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In this briefing, originally published March 27, 2025, Fred Harter looks at the potential for fresh conflict in Ethiopia.

Ethiopia, Eritrea and Tigray Are Back on a War Footing

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia—A political crisis in Ethiopia’s war-battered Tigray escalated dramatically in March, bringing armed men out onto the streets and raising fears of a fresh conflict in the still-fragile region. At its heart is a power struggle between Debretsion Gebremichael, chairman of the dominant Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF, party, and Getachew Reda, Tigray’s interim regional president and Debretsion’s deputy in the TPLF.

But in the background lurks a potentially more explosive dynamic: the escalating rivalry between Ethiopia’s federal government and Eritrea, which united in the war against Tigray in 2020-2022 but fell out over the peace deal that ended it. More than two years later, tensions between the two are spiking over Ethiopia’s quest to end its status as the world’s most-populous landlocked country. ... Listen to hear the rest, or read it here:

https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/ethiopia-eritrea-tigray-war/

 

Israel has resumed attacks in force on Gaza this week, breaking a two-month ceasefire and undermining U.S. President Donald Trump's claim that he would end both the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine conflicts quickly and easily.
To some, Trump's seeming empowerment of both Israel and Russia, coming on the heels of former President Joe Biden's earlier failure to deter Russian aggression or use U.S. leverage with Israel to prevent the flattening of Gaza, only proves that the international rules-based order Trump is openly seeking to flout may have never been as sturdy as it seemed.
But as I put it in an interview on the American Prestige podcast last week, the rules-based order may be weaker than many may want, but it is stronger than they may think. It can even withstand efforts to break it by the U.S., which disregards rules and institutions - and permits Washington's adversaries and allies to do the same - at its peril.
To be sure, as one of the podcast's hosts pointed out, when even a U.S. president who defends the rules-based order, like Biden, fails to bring an ally that is committing crimes against humanity to heel - to say nothing of an advocate of "might makes right," like Trump, failing to do so - it certainly increases the likelihood those crimes will continue. That might appear to confirm the view that rules matter little in international affairs, even when great powers pay lip service to them.
But part of the problem is the gaps in the rules-based order itself. In this case, international law does not currently compel third parties to withhold aid from the parties to a conflict committing aggression or crimes against humanity, or come to the aid of those that are the victims of either. That should change - and it could if a Treaty on Crimes Against Humanity were adopted.
To be sure, such rules do exist with regard to genocide, which is a very specific crime defined as any one of several acts when those acts are carried out with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
The Genocide Convention not only prohibits such acts - including but not limited to wilful killing, bodily harm and infliction of conditions on a group calculated to ensure their destruction - but also requires third parties to prevent and punish such acts.
This was the basis of South Africa's effort at the International Court of Justice to seek a stay of hostilities in Gaza until the court made a legal determination over whether Israel was guilty of the crime of genocide there: South Africa claimed it was required under international law to do what it could to prevent or punish what it viewed as a potential genocide, rather than to stand by.
But scholars and legal experts are split on whether Israel's atrocities in Gaza constitute genocide. A September 2024 report from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights argues that Israel's actions are consistent with the characteristics of genocide. So do some rights groups and numerous legal scholars. Others have argued that the crimes fall below this threshold.
The International Court of Justice has yet to rule on the matter, while the International Criminal Court's investigation into the situation in Gaza does not include charges of genocide.
The debate as a whole underscores how high the bar is set for proving a party is guilty of genocide, largely because it is a crime of "intent." If a prosecutor can't show that the acts were undertaken with the actual intent to destroy the group as such, they don't qualify. And if they don't qualify, then third-party complicity in or incitement of these acts could not trigger criminal prosecutions under the Genocide Convention against leaders of the relevant third-party state.
And yet regardless of whether Israel's acts meet the strict definition of genocide, no observer familiar with international humanitarian law could conclude that Israel is not at minimum committing what could reasonably be p...

French President Emmanuel Macron is comfortably ahead in the polls for the first round of France’s presidential election, which takes place Sunday. With far-right candidate Marine Le Pen likely to finish second, the second-round runoff is shaping up to be a repeat of 2017.

But while Macron won in a landslide in 2017 with more than 60 percent of the vote, this time the gap is much narrower, with less than 10 percent separating Macron and Le Pen in opinion polls and the momentum clearly in Le Pen’s favor.

Macron came into office on an ambitious and popular foreign policy agenda that portrayed the European Union not as a problem, but as a solution, particularly to the pressures the country faces as a result of globalization. But Macron has often struggled to communicate his vision to the French electorate, even as he suffers from his image of being detached from the population’s everyday problems, especially the spiraling cost of living.

On this week’s episode of Trend Lines, Célia Belin, a visiting fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe, joins Peter Dörrie to discuss how foreign policy is intersecting with electoral politics in France’s presidential election, and what a possible second term for Macron—or a first term for Le Pen—might look like.

Relevant articles:

Monsieur Fixit

The Making of Macron’s Worldview

For Macron, Being Right on European Strategic Autonomy Isn’t Enough

France’s Security Law Debacle Shows the Dangers of Macron’s ‘Le Pen-Lite’ Agenda

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.  

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com .

Plastics, e-waste and other hazardous waste are routinely traded across borders in what amounts to an “out of sight, out of mind” approach for the rich countries that produce them. The story is more complicated for the communities that receive and dispose of the waste. 

Hazardous waste poses risks to the health of local communities and the environment, spurring attempts to ban its movement across borders. But in countries like Turkey, Vietnam and Ghana, waste is often processed to extract its residual value. The important source of income it provides explains why those efforts have been of limited success and questionable usefulness.

To discuss the risks but also the complexity of the international trade of hazardous wastes, Kate O’Neill joins Peter Dörrie on Trend Lines. O’Neill is a professor at the University of California Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, where she specializes in researching waste, the circular economy and global environmental governance. 

Relevant articles on WPR:  

Cuts to Waste Imports in East Asia Put Pressure on World’s Producers 

Toxic Waste Spill in Ivory Coast Exposes 'Dark Underbelly' of Globalization 

E-Waste Is Taking Over the World. 5G Will Make It Even Worse 

Can the World Win the War on Plastic? 

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie

In many countries, COVID-19 has robbed an entire generation of at least a year of education and child care, not to speak of many social connections. Climate change is already threatening the wellbeing of young people around the world and will negatively impact them and future generations for decades to come. And the impacts of many social problems like unemployment and the rising cost of housing are especially severe for younger people.

What would the world look like if policymakers gave priority in their decision-making to long-term consequences over short-term political expediency?

U.N. Next Generation Fellow and WPR columnist Aishwarya Machani joins Peter Dörrie on Trend Lines to discuss what the world looks like from the perspective of a young activist today and how to make young people’s voices heard in finding solutions to the crises that disproportionately affect them.

Relevant articles on WPR:

A Youth Activist Wish List to Make 2022 a Year of Breakthroughs 

Young People Should Have a Say on COVID-19 Policy 

Give Young Changemakers the Funding They Need 

There Will Be No Pandemic Recovery Without Tackling Youth Unemployment 

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’s 10th Review Conference has been postponed repeatedly due to the coronavirus pandemic, perhaps a symbol of the degree to which global efforts to curb the proliferation of nuclear weapons and reduce global stockpiles have stalled in recent years. North Korea continues to expand its nuclear capabilities, and the U.S., China and Russia are all investing heavily in modernizing their arsenals. And efforts to bring Iran back into compliance with the nonproliferation regime have been set back by the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the multilateral deal known as the JCPOA, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, that contained Tehran’s nuclear program.

But while the NPT Review Conference is sorely needed to resolve these and a host of other outstanding problems regarding the treaty and its implementation, some observers welcomed the postponement, as it gives state parties more time to bridge some of their stark disagreements over the best way forward. 

To discuss these issues and more, Miles Pomper, a senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, joins Peter Dörrie on Trend Lines.

Relevant articles on WPR:

NATO’s Nuclear Deterrent Gets a Reprieve—for Now 

The U.S. Should Rethink Its Approach to Reviving the Iran Nuclear Deal 

China’s Nuclear Build-Up Could Make for a More Dangerous Future 

How the U.S. and Russia Can Go Beyond New START 

Mock amphibious assaults, regular intrusions into Taiwan’s air defense zone and the militarization of artificial islands in the South China Sea are just some of the headlines that China’s military buildup has generated in recent years. Under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, China has combined advances in electronic warfare with state-of-the-art military hardware like ballistic anti-ship missiles, stealth aircraft and aircraft carriers, with the ambitious goal of militarily dominating the South and East China Seas.

