To see Tehran as helplessly riven with antagonistic factions is misguided. Under concerted pressure from Trump, the separate parts of Iran’s regime have closed ranks. Western policymakers must accept the reality that Iran conducts its security policy as a unified state actor.
Beijing is expanding its ability to influence societies around the world through its exercise of soft power. This is best exemplified by its Belt and Road Initiative, but there is another, more stealthy effort occurring along-side it that has potentially profound implications for Chinese foreign policy—Beijing’s growing influence in the Western press. China’s state-run media companies are expanding their integration with Western news outlets and having some surprisingly significant impacts.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi with the President of United States of America Donald Trump at a rally in Houston on September 22, 2019. Photo/PIB
US President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi exchanged warm words of friendship in Texas at a rare mass rally for a foreign leader. Around 50,000 people gathered for what Mr Trump called a “profoundly historic event” on Sunday in Houston. The “Howdy, Modi!” event was billed as one of the largest ever receptions of a foreign leader in the US.
Corbyn is the most left-wing leader the Labour Party has seen in decades, and his plans for the country, if elected, are equally as radical: The 70-year-old has pledged to oversee a revolution of the British economy, complete with the nationalization of public services such as intercity rail, water, and mail delivery, as well as the reversal of a decade of painful public-spending cuts imposed following the 2008 financial crisis.
For many years, the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in September was a centerpiece of U.S. global leadership…But when presidents and prime ministers gather in New York starting this week, they will do so under the auspices of an organization that is undergoing a profound transformation. The United States has let go of the wheel, and Beijing stands poised to take hold of it.
In the nine months since Jim Mattis resigned as defense secretary, one man has become the public leader of President Trump’s national security policy: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. In the absence of a confirmed leader at the Pentagon, Pompeo had been unusually visible in public scenes — and decisions — typically associated with the secretary of defense.
Mr. Bolton’s legacy is not of destruction overseas, but dysfunction in Washington. To pursue his own policy agenda and serve an erratic president, in just 17 months Mr. Bolton effectively destroyed the National Security Council system, the intricate structure that governed American foreign policy since the end of World War II. Mr. Bolton’s most lasting legacy will be dismantling the structure that has kept American foreign policy from collapsing into chaos, and finally unshackling an irregular commander-in-chief.
Authoritarianism – from Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, who died last week, to the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos – always goes wrong. The list of failures is long, including China’s Mao Zedong, Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. George Orwell’s prescient warnings in Animal Farm are confirmed again and again. The intriguing question is why so many both inside and outside a country suspend their thinking capacity and collude in the despot’s narrative.
For all the acrimony in Washington today, the city’s foreign policy establishment is settling on a rare bipartisan consensus: that the world has entered a new era of great-power competition. The struggle between the United States and other great powers, the emerging consensus holds, will fundamentally shape geopolitics going forward, for good or ill.
Photo: White House/Flickr
Donald Trump’s long-term impact on US foreign policy is uncertain. But the debate about it has revived a longstanding question: Are major historical outcomes the product of human choices or are they largely the result of overwhelming structural factors produced by economic and political forces beyond our control?
