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...
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...