This strategy is squarely aimed at undermining the U.S. military’s preeminence in the region, which until now has served as a counterweight to China’s claims of sovereignty over large swathes of ocean in its immediate neighborhood, containing both valuable natural resources and some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. And hovering over it all is the threat that China’s military ambitions pose to Taiwan.

Timothy Heath, senior defense researcher at the RAND corporation in Washington, joins Peter Dörrie on Trend Lines to discuss the implications and unintended consequences of China’s military modernization.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

The U.S.-China Rivalry According to China 

The U.S. Faces Hard Choices on Strategic Ambiguity in Europe and Asia 

The U.S. Should Compete With China and Russia—but Wisely 

South Korea Has Quietly Taken Sides in the U.S.-China Rivalry 

Around the world in recent years, the enthusiastic embrace of globalization has given way to a backlash against liberalized trade. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, that shift toward a generalized closure, both between and within nations, has become almost a default setting, on display in everything from governments’ rush to close borders in response to new variants to hyperpartisan politics that turns policy debates into trench warfare. 

Meanwhile, the pandemic, combined with climate change, has only created added urgency among younger generations to ensure that questions of intergenerational equity are made central to how we address both crises. And all of this is unfolding against the backdrop of an international order in which the taboo against interstate conflict is increasingly fraying.

If there is one reason for hope, it lies in humankind’s resilience and the tendency of all historical developments to set in motion countervailing forces that cause the pendulum once again to swing back in the opposite direction. WPR’s editor-in-chief Judah Grunstein joins Peter Dörrie to discuss the trends that will shape international politics in 2022. 

Relevant Articles on WPR:

• Making Sense of a Year of Contradictions 
• The West’s Border Closure Reflex Comes With a Cost 
• A Youth Activist Wish List to Make 2022 a Year of Breakthroughs 
• Putin Wants to Rewrite the End of the Cold War 
• Globalization’s Perverse Convergence 

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

Earlier this month, senior U.S. and Chinese trade negotiators held a virtual round of talks to discuss concerns over the state of bilateral commercial ties. The meeting came after U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said in public remarks that she would seek “frank conversations” with her Chinese counterpart “that will include discussion over China’s performance under the phase-one agreement,” which was negotiated under former President Donald Trump. The Chinese said they pressed Tai to cancel the tariffs that were imposed by Trump and which so far remain in effect under President Joe Biden.

The dynamic around these talks says a lot about the current state of relations between Washington and Beijing. This week on the Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s Elliot Waldman digs into these issues with Ali Wyne, a senior analyst with the Global Macro practice at the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy. He writes frequently about the U.S.-China relationship, including for WPR.

If you would like to request a full transcript of the episode, please send an email to podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

Relevant Articles on WPR: 

•  

• Competition With China Shouldn’t Dictate U.S. Foreign Policy

• China’s Economic Slowdown Is the Price of Tackling Long-Term Risk

• The U.S. and China Are Both Failing the Global Leadership Test

• The AUKUS Deal Is a Clarifying Moment for Biden’s Foreign Policy

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

According to article 14 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.” But that promise, which was enshrined three years later in the 1951 Refugee Convention, has never been completely honored. In fact, it has been progressively eroded in recent years across the Global North, even as the numbers of refugees and asylum-seekers around the world have swelled. 

Just last month, the Parliament of Denmark passed a law allowing it to relocate asylum-seekers outside Europe while their claims are being processed. A similar measure is under consideration in the United Kingdom, while Australia has long maintained such a policy. Here in the United States, former President Donald Trump’s administration enacted a policy known as “Remain in Mexico,” under which asylum-seekers were forced to wait across the border in Mexico, often in unsafe environments, while their claims were processed. 

Today on Trend Lines, Khalid Koser, executive director of the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund, joins WPR’s Elliot Waldman to discuss the past, present and potential future of the right to asylum, and what it might take to revive this critical component of the international legal system. If you would like to request a full transcript of the episode, please send an email to podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

• Has the World Learned the Lessons of the 2015 Refugee Crisis?

• African Migration to Europe Is a Lifeline, not a Threat

• Biden’s Immigration Imperatives

• Refugees Are Being Ignored Amid the COVID-19 Crisis

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

Around the world, the coronavirus pandemic has taken an especially high toll on women and girls. From public health to education to jobs and livelihoods, studies have revealed a gender disparity in the impact of COVID-19 that is particularly wide in lower- and middle-income countries. Yet for all the work that’s been done, experts say there’s still a lot they don’t know about how these impacts are being felt across different communities.

To help address this problem, the Center for Global Development recently launched a new initiative to analyze the gendered impacts of the pandemic and study policy responses around the world with the aim of addressing the long-term causes of gender inequality. The leader of the initiative, Megan O’Donnell, discussed her work with WPR’s Elliot Waldman in this episode that originally ran on February 3, 2021 on the Trend Lines podcast. 

Relevant Articles on WPR:

The Importance of Gender Inclusion in COVID-19 Responses

‘Don’t We Deserve More?’ Mexico’s Spike in Femicides Sparks a Women’s Uprising

To Save the Economy From COVID-19, Protect Informal Workers

Another Victim of COVID-19: Sustainable Development

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

Three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has reestablished itself as a force to be reckoned with on the global stage, intervening forcefully not only in former Soviet republics on its periphery, but also in global hotspots like Syria and Libya. Despite Russia’s resurgence, some Western leaders have a noticeable tendency to dismiss it as an overrated, overhyped power. John McCain, the late U.S. senator, famously quipped that Russia is a “gas station masquerading as a country.” U.S. President Joe Biden may have been channeling McCain when he said in July that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “sitting on top of an economy that has nuclear weapons and oil wells and nothing else.”

In a recently published book entitled “Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order,” Kathryn Stoner, a specialist on Russia at Stanford University, challenges the conventional view of Moscow as a weak and declining power, arguing that assessing Russian capabilities requires looking beyond traditional metrics of power. She joins WPR’s Elliot on the Trend Lines podcast this week.

If you would like to request a full transcript of the episode, please send an email to podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

Relevant Articles on WPR: 

• Putin’s Big Plans for Russia’s Far East Aren’t Panning Out
• Afghanistan Will Put Russia’s Regional Ambitions to the Test
• Like It or Not, Biden Will Have to Live With Russia’s Energy Exports
• For the U.S. and Russia, ‘Stable and Predictable’ Would Be a Good Start

 

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

In a scenario that evokes memories of the period immediately following the end of the Cold War, a Central European nation is locked in a battle to fend off Russian influence while safeguarding its democracy. But this time around, there is a critical twist: As Romania strives to maintain the integrity of its representative government, one of the states seemingly working against it is the United States.
This weekend, Romania's election authority, the Central Electoral Bureau, disqualified far-right populist candidate Calin Georgescu from participating in May's rerun of the presidential election, ruling that he had "violated the fundamental obligation to defend democracy." Georgescu won the first round of the election in November, but Romania's Constitutional Court later annulled the results after intelligence reports alleged that he had benefited from an aggressive Russian-sponsored propaganda
campaign on the social media platform TikTok.
Almost immediately after Sunday's announcement, Georgescu appealed the election authority's decision, calling it a "direct blow to the heart of democracy around the world." His supporters took to the streets of Bucharest in protest, attempting to storm the election authority's headquarters. The demonstration quickly descended into violence, leaving four police officers hospitalized.
In just a few months, Georgescu has gone from being a political outsider unknown outside of Romania to being a key figurehead of the global far-right populist movement. His rise has been fueled by savvy online engagement: He has amassed over 700,000 followers on TikTok and 400,000 on Facebook since starting his campaign, allowing him to harness nationalist sentiment, exploit the legacy of Romania's fascist and antisemitic past, and use the ongoing war in Ukraine to push a protectionist agenda.
Georgescu has accused the European Union and NATO of conspiring to block his path to office and has openly praised Romania's historical fascist leaders. His rhetoric has resonated with Romanians who are disillusioned with the country's political elite, while his social media presence has strengthened his appeal among younger voters.
In the aftermath of his disqualification, some of Europe's leading far-right political figures quickly rallied behind Georgescu. Matteo Salvini, Italy's deputy prime minister and leader of the far-right Lega party, condemned the election authority's decision as a "soviet-style EU coup." But Georgescu's most vocal support has come from the United States.
In the aftermath of Georgescu's disqualification, some of Europe's leading far-right political figures quickly rallied behind him. But his most vocal support has come from the United States.
Among his key defenders is Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, and a senior adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump. Taking to X, Musk questioned how a judge could "end democracy in Romania" following the election authority's decision. This was not the first time Musk intervened on Georgescu's behalf.
In late February, Romanian prosecutors launched a criminal investigation into Georgescu, charging him with six offences, including campaign finance violations, support for fascist organizations - illegal in Romania - and fraudulent use of digital technologies. In response, Musk falsely claimed that "the person who won the most votes in the Romanian presidential election" had been arrested, misleading his millions of followers.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance also took a hardline stance, telling the Republican party faithful at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February that Romania no longer shared the United States' values. "You don't have shared values if you cancel elections because you don't like the result," he declared, accusing the Romanian government of silencing its people.
Vance staked out a similar position in early February at the Munich Security Conference, where he shocked those in attendance...

Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne is finishing up a four-nation tour of Southeast Asia this week, having begun her trip in Malaysia before moving on to Cambodia, Vietnam and finally Indonesia. A main goal of the visit is to conduct follow-up talks after Canberra agreed in late October on a new “comprehensive strategic partnership” with the main regional bloc, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Another prominent item on Payne’s agenda is to seek understanding from ASEAN members for Australia’s three-way defense partnership with the U.S. and the U.K., which was just announced in September. Known as AUKUS, the pact calls for Australia to deploy nuclear-propelled attack submarines with British and American assistance.

This week on the Trend Lines podcast, Susannah Patton, a research fellow in the Foreign Policy and Defense Program at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Center, joins WPR’s Elliot Waldman to discuss the mixed reception of AUKUS in Southeast Asia and how ASEAN is positioning itself amid rising tensions between China on one hand, and the U.S. and its allies on the other.

If you would like to request a full transcript of the episode, please send an email to podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

Relevant Articles on WPR: 

• Australia Can’t Get By on Nuclear Subs Alone
• Looming Over the AUKUS Deal Is the Shadow of War
• China’s Growing Influence in Cambodia and Laos Has Vietnam on Edge
• The AUKUS Deal Is a Clarifying Moment for Biden’s Foreign Policy

 

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

The annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, known this year as COP26, is underway in Glasgow, Scotland. High-profile figures from the private sector and philanthropic organizations, as well as national political leaders, have all gathered to discuss ways to reduce emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases—all while the scientific community warns that the window to avert a global catastrophe is rapidly closing.

Today on Trend Lines, Stewart Patrick, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a weekly columnist for WPR, joins Elliot Waldman to discuss the latest developments from Glasgow and the sticking points that are preventing more ambitious global action to curb emissions.

If you would like to request a full transcript of the episode, please send an email to podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

Relevant Articles on WPR: 

• The Long-Awaited Climate Emergency Is Now
• The COP26 Summit Won’t Be Effective If It Isn’t Inclusive
• The Climate Crisis Is Also a Global Health Crisis
• The EU Green Deal Just Raised the Bar on Climate Policy

 

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

A new agreement negotiated under the auspices of the G-20 and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development aims to crack down on tax havens by subjecting the world’s largest and most profitable multinational corporations to a minimum corporate tax rate of 15 percent. The deal has been agreed by 136 countries and jurisdictions, collectively representing more than 90 percent of the global economy. The OECD is hoping it will become effective by 2023.

Many economists and commentators argue that such a deal is long overdue, given the ability of many gigantic corporations to avoid paying taxes on all or most of their profits by locating their operations in low-tax jurisdictions. But as with all things tax-related, critics contend that the devil is in the details, and that the agreement in practice does little to aid lower-income countries.

This week on Trend Lines, WPR’s Elliot Waldman digs into the substance of the agreement with Martin Hearson, [https://martinhearson.net/] a research fellow at the U.K.-based Institute of Development Studies and the International Center for Tax and Development, where he leads the international tax program. He’s the author of “Imposing Standards: The North-South Dimension to Global Tax Politics.”

If you would like to request a full transcript of the episode, please send an email to podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

Relevant Articles on WPR: 

• Africa’s Pandora Papers Revelations Are About More Than ‘Legality’

• Rather Than Retaliate, Biden Should Work With France Over Its ‘Tech Tax’

• The G-20 Was Made for Moments Like This

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

Earlier this month, senior U.S. and Chinese trade negotiators held a virtual round of talks to discuss concerns over the state of bilateral commercial ties. The meeting came after U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said in public remarks that she would seek “frank conversations” with her Chinese counterpart “that will include discussion over China’s performance under the phase-one agreement,” which was negotiated under former President Donald Trump. The Chinese said they pressed Tai to cancel the tariffs that were imposed by Trump and which so far remain in effect under President Joe Biden.

The dynamic around these talks says a lot about the current state of relations between Washington and Beijing. This week on the Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s Elliot Waldman digs into these issues with Ali Wyne, a senior analyst with the Global Macro practice at the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy. He writes frequently about the U.S.-China relationship, including for WPR.

If you would like to request a full transcript of the episode, please send an email to podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

Relevant Articles on WPR: 

•  

• Competition With China Shouldn’t Dictate U.S. Foreign Policy

• China’s Economic Slowdown Is the Price of Tackling Long-Term Risk

• The U.S. and China Are Both Failing the Global Leadership Test

• The AUKUS Deal Is a Clarifying Moment for Biden’s Foreign Policy

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

With its rich natural gas reserves and strategic location, the Gulf monarchy of Qatar has long played an important role in regional and global diplomacy that belies its small size. It has mediated or facilitated a number of sensitive negotiations, including the talks that led to the peace agreement the United States signed in February 2020 with the Taliban. Since then, and even after the Taliban overthrew the internationally backed government in Kabul this summer, officials in Doha have continued to exercise influence in Afghanistan.

Qatar’s diplomatic efforts have not always been smooth sailing, however. For more than three years, it had to weather a blockade that was imposed on the country by a group of countries led by neighboring Saudi Arabia and the UAE, fellow members of the Gulf Cooperation Council. That embargo was only lifted in January of this year.

Today on Trend Lines, Annelle Sheline, a research fellow in the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, joins WPR’s Elliot Waldman to discuss the unique role that Qatar plays in the Middle East and in the broader Islamic world, as well as the complicated dynamics in the region that it must navigate as it does so.

If you would like to request a full transcript of the episode, please send an email to podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

Relevant Articles on WPR: 

• Long-Delayed Elections Will Be a Key Test for Qatar—and the Gulf

   

• After the Qatar Boycott, Can the GCC Come Together?

   

• As Qatar Readies for the 2022 World Cup, Migrant Workers Continue to Die

   

• Saudi Arabia’s Economic Ambitions Could Fuel Gulf Rivalries

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the United States and its allies enjoyed a near monopoly on economic, military and ideological power in a suddenly unipolar world. Over the decade and a half that followed, the U.S. emerged as the dominant power atop a liberal international order in large part shaped by its preferences. 

But the rise of China and resurgence of Russia as great power competitors has challenged Washington’s global leadership role, while offering new options to countries seeking alternatives to the U.S.-led order. That coincides with the emergence within the U.S. and other Western democracies of movements questioning the foundations of that order. Combined, these trends have significantly weakened the United States’ ability to maintain its hegemonic position in a rapidly transforming international landscape.

This week on a special edition of Trend Lines, Daniel Nexon joins WPR weekly columnist Howard French to discuss the rapidly changing global order and the United States’ place in it. Nexon is a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. With Alexander Cooley, he is the co-author of “Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order.”

If you would like to request a full transcript of the episode, please send an email to podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

• The U.S. Still Makes for a Tough Competitor Against China

   

• The U.S. and China Are Both Failing the Global Leadership Test

   

• America’s ‘Return’ Might Not Be Enough to Revive the West

• The Liberal World Order Is Dying. What Comes Next?

