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After five years and a nearly 20-month border shutdown, the heads of government of Mexico, Canada and the United States gave a sense of restored normalcy to trilateral relations last month, when they joined up in Washington for the first summit of its kind since a 2016 gathering—featuring a famously awkward handshake—in Ottawa. Then again, by the time Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, or AMLO, met with U.S. President Joe Biden in the Oval Office on the sidelines of what has been dubbed the Three Amigos Summit, they were already capping off a period filled with renewed, high-level bilateral […]

This week, the emergence of a new coronavirus variant potentially more contagious than the dominant delta strain caused widespread panic, as governments across the world closed their borders to travelers from Southern Africa, where the new variant was first identified. Named omicron, it contains even more mutations to its spike proteins than delta, causing some scientists to worry that it could also reduce the effectiveness of the currently developed vaccines. For now, the data is preliminary, and most of the alarm is based on speculation and the principle of precaution. But the rush to seal borders serves as a reminder […]

The eighth edition of the triennial Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, or FOCAC, took place this week in Dakar, Senegal, marking the first time the meeting was held in West Africa. The conference, which took place days after the release of a Chinese government white paper detailing a new era of cooperation with African countries, saw major announcements on COVID-19 vaccines, Special Drawing Rights allocations and climate cooperation. While those areas of cooperation portend to be the cornerstone of engagement between China and Africa, growing debates are emerging on the continent and elsewhere about the imbalanced nature of the relationship. FOCAC […]

On Nov. 24, two devastating and separate, but ultimately interrelated, incidents took place in far-flung corners of the world. First, at least 27 people perished while attempting to cross the turbulent waters of the English Channel, which separates France from the United Kingdom. The dead were migrants from Africa and the Middle East whose fragile, flimsy raft sank before it reached the U.K.’s shores. This was the deadliest migrant crossing across the channel ever recorded, but it is not an isolated incident. Attempted channel crossings have spiked since 2018, resulting in hundreds of deaths.  On the same day, more than […]

After months of doing little to respond to the Feb. 1 coup in Myanmar—as well as the Myanmar military’s subsequent crackdown on civil society and murdering of opponents, and its overall mismanagement of the country—the Association of Southeast Asian Nations finally took a step toward a more resolute reaction in late October, when it disinvited Myanmar junta leader Min Aung Hlaing from its annual summit as well as the East Asia Summit immediately thereafter. He was also not invited to a meeting between ASEAN and European states in late November.  At the ASEAN summit, several Southeast Asian leaders also offered […]

While previous waves of migrant crossings, and the deaths that often accompany them, have mostly been concentrated in Europe’s south, the latter part of 2021 has seen the extension of that problem to the European Union’s eastern and western borders as well. The European Commission now says that, because of these extraordinary circumstances, the bloc’s normal rules on refugees and asylum shouldn’t apply. Yesterday, the commission proposed that EU member states bordering Belarus should be given more time than the bloc normally requires to register and consider asylum claims from refugees entering their territory—up to four weeks, instead of the […]

It’s never a good sign for a country’s leader when fluctuations in the value of the national currency become a dominant concern for everyday people. That is the case today in Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is taking a huge gamble with his monetary policy, setting a controversial interest rate policy that runs contrary to firmly established economic theory and has caused the local currency, the lira, to nosedive. Slashing the value of savings, spooking investors and further fueling inflation, the policy is already causing significant hardships for the Turkish people, who polls show have lost faith in the […]

There may never be a good time to cut social spending, especially in a Latin American country so wracked by inequality that an unpopular austerity package resulted in lethal riots even before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. That is the lesson Guillermo Lasso, Ecuador’s conservative new president, appears to be learning the hard way six months into his term in office.  After his surprise win in April’s presidential runoff election, Lasso, a former banker and one of his nation’s richest citizens, moved swiftly to establish his authority upon taking office the following month. He rapidly accelerated Ecuador’s vaccination drive […]

BOGOTA, Colombia—Ecuador made international headlines on Sept. 28, when a brutal prison riot left at least 119 inmates dead and more than 80 injured. The details of the uprising at the Litoral penitentiary in Guayaquil, on the Ecuadorian coast, were particularly gruesome, with images emerging of dismembered bodies and reports of inmates armed with chainsaws. A second riot at the same penitentiary on Nov. 11 left another 60 dead. Nearly 300 prisoners have died in gang-related violence in Ecuadorian prisons this year, making it the deadliest on record.  But Ecuador is far from the only country in the region to have experienced […]

A flurry of visits by foreign officials and an invitation to the upcoming virtual democracy summit to be hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden have underscored Taiwan’s growing international profile. But the attention Taiwan is attracting is causing Beijing to increase diplomatic, economic and military pressure on its autonomous neighbor. Ten European lawmakers from Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia arrived on the island for an eight-day visit starting Sunday. “China is afraid that our mission in Taiwan will show the world that there are benefits to rejecting the so-called ‘economic partnership’ offered by the Chinese regime,” Maldas Maideikis, a Lithuanian parliamentarian who […]

As he watched his country flail early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the Nobel laureate economist Paul Romer argued that only by taking a dramatic, concerted step, carried out simultaneously nationwide, would the United States be able to stop the spread of the virus and contain its spiraling costs. At the time, in April 2020, Romer said that the United States should commit an estimated $100 billion dollars to a crash national testing program that would allow the quarantining of people who were positive and thereby stop the spread of the pathogen to others. This, he argued, was a pittance compared […]

Gambia will vote in a presidential election on Dec. 4 for the first time since former President Yahya Jammeh was defeated in December 2016 by incumbent Adama Barrow, ending 22 years of oppressive rule that was marked by widespread human rights violations. The ballot is expected to be a critical test for the country’s ongoing transition from dictatorship to democracy, amid concerns that interference from Jammeh, who is in exile in Equatorial Guinea, could threaten national cohesion and stability.  “We are facing a very uncertain moment,” Fatou Jagne Senghore, the West Africa director for the human rights NGO Article 19, […]