Foreign Affairs

International forums have taken for granted that refugees will return to Syria once a political settlement is in place, but it might not be that simple.

With the June 12 Singapore summit off for now, the Trump administration needs to rethink its desire for a quick, sweeping deal that solves the problem posed by North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.

Italy's new government is going to push back against any attempt by outside actors to force it to rein in its ambitions.

The win of Muqtada al-Sadr and his political alliance in the recent parliamentary election signaled that at least in this vote, sectarianism had supplanted populism as the dominant force in Iraqi politics.

The world is turning isolationist. Africa is a striking exception.

Over the year and a half since its signing, the peace deal continues to face mounting challenges in turning its terms into a reality.

The West long ago ceded leadership in overseas infrastructure building to China. Now U.S. and European-sponsored projects are less viable than their Chinese counterparts.

The real question now facing Iraq is how Iran will choose to respond to Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA.

Trump should think strategically about the motivations of all the summit’s key players: North Korea, China, South Korea, Japan, and Russia. What is it that they really want?

The real question is not whether Europeans are pissed off but whether they will do anything in response to Trump’s actions. The answer is most likely no.

The United States is failing to win its war on terrorism because al Qaeda and the Islamic State represent only a fraction of the real enemy: a global movement, unified by an ideology—Salafi jihadism—that exists outside of al Qaeda or the Islamic State.

For nearly a decade, the nuclear question has crowded out serious deliberations over a broader policy toward Iran.

Trump is raising uncertainty and degrading America's international authority on economic policy.

With the war in Afghanistan now in its 17th year, the U.S. military is engaged in the longest stretch of armed conflict in its history. And yet its leaders are keeping the American public in the dark about its operations around the world, while seeking to obscure what little information is available.

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At the height of World War II, Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine, argued that the United States had amassed such wealth and power that the twentieth century would come to be known simply as “the American Century.” His prediction proved prescient: despite being challenged for supremacy by Nazi Germany and, later, the Soviet Union, the United States prevailed against its adversaries. By the turn of the millennium, its position as the most powerful and influential state in the world appeared unimpeachable. As a result, the twentieth century was marked by the dominance not just of a particular country but also of the political system it helped spread: liberal democracy. 

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Western democracies are in trouble, grappling with rising inequality, lost confidence in government, fraying social fabrics, and intense political divides.

To have any chance of success, U.S. strategy toward North Korea must be guided by an accurate sense of how Kim’s regime thinks and what it knows about Washington. Failure to do so could lead the United States to stumble into the worst conflict since World War II.

In 2001, the reality was that there was really no better alternative than to let China join the WTO.

For about four years now, since Russia’s occupation of Crimea and China’s launch of the Belt and Road Initiative, there has been much speculation about whether another Cold War between East and West is coming. In the last month alone, headlines have proclaimed that “The New Cold War Is Here,” heralded “Putin’s New Cold War,” and warned that “Trump Is Preparing for a New Cold War.” But are we really returning to the past? Contemporary politics is full of false analogies, and the return of the Cold War seems to be one of them.

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