Foreign Affairs

Given the unacceptable consequences of war with North Korea, it is long past time for policymakers in the United States to get realistic about diplomacy with Kim Jong-un's government.

The documents most closely associated with the creation of the United States—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—present a problem with which Americans have been contending from the country’s beginning: how to reconcile the values espoused in those texts with the United States’ original sin of slavery, the flaw that marred the country’s creation, warped its prospects, and eventually plunged it into civil war. The Declaration of Independence had a specific purpose: to cut the ties between the American colonies and Great Britain and establish a new country that would take its place among the nations of the world. But thanks to the vaulting language of its famous preamble, the document instantly came to mean more than that. Its confident statement that “all men are created equal,” with “unalienable Rights” to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” put notions of freedom and equality at the heart of the American experiment.

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Former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh was more than just a leader practiced in the arts of political expedience. He represented the last historic link with the origins of the Yemeni Republic’s foundation and the last hope for its future.

Despite the vast suffering the Chinese Communist Party has caused, it has never admitted guilt, far less memorialized its victims. Nor is it likely to. Too much remembering would risk undermining the party’s legitimacy.

Russia has never truly reckoned with the horrors of Stalin’s regime. And now the Kremlin is keener than ever to avoid acknowledging past crimes; instead, it is promoting an authoritarian ideology dangerously reminiscent of Stalin’s own.

In 2014, an unusual book topped bestseller lists around the world: Capital in the Twenty-first Century, an 816-page scholarly tome by the French economist Thomas Piketty that examined the massive increase in the proportion of income and wealth accruing to the world’s richest people. Drawing on an unprecedented amount of historical economic data from 20 countries, Piketty showed that wealth concentration had returned to a peak not seen since the early twentieth century. Today in the United States, the top one percent of households earn around 20 percent of the nation’s income, a dramatic change from the middle of the twentieth century, when income was spread more evenly and the top one percent’s share hovered at around ten percent.

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The United Kingdom’s vote last year to leave the European Union was a seismic event. The British people ignored the advice of the leaders of all their major political parties and of virtually all experts. George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, told voters that leaving would wreck the British economy. U.S. President Barack Obama warned that it would reduce the United Kingdom’s influence on the world stage. Financial markets, many pollsters, and political pundits all anticipated that voters would heed the elites’ advice. And yet they decided not to, setting off a process destined to transform the country’s politics, economy, and society.

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The terrorist threat has changed since 9/11 and the United States must develop a strategy for this new phase in the war on terrorism.

Peshmerga views of the post-ISIS regional order are key to understanding Iraq’s political future.

Despite China's averred commitment to climate action, Beijing’s foreign energy investments so far paint a drastically different picture.

Trump’s decision to withdraw the nation from the Paris climate agreement was not based on science or sound economics, but on a confused, misguided, and simply dishonest desire to score some short-term political points with his voters. What he sacrifices in the long term will be immensely more difficult for the country to win back at the ballot box: authority, credibility, and influence.

Republicans have long panned the U.S. tax system; now they have a plan to change it. In fact, two plans. The first comes from Congress, the second from the White House. The congressional “Better Way” plan, championed by Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, and Kevin Brady, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, would create a business tax system that has never existed anywhere in the world. The White House plan would enact a massive tax cut, mostly for the wealthy.

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Powerful economic and political forces will prevent Trump from destroying the Paris agreement. But he can still cause the United States serious diplomatic and economic pain—and cost the world precious time.

A tax plan that U.S. President Donald Trump produced in April suggested the biggest tax cuts for rich Americans in the United States’ history—and was bad news for the middle class.

The 2008 financial crisis not only changed the shape and size of the global economy—combined productivity and employment shrank by 5.5 percent in 2014 across OECD countries—it also redefined how leaders across the world discuss and describe finance, banking, and wealth.

Trump’s erratic style and confrontational policies are often condemned as dangerous. Here’s how they could actually lead to conflict—with Iran, China, and North Korea.

U.S. President Donald Trump should rethink important elements of the so-called special relationship with Saudi Arabia. Specifically, the United States should cease to offer unconditional support for the regime, as such backing legitimizes the regime’s excesses and makes Washington vulnerable to accusations of supporting dictatorship.

If the Trump administration abandons the United States' leading position on climate issues, China will fill the vacuum. That would be a mixed bag for the environment, and decidedly bad news for the United States.