The information revolution has seeded a growing ecosystem of open-source intelligence services. Firms such as Recorded Future, DigitalGlobe, and McKinsey offer not only intelligence-like products, such as news aggregation and data analytics, but also such services as on-demand overhead satellite imagery and long-term strategic forecasting that were previously the purview of governments alone.
Read Here | Foreign Affairs
The Covid-19 pandemic has given rise to various new, repurposed or newly popular terms. The newest entry to the pandemic lexicon might be “vaccine diplomacy,” with some countries using their vaccines to strengthen regional ties and enhance their own power and global status.
Read Here | Asia Times
Climate has moved from a lower-rung priority to a top-tier one—ushering in a new era of climate statecraft. What this means in practice is how countries employ a climate-driven agenda around trade, finance, development, and national and international security, as well as the tools of state management.
Read Here | Foreign Policy
While Joe Biden is right to reject many aspects of Donald Trump’s toxic presidency, he should avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Only by recognizing the weaknesses of liberal diplomatic norms can the Biden administration advance the innovative, effective diplomacy the world so desperately needs.
Read Here | Project Syndicate
Given the current bipartisan US antipathy toward China, President-elect Joe Biden is unlikely to change the fundamental tenets of President Donald Trump’s hard-line policy. But if Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping each invest a modest amount of political capital, they may be able to de-escalate bilateral tensions.
Read Here | Project Syndicate
The visit of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper to India for the third India-US 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue coupled with the recent Quad consultations between the two sides have refocused attention on the ties between two of the world’s biggest, and perhaps most consequential, democracies.
Read Here | Asia Times
For decades, Washington think tanks were vital to a virtuous revolving door. Young policy professionals, both Democrats and Republicans, would serve time in government, then remove themselves to think tanks where they further honed their professional skills and rethought issues, then go back into government at a slightly higher level. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 put a spike in that revolving door, shattering its mechanism.
Read Here | The Spectator
Global institutions need a deliberate and large-scale renovation; it is now time to construct a new architecture and usher in a more modern and streamlined multilateral skyline. Some institutions need to be replaced or thoroughly morphed into new ones. Some need to be pruned. The most effective and nimble ones need to be scaled up or have their model applied to more current and pressing mandates.
Contemporary understanding of middle-power diplomacy is tied to a bygone era. Behavioural characteristics like activist diplomacy, coalition building, niche diplomacy and good international citizenship, which underpin norm entrepreneurship, always ultimately relied upon the support of the dominant power. That era may be over, and hopes of a revival rest on the illusion of a middle-power moment. So, what happens to middle powers after the middle-power moment?
What a difference two decades make. In the early years of this century, the world appeared to be moving toward a single, seamless order under U.S. leadership. Today the world is fragmenting, and authoritarian challengers, led by China and Russia, are chipping away at American influence in East Asia, eastern Europe, and the Middle East.
