Section: The Atlantic (USA)
Obama Makes the Case for Democracy, in the Land Where It Was Born
In July 2008, Britain was a solid member of the European Union, where refugee and debt crises had yet to materialize. The global financial crisis was raging, but its consequences weren’t fully appreciated. The Arab world wasn’t yet reeling from pro-democracy uprisings, anti-democracy crackdowns, and civil war. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the...
America’s Friendship With Europe Has Been Horribly Damaged
“In battle, nothing is ever as good or bad as the first reports of excited men would have it.” —Field Marshall Viscount SlimLet’s hope that same caution applies to presidential transition geopolitics too, because the first reports from the Trump transition are very bad indeed.Among America’s oldest and truest allies, the reaction to...
Three Millennia of Safety Pins
My mother, with her carefully trained eye, always knew when I had lost a button on my school uniform. She would rummage around her bag and produce a safety pin, fastening my blouse gently with it, taking extra care not to prick me. I always marveled at how elegantly she fastened the safety pin, with only the slightest trace showing on the...
Fighting Terrorism in the Age of Trump
In February, Donald Trump vowed to make “enhanced interrogation techniques”—like sleep deprivation, waterboarding, and “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”—part of his then-hypothetical administration’s approach to fighting terrorism. He also promised to target the families of suspected terrorists. His pledges, sometimes reversed,...
Snowballs in Siberia and Smog in New Delhi: The Week in Global-Affairs Writing
Canada and Denmark Fight Over Island With Whisky and Schnapps Dan Levin | The New York Times “International disputes over territory can be ugly affairs, waged with all the nastiness of a divorce, backed with the force of armies. Just in the last few years, China has built islands topped with military bases to back its claim to vast stretches of...
5 Foreign-Policy Flashpoints That Await Donald Trump
Presidential elections tend to be all-consuming in America, overshadowing everything else that’s happening in the world for months on end. But the world has a way of marching on regardless. Below are five developments in international affairs that haven’t been getting much media coverage recently, but could reach inflection points...
The Lessons of Henry Kissinger
Author’s note (November 10, 2016): Over the past several months, I’ve interviewed Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, numerous times on the subject of America’s role in the world. Our conversations took place before this week’s election, but were informed by the foreign-policy differences between the...
World Chaos and World Order: Conversations With Henry Kissinger
What follows is an extended transcript of several conversations on foreign policy I had with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which formed the basis of a story in the December issue of The Atlantic. That story, along with an interview on Kissinger’s reaction to the surprise electoral...
What Vladimir Putin Wants From America’s Elections
From summer’s hack of Democratic National Committee emails to warnings about the possibility of Russian-backed cyberattacks on U.S. voting systems, Russia has taken on an outsized role in the American presidential election. But what does Russian President Vladimir Putin really want, and what should America do about it? Peter Pomerantsev and...
Is the CIA Ready for the Age of Cyberwar?
When America goes to the polls on November 8, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials, it will likely experience the culmination of a new form of information war. A months-long campaign backed by the Russian government to undermine the credibility of the U.S. presidential election—through hacking, cyberattacks, and...
