Tabla de contenidos para Spring 2022 en Foreign Policy

There are plenty of economic and security explanations for the war in Ukraine. And they’re useful, but they’re not enough. The cultural, historical, and religious underpinnings of the conflict between Moscow and Kyiv go back to fundamental questions of what Russia even is, what it means to be Russian, and who gets to own the myths of the past. On July 12, 2021, the Kremlin’s official website published an article by Russian President Vladimir Putin called “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” It’s a key guide to the historical stories that shape Putin and many Russians’ attitudes—ideas that were echoed in the Russian leader’s angry speech shortly before he declared war. Firstly, Putin and many Russians believe that Russians and Ukrainians are the same people, “brother nations,” with…

After months of devastation and suffering under the weight of war, Ethiopia may be witnessing a rare chance for peace and inclusive dialogue following the federal government’s release of prominent prisoners, notably Bekele Gerba and Jawar Mohammed of the Oromo Federalist Congress, Eskinder Nega of the Balderas for True Democracy, and veteran Tigrayan leaders including Sebhat Nega and Abay Woldu. One of the biggest concerns is that the government’s gesture toward peace may fracture the ruling Prosperity Party, which is centered on an alliance between Amharas and Oromos, Ethiopia’s two largest ethnic groups, constituting around two-thirds of the country’s population. This stems from outrage against the government and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed among some Amharas and unwarranted accusations by Tigrayan and Oromo ethnonationalists and some international analysts and policymakers that…

Two major works of Chinese government propaganda released this year have elicited opposite viewer reactions: effusive praise and ridicule. Both works, the historical fiction film The Battle at Lake Changjin 2 and the five-part TV documentary special Zero Tolerance, extol the virtues of sacrificing oneself for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Both are also plodding, heavyhanded, and preachy, commissioned by central authorities and released after scrutiny by government censors. Yet where Lake Changjin 2, set during the Korean War, has been celebrated for its agonizing attention to brutal, snowy battle scenes, Zero Tolerance has come under fire for muddying its own message: namely, by not depicting corrupt officials as miserable and repentant enough. Lake Changjin 2, a feature film, has been deemed more effective as propaganda in the court of…

Harsh Times, Mario Vargas Llosa’s 2019 novel first published in Spanish and now translated into English, is a didactic book. Set before and after the U.S.-orchestrated coup that toppled Guatemala’s socialist president, Jacobo Árbenz, in 1954, its message is spelled out repeatedly across some 300 pages and then again—as though the reader were in danger of missing the point—in its final paragraph: “When all is said and done, the North American invasion of Guatemala held up the continent’s democratization for decades at the cost of thousands of lives, as it helped popularize the myth of armed struggle and socialism throughout Latin America.” For all the endless debates over the proper role of politics in literature, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen such a stark example of what might be called…

The lead-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine bore a chilling resemblance to its approach to Georgia in 2008. Five days prior to launching its operation in Georgia, the Kremlin concluded the large-scale Kavkaz 2008 military exercise in the North Caucasus and announced a pullback. The Georgian example clearly shows that Russian rhetoric cannot be trusted. Apart from heavy military mobilization near the Ukrainian border, Russia sought to construct a casus belli by spreading disinformation and accusing Ukraine of planning military provocations in its eastern Donbass region. Throughout eight years of ongoing war, since Russia invaded Donbass and seized Crimea in 2014, the Ukrainian government has never attempted to escalate the situation and retake control of the occupied parts of the east. It is hardly believable that Kyiv would have taken…

On Jan. 5, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev imposed a state of emergency, and two days later, he ordered police to shoot to kill “terrorists”—that is, anyone who participated in the protests’ violent aftermath. “I didn’t think I’d see mass shootings I only knew from my parents,” Suinbike Suleimenova, a contemporary artist based in Almaty, Kazakhstan, wrote on her Telegram channel. Her sentiment reflects both the ruling regime’s shocking turn to lethal violence after Kazakhstan’s nationwide protests in January and familiar historic grievances dating back to the 1986 uprising against Soviet rule in Almaty. The protests started as peaceful demonstrations in Kazakhstan’s Mangystau region on Jan. 2 and quickly spread across all major cities within days. But they were soon reportedly hijacked by criminal groups, which attacked law enforcement officers and…

