Huntington’s Legacy
Samuel Huntington was not right about everything. Rather, his greatness lay in his ability to conceptualize big ideas in a wide variety of fields. The first in a series of three essays celebrating the 25th anniversary of the publication of Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. Ot…
Understanding the Failure of U.S. Foreign Policy: The Albright Doctrine
How to describe U.S. foreign policy over the last couple of decades? Disastrous comes to mind. Arrogant and murderous also seem appropriate. Since 9/11, Washington has been extraordinarily active militarily—invading two nations, bombing and droning several others, deploying special operations forces…
The outbreak of the second Cold War
Regular readers of this column will not have been surprised by the outbreak of the Second Cold War. Ever since President Trump imposed the first tariffs on Chinese imports last year, I have argued that the trade war between the United States and China would last longer than most people expected and …
Hurting China is causing damage to the world
Given the American administration’s trade war on China escalates, the question is whom China can rely on in this delicate moment of its 40-years-long economic history of opening up to the world, except on its own effort. China’s vice premier, the brilliantly modest Liu He, counters to the U.S….
Religious Freedom in Ukraine
The United States strongly supports religious freedom, including the freedom of members of groups to govern their religion according to their beliefs and practice their faiths freely without government interference. The United States respects the ability of Ukraine’s Orthodox religious leaders and f…
Ten years after Lehman: Can liberal democracy survive another financial crisis?
In recent weeks, media outlets across the world have marked the ten-year anniversary of a signal event in the global financial crisis: the bankruptcy and downfall of Lehman Brothers, once one of the United States’ most important investment banks. Much of the coverage has depicted the developments th…
Chagos Islands dispute: UK ‘threatened’ Mauritius
The British government has been accused of threatening a close ally in an increasingly bitter diplomatic tug-of-war over the fate of a tiny, strategic archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The dispute over the Chagos Islands – home to the US military base on Diego Garcia – is being portraye…
In Morocco, a Draft to Dodge Radicalization
Earlier this summer, there was an unusual story out of Morocco. On May 1, the government severed political ties with Iran and recalled its ambassador. That’s not the unusual part; Morocco and Iran have longstanding animosity, and the government in Rabat cut diplomatic ties in 2009 (they were reinsta…
Making plans for a new world order
Henry Kissinger was recently asked if Donald Trump could not unintentionally become the force behind the birth of a new western order. His answer: It would be ironic but not impossible. Instead of narrowing our view across the Atlantic to the ever-changing whims of the American President, we should …
Why ‘we’ got Turkey wrong (and China. And Russia. And Iraq)
In addition to warning us of the growing tide of populism and nationalism, and bashing Donald Trump, Pundits in Washington and other Western capitals have been also spending also a lot of time, debating ‘How the West got China wrong,’ as The Economist put it, which was just another way of …