Tabla de contenidos para Summer 2021 en Foreign Policy

Nosmot Gbadamosi is a multimedia journalist. She has reported on human rights, the environment, and sustainable development from across Africa, Asia, and Europe. Caroline de Gruyter is a Europe correspondent and columnist for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad and a columnist at FOREIGN POLICY. She is the author of five books on globalization, democracy, and sovereignty. Diana Seave Greenwald is an art historian and the assistant curator of the collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She is the author of Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art. Robert Barnett is a writer and researcher on modern Tibetan history and politics. He is a professorial research associate at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, an affiliate researcher at King’s College London, and a senior research…

WE HAVE ALL BECOME POLICY EXPERIMENTALISTS in the new era ushered in by the 2008-09 global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Whereas central banks were once considered uniquely well-equipped to restart the economic engine after a recession or tame inflationary pressures in a boom, fiscal policy is increasingly seen as a powerful and fast-acting way to reverse a downward spiral. When fiscal policy did too little—after the global financial crisis, for example—central bankers tried to compensate, experimenting with forward guidance and large-scale bond-buying programs known as quantitative easing. While the U.S. Federal Reserve cut interest rates to zero, a handful of other central banks experimented with negative rates. All of them hoped that the combination of asset purchases and near-zero interest rates would induce enough borrowing and spending to…

BUSINESS IS TALKING ABOUT stakeholder capitalism. Governments are talking about the need to confront challenges such as climate change. The new era requires walking the talk—and putting common purpose at the center of how the public and private sectors interact. For too long, the relationship between government and corporations has been parasitic, not symbiotic. In areas like health, we have governments putting billions of dollars into drug innovation, yet taxpayers often cannot afford them. Government invented the internet but didn’t bother making sure that technology corporations wouldn’t abuse our privacy. A new social contract is required to make sure that stakeholder value and policies defined by the challenges they must solve go to the center of how business and the state interact—that is, in how they co-create value. This should affect…

AFTER COVID-19, cries resound for the parent state to come to the aid of its adult children with spending and regulation galore. In the United States, liberalism has long meant such a tentative socialism. Yet the true liberalism of Adam Smith, Mary Woll-stonecraft, and John Stuart Mill was better. It might be called “adultism,” floating above the statist spectrum of left and right, which both treat adults as sad or bad children. Liberalism accords them dignity, the permission to be without a master, whether aristocrat or bureaucrat. True liberalism in the past two centuries has made much of the world rich and dignified. It liberated poor men, then slaves, women, colonized peoples, and LGBT people and allowed them to have a go. And go they did, innovating at a pace that…

THE MAIN DRIVER OF THIS NEW ERA is no longer economic globalization but, increasingly, great-power competition. This competition—primarily between China and the United States—will dominate nearly every policy domain: trade and investment, financial markets, information technology, biotechnology, foreign policy, military power, and ideology. It will also dominate nearly every region of the globe as it draws countries, corporations, and institutions into an increasingly binary race. For these reasons, we are also seeing the return of the state’s dominance as the enforcer of national competitive advantage, not just in China but also in the United States and elsewhere. While the efficiency costs will be high, this new period of “state-onomics” will continue until the outcome of the race for global supremacy is resolved. The 2020s will therefore be a decade of living…

PEOPLE ARE EMERGING from a year of loss, isolation, and change. They will need to rekindle friendships and acquaintances and learn to be and feel safe in a crowd. Many will rediscover the thrill of a crowded concert or sporting event, while others will discover that new passions have replaced the old. People are rediscovering their work commute, and many workers and employers are busy discovering a new way of working—one that seeks to find a balance between the benefits of working from home and its costs. Millions of people have lost their jobs in industries that are contracting or where the pandemic hit particularly hard. These millions must discover new career paths as job openings surge but with no direct fit to what they were doing before the pandemic.…

