Section: The Atlantic (USA)
Trump’s Two G7 Summits
At the Group of Seven meeting in Biarritz, France, there are, in effect, two different summits underway—one that’s happening in President Donald Trump’s mind, and another that is actually happening on the ground; there’s the summit Trump is trying to will into existence, and the summit unfolding in real time.To hear Trump tell...
Boris Johnson’s G7 Balancing Act
Boris Johnson has spent the first month of his premiership holding bilateral talks with Britain’s allies in the European Union and in the United States. But can he appeal to both at once?At this weekend’s Group of Seven summit in the French seaside town of Biarritz, he has endeavored to do just that. The annual gathering, which brings...
The Lasting Lesson of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
Thirty years ago this week, on August 23, 1989, more than 2 million citizens of the Baltic republics of the U.S.S.R. engineered one of the most dramatic and successful mass protests in Soviet history. Men, women, and children linked hands in a continuous human chain more than 400 miles long that they called the “Baltic Way,” connecting the...
Emmanuel Macron Expounds as the World Burns
It was a perfect late summer evening when President Emmanuel Macron—tanned and super-energized in a dark blue suit and crisp white shirt—held forth before the Elysée press corps on matters of international import. Posh Paris was largely out of town. Nearby, boulangeries, shops and the French National Assembly were still closed for the August...
Flying Down East
We were flying away from Washington D.C. again, leaving the Sturm und Drang of our hometown in early August for a point nearly as far east on the U.S. map as one can get. It is “Down East,” in the vernacular of Maine, and the town of Eastport, where residents say the sun first rises over the United States, as does the moon, which gets far too...
From Narratives to Networks: The Changing World of Protests
From Hong Kong to Moscow, Tbilisi to Belgrade, swelling crowds are protesting on the streets, often facing down twitchy, armed police with their tear gas and batons, returning week after week.Some rallies have been the biggest since 1989, the great year of pro-democracy revolutions. But something fundamental has changed in the 30 years since. In...
Why Everyone in Washington Is Talking About Great-Power Competition
Grand narratives about global affairs have a way of seizing Washington, D.C., with sudden force. Not long after World War II, the U.S. government settled on the mission of containing the Soviet Union. The War on Terror commenced within days of the 9/11 attacks. And now we’re in the early, heady days of a newly entrenched narrative, one with...
Are Anti-vaxxers Conscientious Objectors?
By April, 2019 was already a bad year for measles. Outbreaks were occurring all over the world, including in Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Madagascar, Sudan, Thailand, and Ukraine. In the Philippines, more than 200 people, most of them children, had died from measles in January and February. By the end of February, 13 deaths had been reported in Europe....
Trump’s Faith-Based Foreign Policy
Behind the Oval Office circus of drama and distraction, conservatives are quietly reshaping government in ways that could resonate for generations to come. One major front is the integration of religion into foreign policy, in which the phrase “religious freedom,” figures prominently—in the same way it did during the George W. Bush...
Joe Biden’s Foreign Policy of Nostalgia
If the election of Donald Trump and rise of populists in Europe has killed off the liberal world order as we knew it, no one told Joe Biden. The former vice president is billing himself as the man who can revive it.Biden will deliver his first major foreign-policy address as a Democratic presidential contender today, and it will underscore a...