Decline is a tricky concept. The term makes us think of a country that is falling like a rock—one whose power and capabilities are dropping across the board. But a country can be in relative decline vis-à-vis a fast-growing adversary even if its own power is still increasing. It can be surging forward in some areas, such as military might, even as its underlying economic strength starts to wither. And decline doesn’t always lead a country to scale back its objectives—the sense of urgency it creates can cause ambitious powers to grab what they can before the clock runs out. Xi Jinping’s China is about to give the world an education in the nuances of decline. Since the onset of its economic reforms in the 1970s, China has long defied…

The following is adapted from past editions of FP’s weekly news quiz. Test yourself at ForeignPolicy.com. 1. Which region ended 2021 with the world’s highest COVID-19 vaccination rate? a. North America b. South America c. Europe d. Asia 2. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted massive foreign-policy shifts around the world. In Germany, leaders finally agreed to increase defense spending to a target set by NATO. What percent of GDP are NATO members expected to spend? a. 0.5 percent b. 2 percent c. 5 percent d. 10 percent 3. Iceland announced this year that it would move toward shutting down its whaling industry. In which two other countries is whaling still legal? a. Norway and Japan b. The United States and Canada c. China and Australia d. Chile and Indonesia 4.…

On the morning of Feb. 24, as Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, German army chief Alfons Mais got up and wrote on LinkedIn that he had “never ever expected to experience war again” in Europe. After years of budget cuts, he observed, the Bundeswehr, Germany’s military, “stands naked. The options we can offer our government to support the [NATO] alliance are extremely limited.” Only three days later, on Feb. 27, after Putin had put his nuclear deterrent forces on alert, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz committed an extra 100 billion euros (around $112 billion) to his country’s 2022 defense budget. In another major turnaround, he also authorized third countries such as the Netherlands to ship German-made defensive weapons to Ukraine, and he supported a call for…

Sometimes we cannot know what principle we are prepared to defend until it is challenged. In There Is a North, the historian John L. Brooke argues that only after the American South coalesced around the defense of slavery post-1850 did the North discover its own identity in the opposition to slavery. Similarly, in the aftermath of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine—and of the startlingly, almost thrillingly, unified response by major democratic states—we can say, “There is a West.” We do not yet know quite what that means or whom that includes or just how binding that sense of common purpose will prove to be. We do know, however, how deep and widespread the reaction to Putin’s violation of international law and norms has been: Germany has agreed to…

In late January, Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, boiled down the suffering of millions of Yemenis into a false binary in which Washington had done everything it could for peace. He claimed that the Houthi rebels in Yemen were to blame for the continuation of the seven-year conflict, which has become one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world. With the Houthis launching ballistic missiles at the United Arab Emirates and a litany of their own war crimes, it’d be easy to fall for this simplistic analysis of the conflict. Yet, in suggesting that reaching a cease-fire and ending the war are simply up to the Houthis, rather than the Saudi-backed Yemeni government, McGurk reveals his misunderstanding of the conflict. For…

That China seeks to challenge the United States’ privileged position in Asia is beyond doubt. But does China intend to go even further—to replace the United States as the global hegemon, remake the liberal international order, and threaten freedom and democracy everywhere? And if so, does Beijing have the resources to do it? The right China strategy for the United States depends on the correct assessment of Beijing’s strategic ambitions and its options to achieve them. That presents Washington with a conundrum. Chinese pronouncements about the country’s global ambitions are notoriously vague, forcing U.S. policymakers to interpret them for hints of Beijing’s strategy—reminiscent of the ways Kremlinologists once tried to divine the Soviet Politburo’s intentions. These interpretations, in turn, can vary greatly depending on a U.S. policymaker’s lens and perspective.…

When the internet proliferated in the early 2000s, Chinese millennials saw it as a window to a bigger, wider world—one in which China was becoming more integrated. Back then, many Chinese still saw the West as a model to learn from. In my high school, right as the internet was becoming commonplace, I was taught how to browse news on Yahoo, search information on Google, and find videos on YouTube. Discussions on nascent online forums were somewhat similar to those in many Western democracies: open, free, and unfiltered. Netizens would organically criticize government policies. Public intellectuals who drew attention to societal problems were applauded. The strengthening of China’s Great Firewall changed everything. Within a few years, free speech was first censored and then cracked down on. Dissent was no longer…