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Say goodbye to sleep, world, because it’s going to be nothing but fever dreams until noon on Jan. 20, 2021, when the United States holds its presidential inauguration. If you thought America looked crazy from afar the past few years, amid all the chaos of Donald Trump’s presidency, just wait until you see what one of the most punishing political contests in its history does to the psyches of 328 million people. Before Tuesday, it might have been tempting to think that the U.S. would rest a little easier after the presidential polls closed and all the votes were counted. […]

In 2018, the Congolese gynecologist Denis Mukwege was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to end rape as a weapon of war. Speaking to a rapt and tearful audience at that year’s Nobel award ceremony in Oslo, he mentioned a report that was “gathering mold in an office drawer in New York.” The 550-page tome he referred to was released by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in October 2010. It painstakingly documented and mapped the locations of 617 instances of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and perhaps even genocide, allegedly committed by local combatants, militias […]

Thailand’s King Maha Vajiralongkorn, also known as Rama X, made a rare media appearance last weekend, publicly addressing for the first time the monthslong pro-democracy uprising in the country. In a joint interview with CNN and Channel 4 News, he suggested there could be room for compromise with the demonstrators in the streets. Asked what he would say to them, he responded, “we love them all the same.” But according to Tyrell Haberkorn, an expert on Thailand at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the king’s apparent peace offering should be taken with a grain of salt, given the ongoing campaign of […]

After nearly a decade of effort, Latin America is on the verge of realizing its first regional environmental treaty. The Regional Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters in Latin America and the Caribbean, better known as the Escazu Agreement, has 24 signatories, 10 of which have ratified it—just one less than is needed for it to enter into force. Curiously though, Chile, one of the countries that spearheaded negotiations over the pact, is missing from the list of signatories, an omission that calls into question its mostly positive record on addressing climate change. Negotiations […]

As a terrorist attack was unfolding late Monday night in Vienna, where four people were killed and 22 others injured in a shooting rampage on crowded bars, speculation about the culprit, unsurprisingly, was rife on social media. Many of those offering theories were quick to accuse Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of stoking the rage of militant Islamists. There is no indication that the attacker—a young extremist who it turned out had previously been convicted in Austria for trying to join the Islamic State—was motivated by Erdogan, as Austrian authorities have pointed to his ISIS sympathies and the Islamic State’s […]

For nearly five months, Thailand has been in the throes of a historic pro-democracy uprising. Demonstrators have braved water cannons and arbitrary arrests to challenge the current government of Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, the leader of a 2014 coup who then headed the military junta that ruled Thailand until last year. The protest movement has also broken a longstanding taboo by demanding reforms of Thailand’s monarchy, which is protected by one of the world’s harshest lèse-majesté laws. Thailand’s king addressed the protests for the first time in rare public comments over the weekend, suggesting he may be open to compromise […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR contributor Lavender Au and Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curate the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive China Note by email every week. Last week, the Communist Party’s Central Committee held one of the most important events on China’s political calendar, meeting for its fifth plenum. From Oct. 26 to 29, the conclave of senior party officials discussed the blueprint of the country’s 14th five-year plan and set out long-range objectives for 2035. Those who are tracking policy aims that have been set out […]

Despite all the alarm over the potential for violence and disruption, the U.S. presidential election and ballot-counting process have so far been routine. Were it not for the massive number of mail-in ballots due to the coronavirus pandemic, we would in all likelihood already know the victor. As it is, at the time of writing this column, there are still three possible scenarios ahead because of the time it will take to tally the final outstanding ballots. The first is a reelection for President Donald Trump largely along the same lines of the electoral map he rode to victory in […]

Voters in Guinea went to the polls last month for a general election that saw President Alpha Conde clinch a controversial third term. Among a total of 12 candidates on the ballot, competition centered around the 82-year-old Conde and his longtime rival, former Prime Minister Cellou Dalein Diallo, who also ran against Conde in 2010 and 2015. The day after the Oct. 18 election, Diallo claimed that early results showing Conde in the lead were fraudulent, and declared victory based on his own party’s vote tally. Nonetheless, Guinea’s electoral commission subsequently reported official results showing Conde as the winner, with […]

