This week, G7 finance ministers will meet in London to discuss, among other things, the Biden Administration’s proposed global minimum 15% corporate tax rate. The idea is simple (to crack down on multinationals’ tax arbitrage schemes) and comes gift-wrapped with a timely justification (to pay for pandemic-induced recovery packages). The proposal, with U.S. Treasury Secretary...
President John F. Kennedy arrived in Vienna sixty years ago with lofty expectations for a Cold War breakthrough. But rather than alleviating U.S.-Soviet tensions as Kennedy had hoped, his conference with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev instead precipitated a summer of crisis in Berlin, the perennial flashpoint of the Cold War. Probing Kennedy’s resolve, Khrushchev reissued...
Last weekend, Belarus dispatched a warplane to divert and ground a commercial Ryanair flight in Minsk. After landing, authorities swiftly moved to arrest journalist Roman Protasevich, a longtime critic of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko who, in a predictable turn, defended the move as an internal matter. In response, the EU banned Belarusian flights over the...
Ahead of a diplomatic swing highlighted by an encounter with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has broadcast the Biden Administration’s concerns about the militarization of the Arctic. Against the backdrop of increased Sino-Russian cooperation in the region, united by shared economic interests in its control, Blinken has stated that the...
In October 1994, the Clinton administration had momentous news to share with the world. It had reached an agreement with North Korea to incrementally achieve normalization and denuclearization. Pyongyang pledged to freeze and dismantle its nuclear reactors, submit to international inspections and comply with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The U.S. promised North Korea financing for...
Last week, the Biden administration launched its most ambitious initiative in climate diplomacy to date: a two-day conference with forty world leaders to spur reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. President Biden unveiled a new U.S. commitment to reduce its emissions to half of their 2005 level by 2030, a dramatic target followed by comparably ambitious...
For now, the standoff is (apparently) over. As of this morning, Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu released a statement explaining that the recent Russian troop buildup along the Ukrainian border was a snap ‘military exercise’, and that troops would return to their bases. This is a live story, and experts are scrambling to react; here’s...
This past Saturday marked the 23 year anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), a landmark peace settlement brokered by the United States that ended three decades of insurgent conflict in Northern Ireland, grimly remembered as “The Troubles.” Despite the GFA’s success in reducing violence and promoting power-sharing between Northern Ireland’s Catholic...
From 1949 to 1979, the status of Taiwan was a constant source of tension between the People’s Republic of China and the United States, threatening at its gravest moments the perils of nuclear war. Today, the combination of geopolitical competition between the United States and PRC and worsening relations between Beijing and Taipei has reactivated...
A key chord in Donald Trump’s 2016 rise was a promise to terminate ‘bad deals’ made by previous administrations on the international stage – of these, public enemy number one was the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The agreement aimed to avert Iran’s development of nuclear weapons and subject its facilities to international...
