Tabla de contenidos para Summer 2019 en Foreign Policy

MANY WESTERN PARLIAMENTS ARE DOMINATED by people with law degrees, but China’s leaders are mostly trained as engineers and scientists—or so goes conventional wisdom. Advocates for this supposed Chinese approach, such as the entrepreneur Elon Musk, argue that it produces leaders who adopt a pragmatic and technocratic framework to solving problems. And those scientist-politicians, the theory goes, are more likely to govern efficiently, in part because they are unburdened by ideology. But advocates for China’s supposed technocracy are not only wrong about the background of Beijing’s current leadership. They are also fundamentally mistaken about how their training shapes policymaking. China’s leaders today—including President Xi Jinping himself—have been molded less by their education and more by the need to consolidate control and prevail in the brutal internal power struggles of the…

RECENT MONTHS HAVE SEEN SOMETHING OF A TURNAROUND in the conventional wisdom about how to address climate change. In December, on the weekend before the Swedish Academy presented the Nobel Prize to my uncle, the economist William Nordhaus, for his work on climate change and carbon taxes, France’s yellow vest movement flooded into the streets, shutting down Paris and other cities across the country and forcing President Emmanuel Macron to rescind the carbon tax he had recently imposed on transportation fuels. A month earlier, voters in Washington state, as environmentally minded a place as you will find in the United States, soundly rejected a ballot initiative that would have established a carbon tax in that state. Meanwhile, residents of New York’s 14th District elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress. Ocasio-Cortez, a…

WHAT EXACTLY IS THE EUROPEAN UNION? A postnational superstate or a mechanism to augment the power of nations? A neoliberal fantasia or a protectionist cartel? A Christian empire? A socially liberal paradise? Or is it something defined not by what it is but by what it is not—the lack of war in Europe, the taming of extremist ideologies, the avoidance of another Auschwitz? And what if nobody in the EU, including the people who work in its institutions, even knows the answer? Such questions have riven the EU since it first came into existence, but in recent years, the latent tensions have risen to a breaking point. Now the Austrian writer Robert Menasse has dramatized Europe’s existential agonies in his splendid novel The Capital, which won the 2017 German Book…

CRITICS OF ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER Benjamin Netanyahu have long compared him to illiberal nationalists, such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, and strongmen who have consolidated control to stay in power, such as Viktor Orban and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But to understand Netanyahu’s ability to survive against daunting political odds—he faces potential indictment for alleged corruption and recently failed to form a government—there is a better comparison: Aleksandar Vucic, the president of Serbia. ARGUMENT Netanyahu and Vucic each preside over unresolved violent conflicts in which their more powerful countries are widely viewed as the aggressors. Both began as propagandists who learned to portray their countries as victims to the world. And both later leveraged their narrative skills to drive their individual political ascents—by portraying themselves, simultaneously, as victims and saviors.…

THE FIGHT AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE MAY SEEM HOPELESS, but humanity has a simple and powerful ally in plain sight: plants. At least that’s the belief of the botanist Joanne Chory and her team of scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego. As part of her Harnessing Plants Initiative, Chory is focused on genetically modifying plants to absorb more carbon dioxide—and then hold on to it for longer—than their wild cousins through a larger and deeper network of carbon-storing roots, creating so-called Ideal Plants. Every year, humanity emits 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide; photosynthetic life can process and capture nearly half of that amount. Chory believes that coaxing a little more productivity out of plants could make a dramatic difference. And she has no shortage of backers:…

ONE OF THE MOST STRIKING THINGS ABOUT THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY SO FAR—aside from the sheer number of candidates running—is how little any of them has said about foreign policy. With very few exceptions (like one-off essays by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders), the group has largely ignored the rest of the world and focused on domestic issues. Such neglect probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. Few of the governors, senators, and mayors now running for president have international experience to draw on. And they know that while American voters do care about foreign policy, especially when it comes to fighting terrorism and protecting U.S. jobs, most don’t care about it as much as they do about domestic issues. Very few U.S. presidents have won office by building their campaigns…

“THERE WAS NOTHING IN HIS EYES. It was like his soul was missing,” Neeti Singh, a young police officer, tearfully tells her boss. Deputy Police Commissioner Vartika Chaturvedi, cool and calm, dismisses her discomfort. “If you’re trying to ascribe meaning to this, forget it.” She is already on to the next crime: another recent rape, this one involving a broken beer bottle. The victim had died. This scene comes toward the end of the hit Netflix show Delhi Crime, which fictionalizes the real-life story of Jyoti Singh Pandey, a young physiotherapy intern who was raped on a moving bus in New Delhi in 2012. The popular seven-episode series was written and produced by the Canadian filmmaker Richie Mehta following six years of research during which he interviewed police officers, consulted…

ECONOMISTS AND GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS GENERALLY THINK of poverty as a chronic, binary phenomenon: People are either poor or they are not. But reality is not so simple. Worldwide, 300 million people live nominally above the poverty line but regularly go hungry for some portion of the year. This seasonal deprivation is related to the agricultural crop cycle. The period between planting and harvest is a so-called lean season during which prices of staples rise and job opportunities become scarce for landless agricultural workers. This period is predictable in timing and geography. Colloquially known as the “hunger season” in many parts of Africa, it is called njala in Malawi, musim paceklik in Indonesia, and monga in Bangladesh. And its impact is extremely widespread, given that 80 percent of the world’s poor…

IN TODAY’S BRITAIN, A RARE PUBLIC FIGURE can bring together Brexiteers and Remainers, Conservatives and Labour. Yet the teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg did just that on a visit to London in April, when she was feted by British politicians from across the political spectrum. In an address to Parliament, Thunberg said she spoke for the children who had been betrayed by politicians and voters who had failed to prevent climate change. She also claimed to speak for the unborn billions of people who will bear the brunt of a rapidly warming world. “I am 16 years old,” she said. “I come from Sweden. And I speak on behalf of future generations.…Now we probably don’t even have a future anymore.” It would have taken a very brave politician to downplay…

FOR AMERICANS, CARS ARE A WAY OF LIFE. They not only take people from one place to another; they also serve as entertainment systems, storage lockers, and status symbols. But thanks to ride-hailing services, personal cars are becoming less important, and the development of autonomous vehicles may accelerate that trend. Cutting out the driver could make ride-hailing so cheap, convenient, and safe that many Americans may go carless. Will Americans really give up their cars? The transportation consultants Bern Grush and John Niles think they will. In The End of Driving: Transportation Systems and Public Policy Planning for Autonomous Vehicles, they reckon that, 50 years from now, only hobbyists will drive cars. Between then and now, however, officials will have to do the complicated work of promoting a “transit leap”…