In October 2015, China announced that a new village, called Gyalaphug in Tibetan or Jieluobu in Chinese, had been established in the south of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). In April 2020, the Communist Party secretary of the TAR, Wu Yingjie, traveled across two passes, both more than 14,000 feet high, on his way to visit the new village. There he told the residents—all of them Tibetans—to “put down roots like Kalsang flowers in the borderland of snows” and to “raise the bright five-star red flag high.” Film of the visit was broadcast on local TV channels and plastered on the front pages of Tibetan newspapers. It was not reported outside China: Hundreds of new villages are being built in Tibet, and this one seemed no different. Gyalaphug, however, is…

While COVID-19 stalled the Dominican Republic’s bustling economy, especially its tourism, the Caribbean nation remains poised for an economic recovery as the world returns to a sense of post-pandemic normalcy. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects the Dominican Republic to make a robust recovery, and the nation’s new president, Luis Abinader, wants to ensure his nation’s economy is driven by more than tourism. Abinader, 53, has outlined a revitalization plan that includes tax incentives and investment opportunities, and promotion of his country as an ideal location for nearshoring — when businesses move their operations to a nearby country instead of a distant one. The largest economy in Central America and the Caribbean with an estimated gross domestic product (GDP) of $88.94 to the pandemic, tourism brought in $630 million to…

WHEN U.S. PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan into law, he sanctioned a coronavirus relief package that was about as historic as the pandemic itself. The sheer size of the fiscal injection was greater than the annual economic output of Australia, Brazil, or Canada. When you combine that $1.9 trillion with the $900 billion relief bill passed by Congress in December and the $2.5 trillion of aid authorized by then-President Donald Trump in 2020, you arrive at $5.3 trillion—an amount larger than the GDP of Germany, India, Japan, or the United Kingdom. In short, it’s an unprecedented stimulation of the economy. And the United States isn’t alone. Most rich Western democracies are pumping giant sums of money into their financial systems as they try to fight off…

CHINA It has never been easy to write about China, but today access is harder, and sources are more limited than they have been in decades. The pandemic hasn’t helped; since March 2020, China’s borders have been closed to most non-Chinese citizens. The result of this is that it is even more difficult for outsiders—and even most Chinese—to understand what is happening inside the country. As a journalist, you risk being targeted by an ever changing set of measures by the Chinese government. A weaponized visa process means your credentials may be renewed for six months or denied without explanation. You, or more likely your Chinese colleague, might be detained as the Bloomberg reporter Haze Fan was in 2020. The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China reported that the government expelled…

AMERICAS In a 2009 essay, I coined the term “formestic” to describe the inevitable intertwining of foreign and domestic policy and the fact that solutions to global challenges often lie at home—and vice versa. Although I’m not holding my breath for the word to catch on, the idea that foreign and domestic policy are inseparably connected is a core conviction of U.S. President Joe Biden’s team. He made the point repeatedly during the run-up to the November 2020 elections and has kept making it since. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was one of the architects of a “foreign policy for the middle class.” If there is a Biden doctrine, breaking down the silos of foreign and domestic policy would be a fundamental element. The reason why these realms are deeply…

EUROPE In March, Europe’s vaccine procurement was the world’s laughingstock. The Europeans were far behind the Americans, the British, and the Israelis in obtaining vaccines and administering them to citizens. But now, the critics are silent. European countries are vaccinating in record numbers, all more or less at the same pace. Europe caught up fast because it completely turned around the way it does business in the health sector. It used to be an open system, where goods and services flowed in and out freely; it is now more controlled and more European. By setting up a real industrial policy, and investing in it, Europeans managed to guarantee a steady supply of vaccines. The idea that an industrial policy helps, long taboo in Europe, is now here to stay—and not…

COVID-19 HAS TURBOCHARGED an economic, social, and political phenomenon that was partly visible going into the pandemic but, until now, lacked sufficient roots and momentum. Current events and history suggest that this phenomenon will be with us for a while, can deliver important gains for society, but also risks overshooting. After almost four decades of deregulation and liberalization, governments in many advanced countries have reversed course and are reinserting themselves into their citizens’ daily lives. The catalyst is a pandemic that has inflicted tremendous human suffering, dislocated lives, worsened the inequality trifecta (of wealth, income, and, especially, opportunity), exploited economic and social vulnerabilities, exposed glaring fragilities in our systems and institutions, and simultaneously eroded social cohesion and individual resilience. Most people can agree that governments had no choice but to…

