Foreign Affairs

Examining what happened the last time the United States tried to bully China on trade can shed light on the likely outcome this time around.

Erdogan has triumphed, but Ince showed how social democracy can succeed in Turkey.

After four years in power, the Modi government has largely succeeded in addressing the economic problems that it campaigned to fix.

In recent months, troubling details have emerged about a sprawling network of secretive political reeducation camps in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang. Both official and leaked evidence indicates that up to one million Muslims, chiefly from the Uighur minority, have been interned without legal proceedings. Ex-internees describe vast facilities that can hold nearly 6,000 persons and are heavily secured with barbed wire, surveillance systems, and armed police. Government tenders confirm these reports and provide detailed insights into the sizes and features of reeducation facilities throughout the region. Those interned are subject to intense indoctrination procedures that force them to proclaim “faith” in the Chinese Communist Party while denigrating large parts of their own religion and culture.

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In environments characterized by rapid political change, limited rule of law, and endemic corruption, moderate citizens have rational reasons to favor ideologically extreme groups. 

One of the longest-running and also seemingly silliest disputes in the Balkans may have finally been resolved.

Athough pundits debate whether it was North Korea or the United States that benefited the most from the summit, there was a less visible player that came out a clear winner: China.

Sessions found that a domestic violence victim from El Salvador—perhaps the most dangerous country on earth in which to be a woman—would not qualify for asylum, even though her own country had utterly failed to protect her.

A group of experts weighs in on whether U.S. foreign policy has focused too much on counterterrorism over the past decade.

The Marshall Plan was the most successful U.S. foreign policy program of the Cold War, and arguably the most successful in all of U.S. history. In France, Italy, the United Kingdom, West Germany, and beyond, the plan’s $13 billion in aid expedited economic recovery, buoyed morale, and eroded the appeal of communism. All that is well known. But what is often forgotten is that the Marshall Plan also ratcheted up Cold War tensions. By spurring the economic revival of the western occupation zones in Germany and their eventual merger into the country of West Germany, it rekindled fears across the continent, east and west, about the specter of renewed German power. That, in turn, led to the establishment of NATO and the division of Europe.

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Among the debates that have swept the U.S. foreign policy community since the beginning of the Trump administration, alarm about the fate of the liberal international rules-based order has emerged as one of the few fixed points. From the international relations scholar G. John Ikenberry’s claim that “for seven decades the world has been dominated by a western liberal order” to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s call in the final days of the Obama administration to “act urgently to defend the liberal international order,” this banner waves atop most discussions of the United States’ role in the world. 

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Experts from both the United States and China weigh in on Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner’s March/April article about U.S. China policy.

As long as Putin remains in power, changing Russia will be close to impossible. Washington needs a new grand strategy to deal with the fact that Putin is here to stay and won’t end his assault on Western democracy and multilateral institutions anytime soon.

In theory, carbon pricing makes sense, but in practice, it isn’t doing much about climate change.

The United States has weathered a number of challenges in its progress toward social democracy, and the trials of the present era will likely prove a brief detour rather than a dead end.

Rather than seeking to return to an imagined past in which the United States molded the world in its image, Washington should limit its efforts to ensuring sufficient order abroad and concentrate on reconstructing a viable liberal democracy at home.

In too many places, governments are failing to invest in their populations. This is a problem because neglecting investments in human capital can dramatically weaken a country’s competitiveness in a rapidly changing world.

Marx’s theory remains one of the most perceptive critiques of capitalism ever offered. Far from being outdated, Marxism is crucial for making sense of the world today.

The Marshall Plan worked because its designers had clear objectives and were willing to accept tradeoffs, such as a Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.