Q & A Archive

Last month, China recalled its ambassador to Lithuania and demanded that Vilnius do the same in response to Lithuania’s plans to establish reciprocal diplomatic offices with Taiwan. Despite the pressure from Beijing, the Lithuanian government has refused to back down in its plans to deepen relations with Taipei. This week on the Trend Lines podcast this week, Edward Lucas, a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and a former senior editor at The Economist, joined WPR’s Elliot Waldman to discuss the history and context behind the strong anti-authoritarian streak in Lithuania’s foreign policy. Listen to the […]

The government of Lithuania caused a stir this summer when it announced that it would allow Taiwan to open a de facto embassy in the capital, Vilnius, with plans to open a reciprocal Lithuanian representative office in Taipei. China responded by withdrawing its ambassador to Vilnius and demanding that Lithuania do the same. And in May, the Lithuanian parliament passed a resolution labeling China’s treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang as a “genocide.” China is not the only authoritarian power that Lithuania is facing off with. Vilnius hosts the Belarusian opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who fled her home country last […]

According to a report released last week, 2020 was the deadliest year on record for environmental and land rights activists around the world. The human rights organization Global Witness recorded 227 killings of such activists, a tally that it said was almost certainly an undercount.  As the report makes clear, the victims were most often killed while resisting the activities of extractive industries on their land: logging, mining, the clearing of forests for agribusiness and other environmentally destructive activities that fuel the climate crisis. Of the confirmed lethal attacks, the highest number was recorded in Colombia, and nearly three-fourths of […]

Almost everything about the conventional narrative of the history of Europe’s Age of Exploration and Empire is wrong, particularly where it concerns the role of Africa and Africans. Africa was a central focus of the early period of European exploration in the late 15th century and continued to be central to the plantation economies established in the European colonies of the Americas. And without the labor of enslaved Africans, none of those economies would have been as profitable, or as transformational, as they were. Howard French joined WPR’s Judah Grunstein this week on Trend Lines to discuss his fifth and […]

The history of Europe’s Age of Exploration and Empire usually follows a familiar narrative. Starting in the late 15th century, European explorers set out to find maritime trade routes to the lucrative spice and textile markets of Asia. Happening by chance upon the “New World” of the Americas, they quickly established colonies whose wealth, mainly in the form of gold and silver, combined with advances in military technology, propelled what would become known as the West to centuries of global dominance that has only begun to wane today. In this narrative, Africa and Africans are all but invisible, except as […]

President Joe Biden’s administration has come under heavy criticism, both domestically and from overseas, over the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan by American and NATO forces. Since Kabul fell to the Taliban on Aug. 15, Biden’s approval rating has dipped nearly five points, to 45 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s weighted average of opinion polls. And Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, bluntly criticized the U.S. earlier this week for making “very few—if any—consultations with their European partners” regarding plans for the exit from Afghanistan. The fallout from this crisis will follow Biden to United Nations headquarters in New York later […]