THE ECONOMIC SHOCKWAVES created by the pandemic were extraordinary in many respects. As impressive as the recovery has been in much of the (vaccinated) world, it is staggeringly uneven both within and across countries. Developing countries, in particular, risk being left behind—with unsustainable debt levels, fragmented labor markets, polarized politics, and weakened governments at a time when the world has virtually no global leadership. How best to grapple with the uncertainty of this new era? Firms will be more cautious in how they construct their international supply chains, and governments will be more involved in setting parameters for the economy. U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell once described the task of central banks as wandering in a dark room and feeling their way—just as Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping once described…

THE TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS SPENT to ease the economic pain of the pandemic has commentators marveling that “we are all Keynesians now.” But the current spending is a gross distortion of what that famous proponent of government stimulus, the economist John Maynard Keynes, recommended during the Great Depression nearly a century ago. The prevailing view before Keynes was that the government should let nature run its course. That approach had worked over the preceding century, and then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon advised President Herbert Hoover that if he let the Depression “liquidate” the weak links in the economy, it would emerge from the crisis stronger. The depth of the resulting pain discredited the old Darwinian approach forever. It also opened the door to Keynes, who proposed instead that the government should…

IN HIS BOOK APOLLO’S ARROW, Nicholas Christakis asks if, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we might find ourselves, like our grandparents and great-grandparents after the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, in the Roaring ’20s: … the increased religiosity and reflection of the immediate and intermediate pandemic periods could give way to increased expressions of risk-taking, intemperance, or joie de vivre in the post-pandemic period. The great appeal of cities will be apparent once again. People will relentlessly seek opportunities for social mixing on a larger scale in sporting events, concerts, and political rallies. And after a serious epidemic, people often feel not only a renewed sense of purpose but a renewed sense of possibility. The 1920s brought the widespread use of the radio, jazz, the Harlem Renaissance, and women’s suffrage.…

ONLY A YEAR AGO, JOE BIDEN was seen as an aging if likable establishment figure whose main claim to the U.S. presidency was that he wasn’t Donald Trump. Biden himself suggested he might be a “transitional president” rather than a transformational one: Elect me, get rid of the widely hated Trump, and then we’ll figure out how to fix our country. Or perhaps my successor will. But that isn’t the Biden who has shown up this year—at all. In a May 27 speech at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland outlining his $6 trillion budget proposal, Biden talked about “creating a new paradigm”: resurrecting America’s beleaguered underclass with a combination of major education, health care, and tax proposals and a new brand of industrial policy and economic nationalism that will, eventually,…

Washington is a Roman town. From the Senate at its heart to the columns adorning every building and the giant commemorative obelisk and the city’s (sketchy) claim to be built on seven hills, the capital imitates Rome. So does Moscow, boasting of its status as the “third Rome.” So does London, a provincial backwater in Roman times. The European Union’s motto, adopted in 2000, is in Latin, as are over half of U.S. state mottos—and the inscription on U.S. currency. Rome remains an image to be looked to, a symbol of a great past stamped on the West. But Rome was also a nightmare, a slave state topped by a tiny class of the very rich and horrible. The genius of Emma Southon’s new book, A Fatal Thing Happened on…

The first portrait presented in former U.S. President George W. Bush’s second art book, Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants, is probably his best. Depicting Joseph Kim, a young man who came to the United States as a North Korean refugee, the painting exhibits many formal qualities that Bush has shown in his past portraits of veterans and world leaders. The canvas presents a tightly cropped image of the subject’s head rendered with thick, visible brushwork in bright colors. There is, however, a depth in the lavender shading of Kim’s face, the unblended orange of his collared shirt, and the sensitivity of his gaze out of the canvas and away from the viewer that defies the flatness typical of many of Bush’s works in earlier publications and throughout…