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

The government of Lithuania caused a stir this summer when it announced that it would allow Taiwan to open a de facto embassy in the capital, Vilnius, with plans to open a reciprocal Lithuanian representative office in Taipei. China responded by withdrawing its ambassador to Vilnius and demanding that Lithuania do the same. And in May, the Lithuanian parliament passed a resolution labeling China's treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang as a “genocide.”

China is not the only authoritarian power that Lithuania is facing off with. Vilnius hosts the Belarusian opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who fled her home country last year after running against the dictator Alexander Lukashenko in a rigged election.

This week on Trend Lines, Edward Lucas, a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and a former senior editor at The Economist, joins WPR’s Elliot Waldman to discuss the roots of these recent moves by Lithuania, and how the country always finds itself leading the charge against powerful authoritarian states.

If you would like to request a full transcript of the episode, please send an email to podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

• Lithuania’s Conservatives Return to Power by Ditching Austerity
• Are China’s Inroads Into Central and Eastern Europe a Trojan Horse?
• How Lithuania Is Doubling Down on NATO to Counter Russia Threat
• NATO Is Focusing on the Wrong Russian Threat in Eastern Europe

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

According to a report released last week, 2020 was the deadliest year on record for environmental and land rights activists around the world. The human rights organization Global Witness recorded 227 killings of such activists a tally which it said was almost certainly an undercount. 

As the report makes clear, the victims were most often killed while resisting the activities of extractive industries on their land: logging, mining, the clearing of forests for agribusiness and other environmentally destructive activities that fuel the climate crisis. Of the confirmed lethal attacks, the highest number was recorded in Colombia, and nearly three-fourths of the incidents documented in the report took place in Latin America.

Today on Trend Lines, Gimena Sánchez, director for the Andes at the Washington Office on Latin America, joins WPR’s Elliot Waldman to talk about what’s driving this violence and what can be done about it. For more on the struggles of environmental and Indigenous rights activists and the challenges they face in Colombia, check out WOLA’s podcast, “With Leaders There Are Peace.”

If you would like to request a full transcript of the episode, please send an email to podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

• Colombia’s Shaky Peace Deal Needs Biden’s Support

   

• Underlying Colombia’s Protests, ‘an Astonishing Level of Inequality’

   

• ‘In Many Ways, the Conflict Never Ended.’ Ongoing Violence Threatens Colombia’s Peace

   

• Colombia’s Duque is Presiding Over a ‘Massive Backpedaling’ on Indigenous Rights

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

The history of Europe’s Age of Exploration and Empire usually follows a familiar narrative. Starting in the late 15th century, European explorers set out to find maritime trade routes to the lucrative spice and textile markets of Asia. Happening by chance upon the “New World” of the Americas, they quickly established colonies whose wealth, mainly in the form of gold and silver, combined with advances in military technology, propelled what would become known as the West to centuries of global dominance that has only begun to wane today. In this narrative, Africa and Africans are all but invisible, except as a tragic footnote when it comes to the history and legacy of slavery.

WPR columnist Howard French’s fifth and latest book, “Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War,” convincingly argues that almost everything about this familiar narrative is wrong. Far from being peripheral to the Age of Exploration, Africa was in fact the central focus of its early period. And far from being anecdotal to the wealth and power generated by Europe’s colonies in the Americas, Africans were the irreplaceable producers of it.

This week on Trend Lines, Howard French joins WPR’s Judah Grunstein to discuss “Born in Blackness,” which will be released on Oct.12 and is already available for pre-order. Howard is a career foreign correspondent and global affairs writer. From 1990 to 2008, he reported overseas for The New York Times, serving as bureau chief for Central America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Japan and the Koreas, and China. He is a member of the board of the Columbia Journalism Review and a professor at the Columbia Journalism School. His website is HowardWFrench.com, his Twitter handle is @hofrench, and his weekly WPR column appears every Wednesday.

If you would like to request a full transcript of the episode, please send an email to podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

• African Urbanization Is a Matter of Global Importance

   

• Haiti’s Crisis Is Familiar. Its History, Less So

   

• Africa’s ‘Big States Crisis’ Has Deep Historical Roots

   

• Africa’s ‘Demographic Dividend’ Won’t Pay Off Without Purpose and Policy 

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

The 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly will kick off next week in New York, and over the course of the following week, the assembly will host speeches from leaders and representatives of U.N. member states. The highlight will be U.S. President Joe Biden’s first address to the U.N. since taking office in January, but as with previous years’ diplomatic confabs, there will be plenty of developments to keep an eye on.

This week on Trend Lines, Richard Gowan, the U.N. director at the International Crisis Group and a former WPR columnist, joins Elliot Waldman to preview Biden’s speech, as well as other elements of the UNGA’s packed agenda. If you would like to request a full transcript of the episode, please send an email to podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

• Biden’s Honeymoon at the U.N. and the Conflict That Ended It

• The Four Contending Approaches to Multilateralism Under Biden

• An Insider’s Guide to U.N. Security Council Diplomacy in 2021

• Four Ways Biden Can Reinvigorate the U.N.

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

Saudi Arabia is in the middle of a diplomatic blitz. From hosting yesterday's talks between Washington and Kyiv over the war in Ukraine to positioning the kingdom as central to the "day after" plans for postwar Gaza and offering to help deconflict tensions between the U.S. and Iran, Riyadh appears to be everywhere.
This "peace push" is tethered to the political agenda of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS - namely, his effort to rehabilitate his own image while positioning the kingdom at the forefront of Middle East geopolitics and casting Saudi Arabia as a constructive player on the international stage.
At its core, this international push by Saudi Arabia is intimately linked to internal politics inside the kingdom, particularly MBS' efforts to preserve and expand his own power. MBS is spearheading a new hypernationalist project designed to restructure the country's domestic "ruling bargain" and transform Riyadh's global image. Almost every Saudi policy at home and abroad is a byproduct of this new project as well as MBS' ultimate imperatives of regime preservation and power projection.
Critical to this effort is the restructuring of the Saudi economy toward a sustainable footing in anticipation of a future of declining oil revenues. MBS' ambitious economic plan, Vision 2030, is the economic foundation of his new nationalist project, aimed at establishing Saudi Arabia as the major economic hub of the Middle East and a lucrative market for international capital.
For MBS, the success of this nationalist project is existential. It is the new autocratic foundation on which the crown prince - the kingdom's de facto ruler who has already amassed more power than any individual in the history of the Saudi state - hopes to base his authority. But the success of this domestic vision depends on more than just absolute control at home. It is intertwined with regional and international objectives, making it also the driver of Saudi foreign policy.
At the regional level, MBS needs calm to focus on his domestic agenda. This is why he has shifted from an aggressive foreign policy, epitomized by the Saudi intervention in Yemen in 2015, toward an emphasis on de-escalation beginning roughly in 2020. In particular, Saudi Arabia has focused heavily on deconfliction with Iran, its chief regional adversary with which it had severed relations in 2016. In 2023, after a period of diplomatic engagement, Riyadh and Tehran reestablished formal relations.
The two sides have continued to pursue their delicate détente since then. This should not be interpreted as a cessation of long-standing strategic competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran, but rather as opportunistic maneuvering by both parties, given the changing regional and international contexts as well as both sides' increased concern with pressing domestic issues.
The success of Mohammed bin Salman's domestic vision is intertwined with regional and international objectives, making it also the driver of Saudi foreign policy.
Recently, concern in Riyadh over the prospects of a region-wide conflict have grown considerably in the wake of the war in Gaza and rising tensions between Israel, Iran and the United States. Compounding these heightened tensions are concerns over Iran's nuclear program, with Tehran now closer to being able to manufacture a nuclear weapon than any point since its uranium enrichment program was discovered in the early 2000s. Fearful that a war between Israel, Iran and the U.S.
would consume and destabilize the entire region, Riyadh is offering to mediate between Tehran and Washington, hoping that it can prevent such an outcome.
MBS is also keen on asserting Saudi Arabia's central role in shaping the Middle East's geostrategic landscape. This has been particularly apparent over the past year and a half, after the war in Gaza brought the Israel-Palestine conflict back to the forefront of regional geopolitics. Before Hamas' attack against Israel on Oct.
7, 2023...

