Foreign Affairs

The liberal order is largely a myth.

El 4 de agosto, dos drones explotaron en el aire durante un discurso del presidente venezolano Nicolás Maduro en Caracas, en lo que luego fue calificado por el gobierno como un intento fallido de asesinato. A pesar de que la mayoría de las fuerzas opositoras rechazaron el ataque, el gobierno lo usó como excusa para arremeter contra la disidencia, ordenando 34 arrestos, incluyendo el del diputado Juan Requesens. Inquietantes videos circularon poco después por las redes sociales que sugieren que el gobierno drogó forzosamente y humilló al parlamentario para tratar de que confesara su participación en el complot. [Read the English version of this article here.] Para muchos, el ataque de Maduro a las libertades democráticas y la violación sistemática de los derechos humanos en el país significan que no existe otra opción distinta del uso de la fuerza para sacarlo del poder. Pero la...

Over the past four months, the Nicaraguan government, much as it did under Somoza, has declared war on its people.

When the main belligerents in South Sudan’s five-year-long civil war signed a new peace agreement on August 5 in Khartoum, the international response was circumspect at best. This reaction reflects a new attitude on the part of the international community -- especially the United States, which for years failed to sufficiently pressure Kiir’s government even as his forces massacred civilians, carried out widespread sexual abuse, and tortured prisoners as part of a civil war that has displaced more than four million people since it began in 2013. To understand draw lessons for preventing future atrocities, I recently interviewed more than 30 former and current U.S. government officials and policy experts, analysts, and civil society leaders who have worked on issues involving South Sudan for many years. 

In October, the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan will turn 17. The human and material costs of what has become the United States’ longest-ever war are colossal. More than 2,000 U.S. military personnel have been killed and over 20,000 have been injured. The UN estimates that nearly 20,000 Afghan civilians have been killed and another 50,000 injured since 2009 alone. The United States has spent some $877 billion on the war. The Trump administration’s recent initiative to seek direct peace talks with the Taliban—a first since the start of the war in 2001—highlights that Washington is actively looking for new ways to wind down its involvement in the conflict. But why has the U.S.

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Public anger at home pulled the United States out of Vietnam, but the public's indifference about the intervention in Afghanistan has allowed the United States' longest war to drag on.

Is Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary's presidential candidacy a harbinger for Congo’s much-awaited democratic transition or merely a lifeline to a beleaguered strongman?

Policymakers within democracies need to grapple with the challenge of repelling outside influence while upholding essential democratic values.

In the last few months, rising public frustrations over domestic policy and a government proposal to weaken the social safety net have led to a sharp decline in Vladimir Putin’s popularity. 

It's Robert Gilpin's world; everyone else is just living in it.

Gamal Abdel Nasser and Sayyid Qutb are usually remembered as bitter enemies and representatives of two sides of Egypt's most intractable political divide. But in his book Making the Arab World: Nasser, Qutb, and the Clash That Shaped the Middle East, Fawaz Gerges shows that the two titans of Egyptian history overlapped ideologically and personally more than is generally realized.

The U.S government needs to play a more assertive role in protecting the public from digital threats, just as it protects it from conventional ones.   

Democratic societies are fracturing into segments based on ever-narrower identities, threatening the possibility of deliberation and collective action by society as a whole. Unless liberal democracies can work their way back to more universal understandings of human dignity, they will doom themselves—and the world—to continuing conflict.  

India's online biometric ID database offers a model for treating digital infra­structure as a public good and data as something that citizens deserve access to.   

In an world increasingly driven by the ability of private companies and governments to collect vast amounts of personal data online, the European Union's ambitious new data rules enshrine data privacy as a fundamental right rather than a luxury.

Since taking office, President Trump has made a series of unilateral decisions with enormous consequences for U.S. foreign policy. But Trump hasn't single-handedly destroyed the checks and balances that are supposed to constrain executive power in foreign policy: his actions are merely exposing that they have been wearing away for decades.

The United States long promoted its vision of an open and free Internet on the global stage. But today, as authoritarian governments and private actors increasingly weaponize the web, U.S. leadership is largely absent. It’s time for Washington to overcome its belief that the Internet can fix itself and instead work to maintain the Internet as a tool for strengthening democracy.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador's promise to shake up the status quo propelled him to success in Mexico's presidential election. But whether AMLO's leadership will bring about inclusive, forward-looking reforms or a turn backward to dominant-party rule and increased presidential power remains unclear. 

The 2015 Iran nuclear deal stands as a model for combining the threat of sanctions and continued isolation with the hard work of negotiating, even between countries whose relationships are shaped by conflict and distrust. The Trump administration's decision to withdraw from the agreement has turned Iran into a nearly impossible problem for future U.S. governments. 

China is set to remake cyberspace in its own image. That will make the Internet less open and allow Beijing to reap vast economic, diplomatic, and security benefits that once flowed to Washington.