Showing results by publisher "Foreign Affairs" in Politics & Government

World politics is entering a new phase, in which the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of international conflict will be cultural.

Instead of trying to predict "Black Swan" events such as coups or crises, forecasters should look at how political systems handle disorder. The best indicator of a country's future trajectory is not a lengthy past stability, but recent moderate volatility.

Responding to Mearsheimer's controversial essay blaming the West for the Ukraine crisis, McFaul and Sestanovich put the blame back on Putin and his ideological extremism, denying that NATO expansion provoked him. Mearsheimer replies.

Xi Jinping’s reforms are designed to produce a corruption-free, politically cohesive, and economically powerful one-party state with global reach: a Singapore on steroids. But there is no guarantee the reforms will be as transformative as the Chinese leader hopes.

In assembling an international coalition to combat ISIS, the United States has looked mostly to the Middle East and Europe, regions that it said face a direct threat from the militant Islamist group. But other parts of the world are just as anxious about ISIS - above all, Southeast Asia.

Cohen and Cogan portray U.S. involvement in Congo in the 1960s as necessary and relatively benign. Weissman replies.

Lawrence Freedman’s massive, ambitious new audiobook, Strategy, offers a personal take on an important term, one so overused that it has become almost meaningless.

Indonesia’s new president talks to Foreign Affairs about his recent victory, his national agenda, and the threat of Islamic extremism.

The Millennium Development Goals are due to expire at the end of 2015, and debate has turned to what should come next, with hundreds of new targets already proposed. Governments need to focus carefully and decide which goals offer the greatest returns on investment.

Washington doesn’t have the luxury of simply avoiding insurgencies, so it needs to figure out how to fight them better. Drawn from more than a decade of war, here are 10 lessons for doing so.

Revolts against authoritarian regimes don’t always succeed - but they're more likely to if they embrace civil resistance rather than violence. Over the last century, nonviolent campaigns have been twice as likely to succeed as violent ones and they increase the chances that toppling a dictatorship will lead to peace and democracy.

With US hegemony waning and no successor waiting to pick up the baton, the current international system will likely give way to a larger number of power centers acting with increasing autonomy. The post-Cold War order is unraveling, and it will be missed.

Conventional wisdom about the 1953 coup in Iran rests on the myth that the CIA toppled the country's democratically elected prime minister. In reality, the coup was primarily a domestic Iranian affair, and the CIA's impact was ultimately insignificant.

The Tea Party and its European cousins have emerged from the enduring inability of democratic governments to satisfy their citizens' needs. Today’s populist movements won’t subside until the legitimate grievances driving them have been addressed.

Since the early 1990s, a handful of oligarchs has dominated Greece’s economy and politics. So long as these elites have a vested interest in keeping things as they are, the country will never fully find its way out of crisis.

Washington’s current efforts to resolve the conflict in Syria will not break the stalemate. The only way to restore peace without committing U.S. troops is to build a new Syrian army capable of defeating both the Assad regime and the extremists.

A century on, discussions about the Ottoman massacre of Armenians are still dominated by questions surrounding the use of one fraught and divisive word: "Genocide". Washington should use the term, but also recognize its many limitations.

Far from being a "First World problem", mental illness is a global scourge that affects people of all incomes and backgrounds. By 2030, mental disorders will cost the global economy around $6 trillion a year - more than heart disease.

The past few weeks have seen a wave of Muslims from all around the world joining the ranks of ISIS. Although most of the attention has been on those coming from the United States and Europe, the bulk of foreign fighters has actually come from places like Turkey, from which the flow of jihadists is particularly puzzling.

An end to Russia’s intrusions into Ukraine would bring some measure of respite to Kiev. However, that alone will not be enough to place the country on a truly new path. For that, Ukraine must overcome its self-inflicted problems, in particular rampant and pervasive corruption.