Most African countries have fared relatively well in their responses to the coronavirus pandemic, reporting rates of infection and mortality that are far below those seen across much of Europe and the Americas. Yet Africa is expected to take a huge economic hit from the pandemic and its associated containment measures, with the African Development Bank forecasting that an additional 50 million people could be pushed into extreme poverty across the continent.

Vaccination drives and economic relief packages will certainly be important to contain the damage. But according to author and researcher Efosa Ojomo, emerging-market nations should be aiming to build societies that are more resilient to economic shocks like the pandemic. 

This week on Trend Lines, Ojomo joins WPR’s Elliot Waldman to discuss how the concept of “market-creating innovations” can foster broad-based solutions to poverty and other social problems in the wake of the pandemic. Ojomo is the head of the Global Prosperity research group at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and a co-author of “The Prosperity Paradox: How innovation can lift nations out of poverty.”

Relevant Articles on WPR:

Africa Is a Coronavirus Success Story So Far, If Only the World Would Notice

How Africa’s Surging Technology Sector Can Reach Its Full Potential

Tech Giants Are Engaged in a New Scramble for Africa

The Continued Relevance of Informal Finance in Development

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

Relief efforts are continuing in Haiti following the 7.2-magnitude earthquake that hit the country on Aug. 14, causing widespread destruction in the southern peninsula, near the quake’s epicenter. The death toll has surpassed 2,200, with 344 people still missing, according to the Haitian Civil Protection Agency. More than 12,000 people have been injured and nearly 53,000 houses destroyed. 

The disaster occurred during a period of deep political crisis in Haiti, which took a tragic and unexpected turn when President Jovenel Moise was assassinated on July 7. Before that, Moise had been governing mainly through executive orders due to his failure to organize legislative elections, and he had been facing widespread demands for his resignation due to rampant corruption and mismanagement of the economy under his administration. The current acting president and prime minister, Ariel Henry, had been in office for less than a month when the earthquake occurred.

Given Haiti’s recent history, it is perhaps understandable that headlines about the country in recent years have focused on its cascading crises, now compounded by yet another major natural disaster. Yet too often overlooked in this coverage is the work being done by the country’s vibrant civil society, to put an end to corruption and poor governance and bring about a more just and equitable future for Haiti. This week on Trend Lines, WPR’s Elliot Waldman discusses these efforts with Monique Clesca, a Haitian writer, pro-democracy advocate and former United Nations official who is part of a recently formed group called the Commission to Search for a Haitian Solution to the Crisis.

 

If you would like to support earthquake recovery efforts in Haiti, please consider donating to the relief fund organized by FOKAL, a local NGO.

To request a full transcript of the episode, please send an email to podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

•  

• China’s Demographic Dividend Is Tapering Off

• Japan Says ‘Yes’ to Foreign Workers, but ‘No’ to Immigration

• Africa’s ‘Demographic Dividend’ Won’t Pay Off Without Purpose and Policy

• Women and the Demography-Security Nexus

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

The results of China’s once-a-decade census, released in May after a one-month delay, showed that the population of mainland China grew at an average rate of 0.53 percent each year between 2010 and 2020. The official results contradicted an earlier report by the Financial Times, which indicated the census figures would actually show a population decline.

What is certain, though, is that the combination of higher life expectancies and lower fertility rates poses a huge challenge for East Asia’s largest economy, and for other major economies in the region as well. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore all have population growth rates that are in negative territory or will be in the coming years. It’s an issue with global implications, given the important role that these countries play in the world economy.

This week on Trend Lines, Ronald D. Lee, a demographer and economist at the University of California, Berkeley, joins WPR’s Elliot Waldman to talk about how East Asia is coping with its major demographic changes.

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

•  

• China’s Demographic Dividend Is Tapering Off

• Japan Says ‘Yes’ to Foreign Workers, but ‘No’ to Immigration

• Africa’s ‘Demographic Dividend’ Won’t Pay Off Without Purpose and Policy

• Women and the Demography-Security Nexus

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

2020 will forever be known as the plague year, but it was also a year of increased hunger around the world. That’s according to a multiagency United Nations report released last month, which found that the number of undernourished people in the world rose by 118 million, to a total of about 768 million—nearly one-tenth of the global population. Much of that increase was due to COVID-19, a crisis that “continues to expose weaknesses in our food systems,” the report warned.

Today on Trend Lines, Julie Howard, a senior adviser to the global food security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, joins WPR’s Elliot Waldman to discuss why and how our food systems have become so vulnerable, and what will it take to reverse the trend of increasing hunger.

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

• The Geography of COVID-19 and a Vulnerable Global Food System

• Latin America’s ‘Double Burden’ of Malnutrition: Rising Obesity and Hunger

• Africa’s Crippling Drought Shows the Importance of Climate Change Adaptation

• Zimbabwe Was Already on the Verge of Famine. Then the Coronavirus Hit

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

In recent decades, scientists have identified dozens of new, potentially deadly pathogens that originated among other animal species but have the capacity to infect humans. SARS-COV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is one such zoonotic virus, and humankind’s vulnerability to them is increasing as a result of population growth, globalization, climate change and other processes.

A recently launched project called STOP Spillover aims to anticipate and address the threats posed by zoonotic pathogens. This week on Trend Lines, the director of STOP Spillover, Deborah Kochevar, joins WPR’s Elliot Waldman to discuss some of the latest interventions that are being devised to prevent animal-borne illnesses from spreading among human populations. Kochevar is also dean emerita of the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University. She has a doctor of veterinary medicine degree from Texas A&M University and a Ph.D. in cellular and molecular biology from the University of Texas.

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

• To Prevent Future Pandemics, Start by Protecting Nature

• Now More Than Ever, New Strategies Are Needed to Protect Animal Health

• Earth Day’s New Urgency in the Era of COVID-19

• Four Lessons From a Painful Pandemic Year

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

During his campaign for the presidency last year, Joe Biden pledged to reverse what he called “the failed Trump policies” toward Cuba. But now, Biden’s White House is signaling that it is in no hurry to lift the severe sanctions and other measures imposed on Cuba by former President Donald Trump, much less return to the historic detente with Cuba that was pioneered by Biden’s old boss, former President Barack Obama. 

As the Biden administration bides its time, Cuba’s aging leaders have passed the baton to a new generation. At the Communist Party’s eighth congress last month, Raul Castro stepped down as party chief, marking a transition of power to a new generation of leaders born after the 1959 revolution.  But that new generation was careful to telegraph that it does not plan to change Cuba’s political system or alter the government’s heavy-handed approach to dissent. 

This week on Trend Lines, WPR’s Elliot Waldman is joined by Michael Bustamante, an assistant professor of Latin American History at Florida International University, to discuss the outlook for U.S.-Cuba ties and what the Biden administration’s cautious approach might means for the island. Bustamante’s latest book, just published in March, is “Cuban Memory Wars: Retrospective Politics in Revolution and Exile.”

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

 

• A Simple Reset Won’t Make U.S.-Cuba Ties More Sustainable
• Cuba’s Post-Castro Leaders Must Deliver the Goods
• Cuba’s Economic Crisis Is Spurring Much-Needed Action on Reforms
• How Biden Would Change U.S. Policy in Latin America

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

Over the course of his 12 uninterrupted years as prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu left a profound mark on Israel’s foreign policy. Since taking the reins from him last month, his successor, Naftali Bennett, has tried to capitalize on some of Netanyahu’s accomplishments—such as the diplomatic normalization agreements with Arab states that are known as the Abraham Accords— while also charting a new course when it comes to relations with traditional partners like the United States and Jordan.

This week on Trend Lines, Michael Koplow, a WPR contributor who serves as policy director at the Israel Policy Forum, joins WPR’s Elliot Waldman to discuss the trajectory of Israeli foreign policy in the post-Netanyahu era. If you would like to request a full transcript of the episode, please send an email to podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com. 

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

•  

• Will Israel’s New Coalition Be a True ‘Government of Change’?

• Israel Tries Its Hand at ‘Maximum Pressure’ on Iran

• Is the Cold Peace Between Jordan and Israel at Risk?

• Israel’s New Coalition Changes Nothing for Palestinians

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

According to article 14 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.” But that promise, which was enshrined three years later in the 1951 Refugee Convention, has never been completely honored. In fact, it has been progressively eroded in recent years across the Global North, even as the numbers of refugees and asylum-seekers around the world have swelled. 