The Dominican Republic is open for business. It boasts a clear track record of proven examples of nearshoring success stories, currently benefiting from reduced operational costs, enhanced market access to important consumption markets and logistic solutions that have established the country as a safe and secure destination for both international and local investment. In this global context, where health challenges have impacted the security for a country as an investment destination, is the Dominican Republic a safe destination? Absolutely, Dominican Republic is a safe destination. In terms of health safety, the Dominican Republic has shown it has implemented the right protocols which have produced an efficient and exemplary response to COVID-19. As of June 15, nearly 4.3 million Dominicans had received their first dose of the vaccine, while more than…

The tourism and services industries weren’t always the largest economic contributors in the Dominican Republic. Manufacturing led the way until the 1990s, when tourism and the service field started to take over. The shift was a big boost to the nation as it became the fourth most popular tourist destination among Latin America’s 20 nations in 2018. This led to a 39 percent increase in total employment in only six years, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. The country is the world’s leading exporter of cigars, Latin America’s second largest exporter of candles and cotton fabrics, third largest exporter of medical devices, largest supplier of electrical circuit breakers and switches, fourth largest exporter of medical-surgical instruments, top-10 supplier of leather footwear, and third largest supplier of wool…

1 The country’s 95 miles of spectacularly pristine shoreline are greatly indented with beaches, lagoons, and natural harbors 2 The country’s 400-year-old capital of St John’s is a delightful combination of cosmopolitan meets small-town charm 3 Barbuda Lagoon: one of the natural wonders of the Caribbean, this majestic body of water hosts one of the largest frigatebird colonies in the world 4 Mount Obama: the country’s highest point, this 1,300-foot volcanic crater offers spectacular views of Antigua 5 Highest safety protocols: A&B has been praised by the world’s leading public health organizations for its robust response 6 Lowest infection rates: only 5 people died from Covid-19 in 2020 7 Regional air hub: the country is fast attracting some of the Lesser Antilles’ best carriers 8 Home to the friendliest people…

ASIA Buried in Australia’s 2021-22 federal budget papers, released in May, was a prediction that devastated the million Australians who, like me, live abroad and the millions more at home who love them: The national borders are likely to remain closed until at least mid-2022. Australia slammed its doors as soon as the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and it has kept them more firmly shut than any nation save for, perhaps, North Korea. Plenty if not most nations have restricted nonessential travel since the start of the pandemic. But very few have forbidden their own citizens from leaving, not even China, and certainly none—except for Australia—that are democracies. There are up to 40,000 Australians around the world registered with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade who identify as “stranded”—that is,…

MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA After accepting an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire, which took effect on May 21, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed an “achievement no military has ever achieved” in Israel’s 11-day bombing campaign in Gaza. At the same time, Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that had indiscriminately fired more than 4,300 missiles into Israel, reflexively expressed the “euphoria of victory.” Whatever the military outcome, it seems increasingly likely that the final reckoning of this latest round of conflict will be decided far away from the battlefield. Netanyahu may have picked the wrong time to doggedly pursue airstrikes against one of the most densely populated areas on Earth, where 50 percent of the inhabitants are under the age of 15; more specifically, he may have chosen the wrong cultural moment.…

AN EMERGING ECONOMIC CULTURE will reframe how global corporations trade, invest, and behave. As we move from the preeminence of financial shareholders to a broader stakeholder capitalism, cor-porations are switching to new metrics to assess success beyond profits. The new environmental, social, and governance (ESG) agenda is complex, involving a long list of issues for companies to consider—including climate change, worker empowerment, gender and racial diversity, pay equity, human rights, the provenance of goods and services, and, in the United States, even voter rights. Policymakers, companies, and financial institutions are under intense pressure on these matters from vocal ESG activists. However, this new cultural frontier entails considerable trade-offs for leaders to navigate. For example, calls to defund energy companies to combat climate change ignore the fact that such an approach…

GLOBAL INEQUALITIES were already extreme before the COVID-19 pandemic; now, even greater disparities are actually killing people. Opportunistic vaccine grabs by rich countries and knowledge colonialism through the control of intellectual property rights mean the disease will continue to destroy lives and economies. People in rich countries get big government with expanded services, income support, and more public spending, as they should. But in poor countries, people face cuts in government expenditure, fiscal austerity, and the brutal so-called discipline imposed by global finance. The resulting job losses, worsening livelihoods, hunger, and reduced access to crucial public services could lead to a lost generation across much of the developing world.…

