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

Why equality is likely to make a comeback.

Today, orphanages are common in many parts of the world. But a look at young people who spent their childhoods in institutions in Romania reveals just how developmentally damaging such places can be.

Many in Israel and beyond remain convinced that the traditional model of the Middle East peace process has come very close to success in recent decades. But the model of change embodied in the Oslo Accords failed, and if tried again, it will fail again. Only a fundamentally different approach to change—call it bottom-up rather than top-down—can end the underlying conflict.

Over the past three millennia, China has made three attempts to project its economic pow-er westward. The first began in the second century BC, during the Han dynasty, when China’s imperial rulers developed the ancient Silk Road to trade with the far-off residents of Central Asia and the Mediterranean basin; the fall of the Mongol empire and the rise of European maritime trading eventually rendered that route obsolete.

Just a few years ago, Latin America was on a roll. Its economies, riding on the back of the Chinese juggernaut, were flourishing. Today the picture looks very different. Latin America’s economies are grinding to a halt. Yet on one count at least, the lands south of the Rio Grande are faring better than ever: Latin Americans are denouncing corruption as never before. In decades past, residents of the region seemed resigned to the problem, treating it as an ordinary, if lamentable, part of everyday life.

On June 2, three North Korean restaurant workers who fled from their jobs in China arrived in South Korea. In April, another 13 restaurant workers made a similar escape. The workers were part of a North Korean initiative to earn cash for the regime when aid from the Soviet Union dried up and a massive famine struck in the 1990s. The regime continues to send its citizens to work overseas and bring in revenue for the state.

Ancient Rome was a village that grew into a world empire. At the peak of its territorial reach, AD 117, it stretched from the British Isles to Mesopotamia and from the Rhine to the Sahara. Its history spans more than a millennium. Before the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the late fifth century, Romans enjoyed a standard of living not seen again in the West until the mid-nineteenth century. They had flush toilets, granite countertops, indoor heating, and even cosmetic dentistry.

Racial tensions have been at the center of American political debate recently, but the story of racial and ethnic division is actually a global one. So for the March/April issue, we did a deep dive into racial issues in comparative and historical perspective.

The Western business community is optimistic that Xi could begin a push for long-awaited reforms. It shouldn't be.

Getting smallholders connected.

At the end of September, Russia began conducting air strikes in Syria, ostensibly to combat terrorist groups. The strikes constitute Russia’s biggest intervention in the Middle East in decades. Its unanticipated military foray into Syria has transformed the civil war there into a proxy US-Russian conflict and has raised the stakes in the ongoing standoff between Moscow and Washington.

At the end of World War II, the United Kingdom built memorials to every military branch save one.

Several commentators have suggested that U.S. President Donald Trump should take any efforts to warm relations with Russia one step further and try to enlist Moscow’s help in balancing a rising China. The problem for Trump is that Sino-Russian ties have been improving more or less steadily since the waning years of the Cold War.

A hundred years after World War I, new accounts of the drama help listeners navigate the intricacies of European politics and the political and diplomatic maneuverings that kicked off the war. Yet there is still no consensus on its origins or lessons.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian military rotted away. In one of the most dramatic campaigns of peacetime demilitarization in world history, from 1988 to 1994, Moscow’s armed forces shrank from five mil-lion to one million personnel. As the Kremlin’s defense expenditures plunged from around $246 billion in 1988 to $14 billion in 1994, the government with-drew some 700,000 servicemen from Afghanistan, Germany, Mongolia, and eastern Europe.

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.

The world has learned a lot from the financial crisis, but the central lesson is an old one: never grow complacent about the prospect of financial disaster.

Since Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president on November 8, the liberal commentariat has been sounding the alarm on the fate of the international order: the Pax Americana is over. Four years after dismissing American decline as a myth, Robert Kagan now claims we’re nearing the “end of the 70-year-old U.S. world order.” Ian Buruma laments that those who voted for Trump and Brexit wish to “pull down the pillars” of liberal internationalism and retreat into isolation.

Donald Trump is an unlikely populist. The Republican nominee for US president inherited a fortune, boasts about his wealth and his many properties, shuttles between his exclusive resorts and luxury hotels, and has adopted an economic plan that would, among other things, slash tax rates for rich people like himself. But a politician does not have to live among people of modest means, or even tout policies that would boost their incomes, to articulate their grievances and gain their support.

In the years since the global financial crisis of 2008 engulfed the world and the United States fell into the Great Recession, the panic has subsided and Western economies have recovered to varying degrees. But the downturn’s effects have proved profound and lasting, and serious risks persist for the global economy. The recovery has been slow, inflation levels remain below the targets set by central banks, and total debt levels are much higher than before the crisis began.