Just last month, the Parliament of Denmark passed a law allowing it to relocate asylum-seekers outside Europe while their claims are being processed. A similar measure is under consideration in the United Kingdom, while Australia has long maintained such a policy. Here in the United States, former President Donald Trump’s administration enacted a policy known as “Remain in Mexico,” under which asylum-seekers were forced to wait across the border in Mexico, often in unsafe environments, while their claims were processed. 

Today on Trend Lines, Khalid Koser, executive director of the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund, joins WPR’s Elliot Waldman to discuss the past, present and potential future of the right to asylum, and what it might take to revive this critical component of the international legal system. If you would like to request a full transcript of the episode, please send an email to podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

• Has the World Learned the Lessons of the 2015 Refugee Crisis?

• African Migration to Europe Is a Lifeline, not a Threat

• Biden’s Immigration Imperatives

• Refugees Are Being Ignored Amid the COVID-19 Crisis

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

After Colombians took to the streets on April 28 to protest a tax reform plan, President Ivan Duque quickly rescinded the unpopular proposal. But that didn’t stop the demonstrators, who continued to march in support of more fundamental economic changes to address persistent inequality and poverty, which has been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. Colombian security forces responded to the unrest with a typically heavy-handed approach, and at least 60 people have died so far, many at the hands of the police.

Protest leaders have paused their activities for now, but are planning more strikes and demonstrations for later in the month. Today on Trend Lines, WPR’s Elliot Waldman discusses the situation in Colombia with Elizabeth Dickinson, the Bogota-based senior analyst for Colombia at the International Crisis Group. For more on the protests, check out the recently released Crisis Group report, “The Pandemic Strikes: Responding to Colombia’s Mass Protests.”

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

•  

• Protests in Colombia Could Foreshadow a Regional Wave of Unrest

• Colombia’s Shaky Peace Deal Needs Biden’s Support

• In Colombia, Police Brutality Fuels Deadly Unrest as Protesters Demand Reform

• Another Intelligence Scandal in Colombia Highlights the Need for Lasting Reform

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

When the late Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe was ousted in 2017, celebrations broke out across the country as people cheered the end of his 37-year grip on power. Among them was Evan Mawarire, a pastor and pro-democracy activist who has been imprisoned and tortured for demanding political reforms and an end to rampant corruption and poverty.

But the hopes of Mawarire and his fellow Zimbabweans were quickly dashed, as the country’s crisis only deepened under Mugabe’s successor, Emmerson Mnangagwa. His government has brutally suppressed popular demonstrations, while subjecting dissidents and journalists to the threat of harassment, arbitrary detention and torture. The economic situation is also dire, with the World Bank recently reporting that half of Zimbabweans have fallen into extreme poverty during the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

• Why China’s ‘Wolf Warriors’ Won’t Back Down

   

• More ‘Wolf Warrior’ Diplomacy, Please

   

• China’s Double Standard for Diplomatic Speech Online Sparks a Global Backlash

• Europe Is Souring on China

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

During the night of March 7, Russian forces carried out a concerted bombing campaign against Ukraine's energy facilities. The acts were widely condemned by the international community, including U.S. President Donald Trump, who wrote on social media that he was "strongly considering large scale sanctions" based on the attack and urged both parties to the negotiating table.
At the same time, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated that Ukraine's energy infrastructure is a legitimate target because it is "linked with Ukraine's military industrial complex and weapons production."
Trump was right to call out Russia's attack and threaten sanctions, for several reasons. First, in diplomatic terms it created at least a slight veneer of even-handedness after his dressing down of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House last week, as well as his seeming alignment with Russian President Vladimir Putin in what is clearly a war of aggression in which Putin has committed the majority of war crimes.
But second, international law demands calling out this particular conduct as worthy of reproach, because contrary to what Peskov claimed, a country's energy infrastructure does not become a legitimate military target just because it supports both civilian and military uses.
International humanitarian law draws a clear distinction between civilian objects such as schools and hospitals, and military objectives that are meant to make an "effective contribution to military action." While the law is ambiguous in situations where a civilian object is being used in such a way as to make a direct military contribution to war, even then targeting of that object is subject to the principle of proportionality, by which harm to civilians must be weighed against military
necessity.
Moreover, targeting civilian objects for the purpose of terrorizing civilians is a war crime.
While an argument could be made that attacks on energy infrastructure that result in power outages for a limited period of time are not comparable to collateral damage from kinetic attacks, this is clearly not the case during winter, when civilians are heavily dependent on that infrastructure for indoor heating.
Moreover, such arguments generally don't take into account the knock-on effects of such strikes for the civilian population, such as the health implications of household refrigerators, municipal water sanitation systems and hospital medical equipment all losing access to power. In short, even if the language of humanitarian law makes occasional exceptions for military necessity that clearly outweighs the harm to civilians, such cases are rare.
And those loopholes do not easily cover the kind of massive attacks on civilian infrastructure carried out by Russia, which would appear to instead be calculated to "spread terror among the civilian population."
These rules were developed after World War II, when entire cities were burned to the ground based on the logic that they contained factories used to build munitions, thereby making them and all the civilians in them a military target. But as the postwar push to expand international humanitarian law recognized, if the fact that a civilian mobilization or infrastructure also supports a war effort transforms it into a target, the military-civilian distinction itself begins to break down.
Rather, the International Committee of the Red Cross has postulated a more specific standard on the definition of "direct participation in hostilities" as applied to civilians, in which the burden of proof is on belligerents to prove beyond a doubt that any such instance meets that standard. When in doubt, under Article 52(3) of Additional Protocol 1 to the Geneva Convention, an object shall be assumed to be of a civilian character.
The argument that "dual use" infrastructure constitutes a legitimate military target is often used as justification by states claiming the legal right to engage in such attacks.
It's worth underscoring...

Like their counterparts from around the world, Chinese diplomats tend to be well-credentialed, sophisticated, multilingual and knowledgeable about their host countries and institutions. Yet an increasing number of Chinese envoys and officials are adopting a stridently nationalistic, even belligerent tone in their official statements. Some of these “wolf warrior” diplomats, have even shown a willingness to spread conspiracy theories or use doctored images in order to score points. While this aggressive behavior often plays well back home, it tends to undermine the traditional goals of diplomacy by hardening foreign attitudes toward China.

Peter Martin, a Bloomberg reporter who was previously posted in Beijing, examines this phenomenon in a new book, “China’s Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy.” He joins WPR’s Elliot Waldman on the Trend Lines podcast this week to discuss the historical development of China’s diplomatic apparatus from the early days of the Communist Revolution to the present.

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

• Why China’s ‘Wolf Warriors’ Won’t Back Down

   

• More ‘Wolf Warrior’ Diplomacy, Please

   

• China’s Double Standard for Diplomatic Speech Online Sparks a Global Backlash

• Europe Is Souring on China

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

“America is back at the table,” President Joe Biden said at a press conference Sunday in Cornwall following his first G-7 summit. That statement perhaps best encapsulated Biden’s message during his maiden voyage overseas. While he didn’t mention his predecessor by name, the contrast with Donald Trump couldn’t have been clearer. And it certainly came as a relief to the other G-7 leaders, as the summit was mercifully free of temper tantrums and Twitter tirades.

The displays of comity and unity continued in Brussels this week, where Biden participated in a NATO summit Monday and a U.S.-EU summit Tuesday. But of course, hanging over all of these engagements were a set of thorny challenges facing the trans-Atlantic relationship: recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, responding to the rise of China and adapting to the emergence of nontraditional security threats like climate change, to name just a few.

This week on Trend Lines, WPR’s Elliot Waldman talks about the key takeaways from Biden’s tour of Europe with Lauren Speranza, director of trans-Atlantic defense and security at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington.

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

• Leave Infrastructure to China and Compete Where the West Is Stronger
• ‘America Is Back’ Gets a European Road Test
• Biden Should Think Big on the U.S.-EU Trade Agenda
• America’s ‘Return’ Might Not Be Enough to Revive the West

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

During his first few months in office, President Joe Biden has largely followed through on his pledges to restore a more multilateralist U.S. foreign policy, rejoining a number of key international organizations and agreements that had been abandoned by his predecessor, Donald Trump. This new approach has come as a relief to many senior officials at the United Nations, particularly Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who was nominated for a second term by the U.N. Security Council this week and is expected to cruise to reelection.