SLOW AND STEADY EVOLUTION characterized the period before COVID-19. The pandemic, however, hit with a force that accelerated change all across our economic, social, and political structures, leading to a dynamic divergence within and among the world’s economies. This divergence is spilling over into all segments of society, resulting in greater and deeper inequality, widespread injustice, and a growing susceptibility to disinformation. Alliances are changing, growth poles are diverging, and innovation is accelerating—for better or worse. The pandemic created the world’s first $200 billionaire, while more people in the advanced economies fell deeper into poverty. Inequality was also manifest at the global level, where developing nations lacked the financial liquidity to stave off the crisis while advanced countries injected trillions of dollars into their economies, discarding all caution about deficits and…

LONG-HELD BELIEFS IN DEMOCRACY and market-based solutions are under attack from both the right and the left; we are entering an age of transition. At the same time, the torch of global preeminence is being passed to China, which is growing impatient in reclaiming its pre-Industrial Revolution role as the dominant economic power. Classic military doctrine and technology may soon prove flawed—if not futile—in a crisis over Taiwan that could challenge the United States’ superpower status. Political brinkmanship will be put to the test. Three huge challenges are simultaneously overwhelming traditional market-based solutions: resistance to social change from the right, the backlash against economic and racial inequality from the left, and climate change. Internationally, the center of gravity’s shift from West to East doesn’t give the United States much room…

This summer, as the pandemic eases and Europe opens again for business and pleasure, the Merkel era will end. After her 16-year reign as Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel deserves admiration and praise on many counts. When she made history in the fall of 2005 as the first woman to be elected chancellor, unemployment stood at just over 11 percent, and Germany was widely disparaged as the “sick man of Europe.” Doctoral students on both sides of the Atlantic were writing dissertations trying to uncover the roots of Germany’s malaise and were asking what it was about the country that made it so hard to reform. Four Merkel cabinets later, German unemployment stands at 6 percent (and would be even lower if not for the pandemic), and no one doubts Germany’s…

As countries come out of COVID-19, the Dominican Republic appears well suited to deal with a post-pandemic environment and revitalize its economy. Crucial to any return to normalcy is the vaccination rate, and, as President Abinader indicated, the Dominican Republic is well on its way to meeting its goal of having its population vaccinated by year’s end. Abinader’s business and investment friendly polices, the country’s knowledgeable workforce and predictions of a return to a thriving tourism sector have already borne fruit. The government says its numbers already show a nation rebounding from the pandemic. Exports for January-April totaled $3.7 billion, a 3 percent increase from the previous quarter and 22.9 percent from the same period in 2020 — due mainly to an increase in exports from its free trade zones.…

Now that a partial end is in sight to the global woes of the past year, people are returning to what they know and love best: friends, family, and beautiful foreign climes. With record low cases in 2020 and some of the most successful pandemic-response measures on the planet, the island paradise of Antigua and Barbuda is not only open for business; it’s welcoming smart travelers and remote workers who know how to take advantage of a good thing when they see it. With many office places now a thing of the ancient past, all around the world a new breed of mobile employee is emerging: the kind who sees the forest for the trees. “Wherever you are,” says Minister of Tourism and Investment Charles Fernandez, “you are just a…

Though the world has never been fair place, the arc of the moral universe occasionally bends toward openness and flexibility. None of us choose where we are born; but with Antigua and Barbuda’s smart investment initiative, intrepid individuals and their families can now gain access to the world’s 26th most beneficial passport. Though an increasing number of countries offer similar schemes, few come as close to satisfying the smart investor as Antigua and Barbuda’s. First launched in 2013, this paradisical island nation of 100,000 now offers the full benefits of Commonwealth citizenship and visa-free travel to over 150 countries worldwide. “However,” says Charmaine Quinland-Donovan, “we go beyond simply issuing citizenship to individuals in need of greater mobility. We also have an obligation to the wider community of nations.” Indeed, the…