Realism, long associated with authoritarian European statesmen such as Otto von Bismarck and Klemens von Metternich, has been consistently portrayed as antithetical to American democratic traditions. During the Cold War, statesmen such as Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski were depicted as amoral or even harbouring, in the case of the latter, loyalties to Poland rather than […]
During the Cold War, the United States had strong interests in ensuring the Middle East was not dominated by the Soviet Union… But today, there is no threat to the region from any hegemon. Not only that, but also the world energy balance of power has shifted dramatically. With a vastly different geopolitical reality, U.S. […]
The waiting, wondering, and vacillating are over: Joe Biden is getting into the presidential race, and he has every intention of fighting like hell to kick Donald Trump off the White House grounds. In a three-minute video announcing his candidacy, the former vice president was emphatic and determined—so much so that you could be forgiven […]
One of the most celebrated diplomats of his generation, Richard Holbrooke helped normalise U.S. relations with China; served as U.S. ambassador to a newly reunified Germany and then to the United Nations; and, most famously, negotiated the 1995 Dayton peace agreement that ended the war in Bosnia. But he began and ended his career struggling […]
Diplomacy may be one of the world’s oldest professions, but it’s also one of the most misunderstood. It’s mostly a quiet endeavour, less swaggering than unrelenting, oftentimes operating in back channels, out of sight and out of mind. U.S. President Donald Trump’s disdain for professional diplomacy and its practitioners—along with his penchant for improvisational flirtations […]
The Trump show is endlessly distracting in a way that would be familiar to any connoisseur of the Latin-American strongman. The Wednesday-afternoon Oval Office appearance alone had enough fodder for countless talk-show segments: Trump grounds the airplanes! Trump lies about building the wall! Trump lies about being vindicated in the special-counsel probe —even when a […]
…there’s no question that the United States is at a level of political polarization unseen for many decades. Most of the attention to this phenomenon has focused on its effects on America’s internal politics, and some observers are clearly worried that the core institutions of the country might be at risk—understandable, given President Donald Trump’s open hostility towards some […]
President Trump appears to be getting advice on China policy from World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). It’s all starting to resemble a pro-wrestling match where one wrestler gets his opponent in a headlock, throws him to the ground and has him pinned—for a long two seconds—until he miraculously escapes. It’s good theater, but it’s tough on […]
The expectations were enormous: Perhaps Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un would, at a summit in Vietnam, finally declare an end to the Korean War…Instead, the second meeting between the two leaders ended in failure on Thursday, with a table set for a leaders’ lunch abandoned, a signing ceremony scrapped, and a terse statement from […]
US President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un have wrapped up the first day of a summit in Hanoi that the American president hopes will get Pyongyang to curtail its decades-long push for nuclear weapons. The two-day summit comes after their first meeting in Singapore more than eight months ago, and is taking place […]
looking beyond borders 