Myanmar is preparing to hold general elections this Sunday, an occasion that might have marked a significant milestone in its ongoing transition from decades of military rule. The previous polls, in 2015, saw Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy finally win the presidency and a majority of seats in parliament, following the dissolution of the military junta in 2011. Hopes were high that Suu Kyi, who is now Myanmar’s de facto leader, would usher in a new era of peace and expanded freedoms. Yet the consensus today is that Myanmar’s democratic transition has stalled—if it can even be […]

The COVID-19 pandemic has made everyone much better versed in basic epidemiological modeling than they were eight months ago. We have all familiarized ourselves with exhaustive data collection and the analysis of epidemic curves based on prior crises, the reproduction rates of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the daily influx of new cases. Yet, even for professional epidemiologists, the question of when this pandemic will end has no simple answer. Certainty is a luxury rarely afforded to scientists, and this is particularly true in the world of public health. However, we do know that pandemics do not attack indiscriminately. While we […]

Today is Election Day in the United States, when Americans will render their verdict on the presidency of Donald Trump. When Ronald Reagan was running for president in 1980, he famously asked voters to consider whether they were better off than they had been four years earlier, when his opponent, Jimmy Carter, took office. It appears from polls that many Americans will base their vote on Trump’s disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic. But changes to trade policy were a central part of Trump’s campaign to “make America great again,” so it’s fair to ask what Trump has delivered. Last […]

How has the multilateral system fared in the Trump era? At first glance, the answer must be “poorly.” Donald Trump has attacked and boycotted numerous international agreements and arrangements as U.S. president, ranging from the Paris Agreement on climate change to the World Health Organization. America’s relations with China have worsened dramatically at the United Nations and other forums, culminating in the two powers’ furious disputes over COVID-19. In New York and Geneva, diplomats fret about a growing “crisis of multilateralism.” Much of this sorry story was entirely predictable. In September 2016, when a Trump presidency still seemed improbable even […]

After more than a month of negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government, progress toward a peace agreement remains slow. The key unknown variable is whether the United States has an appetite for staying involved in the long grind of overseeing a peace process that must reconcile two divergent views of Afghanistan’s future—which can only be answered by the winner of this week’s presidential election. The Taliban recognize this, too, and made a foray into American politics last month, announcing their desire to see President Donald Trump win a second term, before hastily backtracking. The reason for the Taliban’s […]

Editor’s Note: Every Monday, Managing Editor Frederick Deknatel highlights a major unfolding story in the Middle East, while curating some of the best news and analysis from the region. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive Middle East Memo by email every week. I watched Barack Obama win America’s presidency from Damascus. I still remember when the race was called, on whatever international news network was carried on satellite TV in Syria, sometime in the middle of the night. Seven months later, Obama traveled to Cairo, to give a major speech to the Arab world. Although its promise of […]

Google recently announced it will enforce rules enabling it to take a 30 percent cut from app purchases in its Google Play Store starting next September, a controversial revenue-generating policy that Apple also uses in its App Store. Both tech giants are facing anti-trust lawsuits over the practice. Also this fall, Ukrainian authorities ordered Apple to remove the apps of Russian propaganda outlets from its store, which Russia’s Foreign Ministry called “another manifestation of the Ukrainian authorities’ repressive policy towards the media.” The move follows other actions by the Ukrainian government in recent years to restrict Russian state media outlets’ […]

As Americans cast their ballots Tuesday, and indeed for the millions who already have, they are voting for the future not just of their own country, but of the open world that the United States helped create. A distinctive element of this global order, particularly since the fall of the Berlin Wall, has been the removal of many restrictions on cross-border flows of goods, money, ideas and even people. Under every American president since the Cold War, until Donald Trump, the United States championed global integration as a motor of prosperity, a bulwark of peace and—at least implicitly—a source of […]