Section: The American Interest (USA)
Don’t Leave the Balkans to Europe
Transatlantic relations, on fragile footing for the better part of the last three and a half years, have been fracturing further across a region that has in the recent past been a rare area of policy consensus. The Western Balkans, always a difficult portfolio, had seen a rare breakthrough agreement in 2018, when Greece and North Macedonia signed...
Should the West Be Worried About Belarus?
There is a joke in which a Russian, a Ukrainian, and a Belarusian enter a train compartment and sit down simultaneously. The Russian and Ukrainian immediately jump up with shouts of pain. After a stream of invective, the Russian exclaims, “Someone put a tack on my seat! I’m a Russian citizen, damn it, there’s gonna be hell to pay!”...
Preventing Protectionism
Protectionism made the Great Depression of the 1930s much worse. Although tariffs had already been rising during much of the previous decade, it was the Smoot–Hawley Tariff in the United States, and Britain’s principle of “home producers first, empire producers second, and foreign producers last,” that led to an almost complete...
The End of China’s “Peaceful Rise”
The deteriorating relationship between the world’s two superpowers—the United States and China—is now entering a period of grave danger. An emboldened Chinese Communist Party is now on the move in Asia and globally. Increasingly, its behavior constitutes a threat to peace and security in Asia and the core national interests of the United...
Ensuring Electoral Integrity
America is facing a crisis of confidence in its electoral process. In the November presidential election, hundreds of millions of voters will cast their ballot—but increasingly, these voters do not trust their votes will be counted correctly. This growing distrust could have devastating consequences for America’s stability, and may...
Renewed Transatlanticism or a Post-American Europe?
Much has been written of late about the Trump Administration’s decision to move 9,500 U.S. troops out of Germany and its impact on deteriorating Transatlantic relations. To be sure, the move and the personality clashes among key leaders in NATO that it has brought to the surface have played a part in fueling the current turmoil. But it is...
Vladimir Putin vs. “Citizen No”
For me the enduring image of Russia in 2020 is a photo of a makeshift street voting station where an elderly election commission official is waiting for people to show up and take part in a “popular vote” to endorse the so-called “constitutional amendments”—more than 200 of them—proposed by Vladimir Putin. The woman in the photo bides her time in...
Why Life Feels Like a TV Show
This season of America sucks.People said the show jumped the shark a few seasons back, when the powers that be decided on that whole Trump twist just a couple episodes after the Brexit plot line. I kept watching, even after season upon season of plot threads went nowhere (Ukraine? Impeachment?) and half the cast was abruptly written off (whatever...
This Time It’s Really Different
There has never been an international sovereign debt crisis on the scale of what is now unfolding. The International Monetary Fund (IMF)—the lender of last resort to governments—reports that more than 100 countries have requested emergency loans.Normally, the IMF looks solely at the levels of economic distress in determining whether to grant...
Japan’s False Hopes of Courting Russia
As the old Soviet joke goes, it is difficult to predict history in Russia. Against the backdrop of the Kremlin’s longstanding efforts to promote a revisionist version of World War II, this past April the Russian Duma (parliament) passed a law to officially change the war’s end date from September 2nd to the 3rd. The bill’s...
