Mostrando resultados por Editor "Foreign Affairs" en Todas las categorías

July 12, 2016, marked a turning point in the long-standing disputes over the South China Sea. After more than three years of proceedings at the Permanent Court of Arbitration, an international body in The Hague, a tribunal constituted under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) issued a widely anticipated decision in a case the Philippines brought in 2013 to challenge China’s maritime claims to most of the contested waterway

On the morning of October 17, 1945, thousands of protesters in Buenos Aires marched on Argentina’s main executive building, the Casa Rosada, to demand the return of Vice President Juan Perón, who had been forced to resign a week earlier. The day was hot, and many of the men took off their jackets and even their shirts. This earned them the mocking title of los descamisados - the shirtless. Perón’s supporters promptly reclaimed the insult and turned it into a badge of honor.

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, many economists worried that even if the US economy improved, unemployment would remain high for years to come. Some warned darkly of a “jobless recovery.” Those fears have proved unfounded: since peaking at ten percent in October 2009, the US unemployment rate has fallen by half and is now lower than it was in the years leading up to the crisis.

The Panama Papers, a cache of 11.5 million leaked documents belonging to the law firm Mossack Fonseca in Panama, has implicated dozens of world leaders and celebrities in offshore banking and tax evasion. And yet these revelations are small when compared to the actual size of global financial crime. Panama, after all, is only one of more than 90 financial secrecy jurisdictions around the world today.

After dithering for decades, governments finally seem to be paying serious attention to the problem of global climate change. Late last year, at the Paris climate conference, they adopted a major new agreement to limit global warming, beginning a process to strengthen commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions over time. For many observers, the promises of the Paris conference offer too little, too late.

Let displaced Syrians join the labor market.

Washington needs a real Middle East policy.

Discussions about the fate of Africa have long had a cyclical quality. That is especially the case when it comes to the question of how to explain the region’s persistent underdevelopment.

In the next four years, North Korea will likely develop the ability to hit the continental United States with a nuclear missile. How can Washington stop it? Pre-emptive military strikes would end in deadly failure. Sanctions have proved a fool’s errand. Only striking a grand bargain with Pyongyang—economic development in exchange for a nuclear freeze—might work.

Of the many reasons that a slim minority of voters chose to elect a bombastic reality television star to be president of the United States, climate change was surely not high on the list. Nonetheless, Donald Trump assumed the office last week openly hostile to the environmental movement. He has threatened to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, gut the Barack Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, and cut funding for climate science research.

The appointment of the Hindu nationalist Yogi Adityanath in Uttar Pradesh raises a question about Narendra Modi: Is he a reformer or a reactionary? The answer is that he's both—and always has been.

Iran has a military-industrial complex problem. The complex is a hulking guild that stands in the way of any Iranian attempt toward policy moderation.

The United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union has triggered the worst political crisis the EU has ever faced. If the EU is to survive, it needs to give Europe’s national governments more, not less, freedom to act. The nation-state is here to stay, and national policies still have far more democratic legitimacy than those imposed by technocrats in Brussels or Frankfurt.

Foreign policy experts have long been taught to see the world as a chessboard, analyzing the decisions of great powers and anticipating rival states’ reactions in a continual game of strategic advantage. Nineteenth-century British statesmen openly embraced this metaphor, calling their contest with Russia in Central Asia "the Great Game." Today, the TV show Game of Thrones offers a particularly gory and irresistible version of geopolitics as a continual competition among contending kingdoms.

Ennahda, one of the most influential political parties in the Arab world and a major force in Tunisia’s emergence as a democracy, recently announced a historic transition. Ennahda has moved beyond its origins as an Islamist party and has fully embraced a new identity as a party of Muslim democrats. The organization, which I co-founded in the 1980s, is no longer both a political party and a social movement. It has ended all of its cultural and religious activities and now focuses only on politics.

Just after 6 PM on August 1, 2007, at the peak of rush hour, 111 vehicles were driving across the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis when a thin metal plate in the bridge’s central span ripped. The bridge collapsed, plunging vehicles and passengers into the river more than 60 feet below. Thirteen people died, and 145 were injured.

In his memoir, The Lion Awakes, Ashish Thakkar describes how, as a young entrepreneur selling computer parts across Africa in the 1990s, he noticed that flights within the continent seemed to take longer than the distances on a map would suggest. “Were the planes slower?” he wondered. In fact, he learned, the commonly used Mercator projection vastly understates the size of Africa, and its 54 countries, relative to other continents.

The relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia has come under unprecedented strains in recent years. US President Barack Obama has openly questioned Riyadh's value as an ally, accusing it of provoking sectarian conflict in the region. According to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, when Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s prime minister, asked Obama whether he saw the Saudis as friends, the president responded, “It’s complicated.”

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.

Was the feud between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, first over settlements and then over Iran, a watershed? Netanyahu, it is claimed, turned US support of Israel into a partisan issue. Liberals, including many American Jews, are said to be fed up with Israel’s “occupation,” which will mark its 50th anniversary next year. The weakening of Israel’s democratic ethos is supposedly undercut-ting the “shared values” argument for the relationship.