Presidential elections next May in the Philippines could prove pivotal to both the country’s democracy and alliance with the United States. By extension, the election could influence President Biden’s foreign policy goals of strengthening human rights and countering China’s great power ambitions. Incumbent President Rodrigo Duterte has decided not to seek the vice presidency, giving...
China’s prodigious economic growth has been a defining feature of the twenty-first century. Troubles inside one of the country’s (and the world’s) largest property developers, however, expose potentially serious weaknesses in the Chinese juggernaut. Last week, China Evergrande Group, a development conglomerate saddled with over $300 billion in debt, failed to make a $83 million...
Last week, the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia announced the formation of AUKUS, a trilateral security agreement to bolster allied interests in the Indo-Pacific, a region key to Washington’s grand strategy. AUKUS’s first initiative is to develop nuclear submarines for Australia, to be provided by American and British companies. The deployment of Australian nuclear...
On September 1, President Biden welcomed President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to the White House. It was Zelensky’s first visit to the White House since taking office in 2019. Ukraine gained its independence following the Soviet Union’s dissolution, but has struggled to consolidate its democracy and stabilize its economy since then. It has suffered a...
On September 2, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro met with opposition leaders in Mexico City with the aim to ease the nation’s ongoing political and economic crisis. Each side brought its own goals to the negotiating table, with the hope that this set of talks would succeed where others have failed. The opposition hopes to advance...
Events in Afghanistan have overshadowed most other developments in U.S. foreign policy, including Vice President Kamala Harris’ recent travel to Singapore and Vietnam. Yet, combined with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s visits to these two countries and the Philippines in July, the Vice President’s trip signals renewed American engagement in Southeast Asia. Home to almost...
Russian President Vladimir Putin recently used the 325th anniversary of the Russian navy’s founding to commemorate the marked growth and modernization of his country’s fleet. Much of this growth has occurred in the Black Sea, a region of great importance to Russia since the reign of Peter the Great in the eighteenth century. Following the...
Sunday evening, the Taliban took possession of Kabul. Afghanistan’s capital was the last and most important city to fall to the insurgency, after a week in which government military forces unraveled across the country. Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan president, has fled to the United Arab Emirates. His predecessor, Hamid Karzai, is negotiating the transfer of...
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...