This week on Trend Lines, Richard Gowan, the U.N. director at the International Crisis Group and former weekly columnist for WPR, joins Elliot Waldman to discuss expectations for Guterres’ second term and the notable aspects of Biden’s approach to the U.N. thus far.

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

• Four Ways Biden Can Reinvigorate the U.N.
• The Four Contending Approaches to Multilateralism Under Biden
• How Biden Can Prove That ‘America Is Back’ at the United Nations
• 2021 Will Be a Make-or-Break Year for Multilateralism

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

Over the past decade or so, a school of thought known as “restraint” has been steadily gaining currency in the U.S. foreign policy establishment. While the idea encompasses a wide range of views and assumptions, proponents of restraint generally argue that in the wake of the Cold War, America overcommitted to its global responsibilities and stretched itself too thin, undertaking ill-conceived and costly military adventures while underwriting the security of allies in Europe and East Asia at a time when the strategic rationale of those alliances was hard to justify.

The so-called restrainers have been increasingly visible lately in media outlets and on Twitter. And in 2019, they got an institutional home in Washington, a new think tank called the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, set up with funding from a diverse array of foundations and philanthropists from across the political spectrum, including both Charles Koch and George Soros.

The restrainers’ most prominent talking points concern the follies of U.S. military adventurism in the Middle East and Afghanistan. But how well do their views and assumptions hold up elsewhere in the world? This week on Trend Lines, Thomas Wright joins WPR’s Elliot Waldman for a critical look at what a U.S. grand strategy of restraint would mean in practice.

Wright is the director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, where he is also a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy. He is the author of “All Measures Short of War: The Contest For the 21st Century and the Future of American Power” which was published in 2017. His second book, co-authored with Colin Kahl, “Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order,” will be published in August.

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

• Getting to Restraint, Responsibly
• The Rise of Restraint Is Shaking Up Washington
• Engaged Restraint: A Framework for U.S. Foreign Policy After Trump
• What Would ‘Restraint’ Really Mean for U.S. Foreign Policy?
• What Would a U.S. Grand Strategy of Restraint Look Like?

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

In 2015, a report from the McKinsey Global Institute found that up to $28 trillion could be added to global GDP by 2025 if women were allowed to achieve their full economic potential. Yet according to the World Economic Forum, there are more than 70 countries where women are not allowed to open bank accounts or obtain credit. The gender gap in financial account penetration tends to be widest in certain emerging markets, like South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East.

Even when financial services are available to them, women often face bias and discrimination at various stages of the lending process. But the emergence of new financial technology companies and mobile credit platforms, accessible with just a few taps on a mobile phone, could change that, offering loans even to women with little or no credit history. The nonprofit Women’s World Banking recently released a report finding that, “For women, who have historically been the victims of unconscious bias in lending decisions, algorithm-enabled credit decisions could create a level playing field.” However, tapping into that potential will require addressing the myriad forms of bias that can creep into artificial intelligence algorithms.

This week on Trend Lines, Mary Ellen Iskendarian, president and CEO of Women’s World Banking, joins WPR’s Elliot Waldman to discuss the promise and perils of financial technology for women’s economic empowerment.

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

• How to Make COVID-19 Recoveries Gender Inclusive
• The Importance of Gender Inclusion in COVID-19 Responses
• Protecting Our Mental Autonomy From New Technologies
• What Google’s Firing of Researcher Timnit Gebru Means for AI Ethics

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

In April 2018, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, said in an interview with The Atlantic that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “makes Hitler look good.” MBS, as the crown prince is widely known, also dismissed the possibility of any talks between the two regional rivals.

Just three years later, MBS has changed his tune, saying in a recent television interview that he hopes to “build a good and positive relationship with Iran.” His remarks came amid reports that the two sides were in the early stages of negotiations to deescalate tensions, which both Riyadh and Tehran subsequently confirmed.

It was the latest hopeful sign that some of the region’s most lasting and damaging conflicts like as the war in Yemen, could be brought to an end, even as intense fighting has flared up again between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants based in Gaza.

 

This week on Trend Lines, Hussein Ibish, senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, joins WPR’s Elliot Waldman to discuss the latest developments in the Middle East. 

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

• Iraq Is a Good Place to Start for an Iran-Saudi Dialogue
• Israeli-Palestinian Clashes Resonate Across the Middle East
• Turkey and Egypt Take a Step Closer to Repairing Ties
• Robert Malley on the ‘Lack of Change Propelling Change’ in the Middle East

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

Voters in Germany will go to the polls in September for elections that will be unusually consequential for the country’s foreign and defense policy. Chancellor Angela Merkel is retiring after almost 16 years in the position, and three major parties recently announced their candidates to replace her.

Much attention has focused on one of the candidates in particular: Annalena Baerbock of the Green party, which is surging in popularity and is likely to enter government as part of a coalition in the fall. This could allow the Greens to exercise influence over decision-making in Berlin. What would that mean for Germany’s approach to foreign policy and defense issues in the post-Merkel era? This week on Trend Lines, WPR’s Elliot Waldman digs into this question and more with Claudia Major, head of the international security research division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

 

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

• Germany’s Greens Are On the Rise. Can They Stay True to Their Roots?
• Can Armin Laschet Lead Germany’s CDU Into the Post-Merkel Era?
• A Generation of Germans Considers Life After Merkel
• How Germany Can Work With Biden to Rebuild Trans-Atlantic Ties

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

During his campaign for the presidency last year, Joe Biden pledged to reverse what he called “the failed Trump policies” toward Cuba. But now, Biden’s White House is signaling that it is in no hurry to lift the severe sanctions and other measures imposed on Cuba by former President Donald Trump, much less return to the historic detente with Cuba that was pioneered by Biden’s old boss, former President Barack Obama. 

As the Biden administration bides its time, Cuba’s aging leaders have passed the baton to a new generation. At the Communist Party’s eighth congress last month, Raul Castro stepped down as party chief, marking a transition of power to a new generation of leaders born after the 1959 revolution.  But that new generation was careful to telegraph that it does not plan to change Cuba’s political system or alter the government’s heavy-handed approach to dissent. 

This week on Trend Lines, WPR’s Elliot Waldman is joined by Michael Bustamante, an assistant professor of Latin American History at Florida International University, to discuss the outlook for U.S.-Cuba ties and what the Biden administration’s cautious approach might means for the island. Bustamante’s latest book, just published in March, is “Cuban Memory Wars: Retrospective Politics in Revolution and Exile.”

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

 

• A Simple Reset Won’t Make U.S.-Cuba Ties More Sustainable
• Cuba’s Post-Castro Leaders Must Deliver the Goods
• Cuba’s Economic Crisis Is Spurring Much-Needed Action on Reforms
• How Biden Would Change U.S. Policy in Latin America

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

Since last year, authorities in China have been conducting pilot programs for the country’s new digital currency. The project, which Beijing has been researching since 2014, is an example of what’s known as a central bank digital currency, which a number of other countries are experimenting with, but few of them are at as advanced a stage as China. A top official at China’s central bank recently expressed hope that the digital yuan would be ready for testing with foreign visitors and athletes during the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

Beijing’s progress on its digital currency has led some commentators to fret that it could erode the primacy of the U.S. dollar in the global financial system. Those concerns are exaggerated, says Yaya Fanusie, an adjunct senior fellow in the Energy, Economics and Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. But as he and his co-author, Emily Jin, explain in a recent report, that doesn’t mean the digital yuan isn’t worth keeping an eye on for other reasons. This week on Trend Lines, Fanusie joins WPR’s Elliot Waldman for a conversation about what China’s digital currency is—and what it’s not.

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

• Is Beijing About to Make an Example Out of Jack Ma?
• China’s Road to ‘Cyber Superpower’ Status
• Dollar Doomsayers Are Wrong—Again
• What the U.S. Can Learn From China’s Economic Recovery

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

When U.S. President Joe Biden announced his decision last week to fully withdraw American troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 2021, he justified it in part by pointing to an agreement signed by the Trump administration committing the U.S. to withdrawing by May 1. But he spent more time highlighting the disconnect between the original reasons the U.S. deployed its military to Afghanistan and the reasons now being used to justify its continued presence. “War in Afghanistan,” he said, “was never meant to be a multi-generational undertaking.”

