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...
Just as the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq defined the War on Terror under President Bush, drone strikes became ubiquitous with counterterrorism under Bush’s successors. Presidents Obama and Trump ordered drone strikes within and outside of war zones to disrupt terrorist networks like IS, Al Shabab, and AQAP, and to conduct controversial assassinations, including radical...
Last Friday marked the opening session of National People’s Congress in Beijing, an annual meeting of China’s highest legislative body, featuring the latest installments of the “Work Report,” which reviews economic statistics for the past year and lays out projections for the next, and the “Five-Year Plan” (the 14th, in this case), which lays out...
When Germany gave refuge to Russian dissident Alexei Navalny last summer following his Kremlin-ordered poisoning, the act was praised as another chapter in chancellor Angela Merkel’s defense of liberal values, and her defiance of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ruthless power politics. On the question of the Nord Stream 2 Baltic pipeline, however, Merkel and Putin...
While few scholars have narrativized it as such, a few seemingly disconnected events over the past year might be indicators that we are entering an era in which, at least in the geo-economic sphere, nation states will have a set of new and powerful rivals: transnational corporations. These legal entities – from more narrowly-focused social...
On issues from competition with China to the place of tariffs in trade policy, notable affinities exist between the Biden and Trump administration’s foreign policies. In Latin American relations, however, President Biden has sought to distinguish himself from his predecessor, vowing to center his policy on democracy and human rights, with diplomacy as its key...
