Showing results by narrator "Kevin Stillwell" in All Categories

China is part of the solution when it comes to North Korea, but, through its continued material support of the Kim regime, it is also part of the problem.

On January 30, after word got out that a large number of U.S. State Department officials were preparing a formal, well-argued dissent against President Donald Trump’s cruel executive order on immigration, the White House reacted with stung indignation. Even before the cable was submitted by an astonishing total of nearly a thousand State Department staffers, Trump’s spokesman, Sean Spicer, issued an extraordinary rebuke to the professional diplomats.

Each U.S. president inherits history’s most robust system for gaining insight into the capabilities and intentions of other powers. A vital part of this national security infrastructure is the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, which contains the nation’s most sensitive intelligence reporting and analysis. For more than 50 years, the U.S. intelligence community has delivered this top-secret book to the commander in chief every working day.

Foreign media is trickling in to North Korea, making its people increasingly aware of the gap between Pyongyang’s propaganda and reality. In the short term, the regime is still well able to repress subversion, but this new awareness could be a long-term threat. Helping the flow of outside information may be the best way to help North Korea change from within.

What happened to Recep Tayyip Erdogan? The Turkish president came to power in 2003 promising economic and political liberalization. But under his rule, Turkey has instead moved in a profoundly illiberal, authoritarian direction - although not toward repressive Islamism, which some feared was Erdogan’s true agenda. Rather, Erdogan has become something more akin to a traditional Middle Eastern strongman: consolidating personal power, purging rivals, and suppressing dissent.

In 2016, as President Robert Mugabe celebrates his 92nd birthday and 36th year in power, Zimbabwe stands on the brink of another meltdown. The country’s current economic insecurity and political conflict are reminiscent of 2000-2008, when hyperinflation and electoral violence were rife. This time, however, the stakes are even higher as a floundering authoritarian regime faces a leadership succession with little clear guidance on how to navigate the transition.

Last October, when the American destroyer USS Lassen sailed by Subi Reef, an artificial island built by China in the South China Sea, a number of Chinese merchant ships and fishing boats maneuvered around it, apparently having anticipated its approach. The Lassen was on a freedom of navigation operation, meant to demonstrate the United States’ commitment to maintaining open access to the area, much of which China claims as its own.

This week, Ethiopia is commemorating its national day with an exhibition celebrating the country’s economic progress. More than 140 companies - some state-owned, some private - have set up displays in Millennium Hall, a conference center in Addis Ababa’s upscale Bole neighborhood.

Europe currently finds itself in the throes of its worst political crisis since World War II. Across the continent, traditional political parties have lost their appeal as populist, Euroskeptical movements have attracted widespread support. Hopes for European unity seem to grow dimmer by the day. The euro crisis has exposed deep fault lines between Germany and debt-ridden southern European states, including Greece and Portugal.

Almost as soon as the financial crisis struck in late 2007, policy-makers began working to prevent another one. The roots of the crisis, they contended, lay in reckless lending and excess debt. Banks had made massive loans to “subprime” borrowers, who had little ability to repay them, and the banks funded these investments with borrowed money. When the US housing bubble burst, millions of Americans defaulted on their mortgages, and the overleveraged banks collapsed.

The United States has the best military in the world today, by far. US forces have few, if any, weaknesses, and in many areas - from naval warfare to precision-strike capabilities, to airpower, to intelligence and reconnaissance, to special operations - they play in a totally different league from the militaries of other countries. Nor is this situation likely to change anytime soon, as US defense spending is almost three times as large as that of the United States’ closest competitor, China.

Fifty years ago this week, the Cultural Revolution began with a sudden shift in power. China’s youth, raised to revere their teachers and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cadres, were abruptly told to overthrow them instead. CCP Chairman Mao Zedong urged students to “bombard the headquarters,” smoking out crypto-capitalists and spies who had wormed their way into the party and betrayed the revolution. “To rebel,” the chairman assured the young, “is justified.”

How to marginalize the Islamic State online.

How should one judge a president’s handling of foreign policy?

The January/February 2016 issue of Foreign Affairs.

According to conventional wisdom, the deterioration of US-Israeli relations is the result of personal animosity between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama. But ill-will is more of a symptom than a cause. In fact, the increased friction reflects a new Israeli grand strategy. Rather than seeking to minimize differences with the United States over Iran and Palestine, as previous Israeli governments had done, Netanyahu has worked to diversify Israel's international partnerships, cultivating new friends - from India to China to Saudi Arabia - so that Israel is less dependent on the United States.

GB Road, New Delhi’s red-light district, is one of India’s largest, with an estimated 5,000 sex workers living in 96 brothels. It is also one of the nation’s oldest, having been established by the British in the 1930s.

When the anti-austerity party Syriza came to power in Greece in January 2015, Cornel Ban and I wrote in a Foreign Affairs article that, at some point, Europe was bound to face an Alexis Tsipras, the party’s leader and Greek prime minister, “because there’s only so long you can ask people to vote for impoverishment today based on promises of a better tomorrow that never arrives.”

Recent surveys conducted in Syria reveal that Islamist fighters are surprisingly supportive of democracy. Here's why.

Belief in “the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby, is a characteristic American trait. But hope in a better future is not uniquely American, even if it has long been a more potent secular faith in the United States than elsewhere.