And yet, as Biden acknowledged in his speech, that is just what the “Forever War” has become, with U.S. soldiers now serving in Afghanistan who had not been born at the time of the attacks of 9/11. What impact has this long and in many ways forgotten war had on the U.S. military? And what has it meant for the role of the military in American society?

In today’s Trend Lines interview, Andrew Exum joins WPR’s editor-in-chief Judah Grunstein to discuss those questions and more. Exum is a partner at Hakluyt & Company, a global advisory firm. From 2015 to 2017, he served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy. He began his career as an officer in the U.S. Army, leading platoons of both light infantry and Army Rangers in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2009, he returned to Afghanistan to serve as a civilian adviser. He was also a long-time WPR contributor and weekly columnist.

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

• The ‘Forever War’ Is Over. Let the Reckoning Begin
• The U.S. Must Prepare for the Worst in Afghanistan
• Biden Must Make Hard Choices Quickly on Afghanistan
• Can the Taliban Be Part of a Lasting Peace in Afghanistan?

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

"Why are there never coup attempts inside the United States?" an old joke among left-wing activists in Latin America goes. "Because there is no U.S. embassy there."
It's a reference to U.S. actions during the Cold War to undermine democratically elected governments across the region, including Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in the 1950s and Chilean President Salvador Allende in the 1970s. Under the auspices of fighting communism, Washington backed right-wing military coups and dictatorships throughout the hemisphere.
As late as the 1980s, Jeanne Kirkpatrick - a foreign policy adviser to then-President Ronald Reagan who later served as his ambassador to the United Nations - issued a defense of authoritarian regimes that she believed helped to protect their populations from even worse revolutionary ideologies.
But the joke was outdated even before January 2021, when then-U.S. President Donald Trump tried to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. In fact, over recent decades, the view of the United States as a defender of authoritarianism, at least in Latin America, has become an anachronism. Eventually, Washington lent support to the Concertacion coalition that defeated then-dictator Augusto Pinochet at the polls and led to the reestablishment of democracy in Chile in 1990.
And in 2001, the U.S. backed the Inter-American Democratic Charter, which clearly states in its opening that "[t]he peoples of the Americas have a right to democracy and their governments have an obligation to promote and defend it," while promising to remove nondemocratic governments from various hemispheric institutions.
More recently, perhaps the top three achievements of former President Joe Biden's policies in Latin America all came in defense of democracy. His administration supported a democratic transition in Honduras in 2021 after Xiomara Castro defeated the ruling National Party's candidate in the country's presidential election that year.
Washington then had outgoing President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who had stolen Honduras' 2017 presidential election, extradited on drug-trafficking charges so he could no longer interfere in domestic politics. A year later, Biden's team pressured Brazil's military leadership to stay clear of a coup attempt led by outgoing President Jair Bolsonaro after Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva won that country's presidential election in 2022.
And the Biden team safeguarded an incredibly difficult presidential transition in Guatemala at the end of 2023 to ensure that President Bernardo Arevalo took office, overcoming the efforts of that country's corrupt elites to keep him from power.
The U.S. record is far from perfect, and this column will no doubt provoke responses detailing the many wrongs Washington has committed in the region in recent years. But the U.S. really did shift toward a more pro-democracy stance in Latin America since the end of the Cold War. As part of that shift, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, funded numerous local NGOs that promoted human rights and anti-corruption efforts.
The National Endowment for Democracy - a government-funded semi-autonomous organization - backed training for political parties and civil society that contributed to grassroots civic activism at the heart of democratic values, winning NED the hatred of authoritarian leaders who viewed those efforts as a violation of their sovereignty. Various other U.S. agencies also provide grants for research and think tank work that is critical to policy debates in the region.
All those efforts go beyond the specific episodes, such as those by the Biden administration, when the U.S. government backed a democratic movement at a critical moment. They were cooked into U.S. policy in nearly every country.
That is not to say that U.S. support is the only thing sustaining democracy in Latin America. Democracy can't be imposed from abroad. The biggest efforts come from the people of Latin America, who work to impr...

One of President Joe Biden’s first actions after taking office in January was to agree with Russian President Vladimir Putin on extending the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. Better known as New START, it is the last remaining nuclear arms control agreement between Washington and Moscow, verifiably limiting each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed delivery systems.

The renewal of New START was widely welcomed by experts, given its important role in limiting the number of deployed nuclear weapons in the world. In a phone call this week, Biden and Putin discussed their intent to pursue further arms control talks, “building on the extension of the New START Treaty,” according to the White House’s readout. But it remains unclear how much further progress is possible, given the broader tensions in the U.S.-Russia relationship. 

This week on Trend Lines, WPR’s Elliot Waldman is joined by Sarah Bidgood, the director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California. They discuss how the U.S. and Russia might be able to draw on the experiences of Cold War-era policymakers and negotiators to make progress on nuclear arms reduction, as well as Biden’s arms control and nonproliferation agenda more broadly.

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

• Can Biden Restore the Arms Control Treaties That Trump Tore Up?
• The New Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty Will Be an Early Trial for Biden
• Russia’s New Nuclear Doctrine: Don’t Mess With Us—But Let’s Talk
• Trump’s Withdrawal From the Open Skies Treaty Is Reckless and Self-Defeating

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

Throughout Donald Trump’s presidency, a recurring theme among the Washington foreign policy establishment was how to repair the damage he was doing to America’s global standing. For many, particularly the centrist current of the Democratic party, that meant restoring the traditional approach to American foreign policy that Trump consistently undermined during his four years in office. 

But some figures on the party’s more progressive left wing saw returning to the status quo ante as insufficient. People like Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ro Khanna, as well as Sen. Bernie Sanders, began expanding the range of policy discussions and debates, in an attempt to advance a progressive foreign policy agenda.

When Joe Biden won the presidential election last November, there was some question over whether this progressive agenda would be reflected in his foreign policy appointments. For now, it seems the Biden administration has opted for a centrist establishment team. But the push for a progressive U.S. foreign policy agenda isn’t going anywhere. If anything, it’s gathering strength.

This week on Trend Lines, Matt Duss, foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, joins WPR editor-in-chief Judah Grunstein to discuss his vision for a progressive U.S. foreign policy.

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

• Biden’s ‘Foreign Policy for the Middle Class’ Takes Shape
• Biden Has a Long Way to Go to Restore America’s Human Rights Reputation
• Globalization’s Perverse Convergence
• Competition With China Shouldn’t Dictate U.S. Foreign Policy

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

This week on Trend Lines, Kevin Rudd, the former prime minister of Australia, joins WPR editor-in-chief Judah Grunstein to discuss the nature of the challenge China poses to the West, the implications of Xi Jinping’s rule, and the future prospects of both China’s rise and America’s global leadership role.

If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

When It Comes to Soft Power, China Is Already Outpacing the U.S.

Beijing Will Come to Regret the End of Hong Kong’s Autonomy

As China Rises and U.S. Influence Wanes, Australia Aims for Self-Reliance

China’s Coronavirus Outbreak Exposes the Limits of Xi’s Centralized Power

Is China’s Repressive Turn Under Xi a Sign of Strength—or Weakness?

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.

“Where the state is absent or weak, non-state actors, such as religious movements and institutions, traditional ethnic polities, militant organizations, or combinations of all three, take its place, some for better, some for worse.” Those are the words of former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell, in his new book, “Nigeria and the Nation-State: Rethinking Diplomacy with the Post-Colonial World.” In it, he argues that U.S. diplomats should focus on working more with traditional, religious and local leaders—where real power often rests—and less with foreign ministries and weak heads of state.

Campbell is currently Ralph Bunche senior fellow for Africa policy studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He joins WPR’s Elliot Waldman on Trend Lines this week to discuss the ideas he lays out in his book, and what the U.S. needs to do to implement them.

Relevant Articles on WPR:

The U.S. Can Still Promote Democracy in Africa

Why the U.S. Needs a Different Approach in Mali

Why Africa’s Future Will Determine the Rest of the World’s

America’s Downsized Relationship With Africa Is About to Go Totally Adrift

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com.