Showing results by publisher "Foreign Affairs" in Social Sciences

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

Conventional wisdom in the West blames the Ukraine crisis on Russian aggression. But this account is wrong: Washington and its European allies actually share most of the responsibility, having spent decades pushing east into Russia’s natural sphere of interest.

For half a millennium, Russian foreign policy has been characterized by soaring ambitions that have exceeded the country’s capabilities. Beginning with the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, Russia managed to expand at an average rate of 50 square miles per day for hundreds of years, eventually covering one-sixth of the earth’s landmass. By 1900, it was the world’s fourth or fifth-largest industrial power and the largest agricultural producer in Europe.

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.

Let displaced Syrians join the labor market.

Donald Trump’s admirers and critics would probably agree on one thing: he is different. One of his chief Republican supporters, Newt Gingrich, describes him as a "unique, extraordinary experience." And of course, in some ways - his celebrity, his flexibility with the facts - Trump is unusual. But in an important sense, he is not: Trump is part of a broad populist upsurge running through the Western world. It can be seen in countries of widely varying circumstances, from prosperous Sweden to crisis-ridden Greece.

Newly available evidence shows that the CIA engaged in pervasive political meddling and paramilitary action in Congo during the 1960s - and that the local CIA station chief directly influenced the events that led to the death of Patrice Lumumba, the country's first democratically elected prime minister.

In 1971, the Pakistani government orchestrated a brutal military crackdown against the Bengali population in East Pakistan - while the United States stuck by its ally Pakistan. Gary Bass' new book spotlights the "significant complicity" of U.S. President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, in this "forgotten genocide".

For the first time in recent memory, large numbers of Americans are openly questioning their country’s grand strategy. An April 2016 Pew poll found that 57 percent of Americans agree that the United States should “deal with its own problems and let others deal with theirs the best they can.” On the campaign trail, both the Democrat Bernie Sanders and the Republican Donald Trump found receptive audiences whenever they questioned the United States’ penchant for promoting democracy.

Bernie Sanders, the left-wing populist who for months competed with Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, has popularized a simple vision for reform: introduce a Nordic-style welfare state in the United States.

We are moving beyond a natural skepticism regarding expert claims to the death of the ideal of expertise itself. This is a bad thing. If trust in experts dissipates, expertise will serve not the public interest, but the interest of whatever clique is paying its bills. And such an outcome is already perilously near.

During the Cold War, the United States preferred to husband, rather than expend, its military power. The idea was not to fight but to defend, deter, and contain, a cold peace infinitely preferable to nuclear cataclysm. When US policymakers strayed from this principle, attempting to unify the Korean Peninsula in 1950 or deploying combat troops to Vietnam in the 1960s, the results proved unhappy in the extreme.

There are reasons other than his longevity why so many world leaders - among them the Chinese President Xi Jinping - continue to seek the counsel of Henry Kissinger, who stepped down as U.S. secretary of state close to four decades ago.

The World Bank's president talks to Foreign Affairs about fighting inequality, his reform program, and who should succeed him.

After two and a half decades, is the United States’ run as the world’s sole superpower coming to an end? Many say yes, seeing a rising China ready to catch up to or even surpass the United States in the near future. China’s economy is on track to become the world’s biggest, and even if its growth slows, it will still outpace that of the United States for many years. Beijing has used its new wealth to attract friends, deter enemies, modernize its military, and aggressively assert sovereignty claims.

Most economists agree that the global economy is stagnating and that governments need to stimulate growth, but lowering interest rates still further could spur a damaging cycle of booms and busts. Instead, central banks should hand consumers cash directly.

Even now, gazing back through the jaundiced lens of subsequent experience, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign speech in Berlin still seems an extraordinary occasion.

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.

On November 15, 2012, the day he became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping stood onstage at the Great Hall of the People, in Beijing, to reflect back on his country’s 5,000 years of history. After citing China’s “indelible contribution” to world civilization, Xi called for “the great revival of the Chinese nation.” And he acknowledged that others had “failed one time after another” to realize that goal. Implicit in Xi’s remarks was a promise: unlike his predecessors, he would not fall short.

Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, talks to Foreign Affairs about the court’s achievements and challenges, why so few people have been convicted, and whether the court has a bias towards African cases.