autonomy has long been a recurring refrain for advocates of a more forceful European Union on the global stage. Upon taking office in December 2019, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that hers would be a “geopolitical commission.” The sense of urgency has only grown since then. Ongoing tensions with Russia over its role in Eastern Europe and new ones with Turkey in the Eastern Mediterranean have called attention to the threats the EU faces in its own neighborhood. Managing strained ties with the United States and defining the new terms of relations with the post-Brexit United [...]
With every major religion in the world represented, and political systems that range from relatively open democracies to authoritarian one-party states, Southeast Asia is one of the most spectacularly diverse regions in the world. It stretches from the highlands of northern Myanmar to the beaches of southern Thailand and the Philippines, and includes low-income economies like Laos and Cambodia, as well as Singapore, one of the wealthiest places in the world on a per capita basis. Each of the 11 countries in this multifarious region, though, face a common foreign policy challenge: how to deal with the political and economic [...]
