Table of contents for Fall 2023 in Foreign Policy

Xi Jinping has ruled China for over a decade, but the way he rules it is changing. Xi faces domestic and international environments that are markedly worse than when he took office in 2012 as general secretary. The economy is struggling, confidence is faltering, debt is looming, and strategic competition with the United States and its allies is endangering the future of China’s technological advancement and economic growth. Many analyses still portray Chinese politics in relatively static terms, as either returning to growth-oriented practicality post-COVID or having discarded economic concerns to pursue authoritarian control and geopolitical dominance. But what such takes miss is that policymaking is becoming increasingly volatile, as China’s mounting challenges lead Beijing into deeper swings between the politics of its ideological agenda and the pragmatism of delivering…

As the day winds to a close, Janet Omole sits on a wooden bench under the stall where she sells smoked fish and pepper in Basiri, a bustling market district of Ado-Ekiti, in Nigeria’s southwest. Close by, small bowls containing tomato and pepper sit in rows. These are all telltale signs that Omole’s business is going through hard times. “Usually by this time of the day, most of my fish and pepper would be almost sold out. But for four weeks now, the market has become unbearably slow, and things have become more expensive, so customers don’t come,” said the 39-year-old, whose dwindling patronage has reduced her profits, making it nearly impossible to support her family of six. The four weeks of unbearably slow markets followed Nigerian President Bola Tinubu’s…

Over the past decade, Haitians have been held captive by a political leadership beholden to gangs. Former President Michel Martelly had extensive ties to drug dealers, money launderers, and gang leaders. Under his successor and protégé, Jovenel Moïse, senior government officials helped plan and supply attacks by a police officer-turned-gang leader named Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, who later became a leader of the G-9 Family and Allies gang alliance that now controls much of Port-au-Prince. When Moïse was assassinated in July 2021, the international community backed Ariel Henry to become prime minister, despite concerns about Henry’s relationship with a key suspect in the assassination. Unelected and unpopular, Henry lacks the will to rein in gangs—and at least one gang leader, Vitelhomme Innocent, has boasted about his ties to Henry. (Henry has…

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME THE NATIONS OF THE WORLD REACHED A MAJOR ACCORD? You’d have to go all the way back to 1994 and the World Trade Organization’s Uruguay Round. Forget the Paris Agreement, which contains no binding commitments to cut emissions. The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals are commendable, but the deadline of 2030 to eliminate global poverty and other scourges is likely to pass with little notice. Even as the list of transnational challenges grows—pandemics, debt, climate change—the ability to arrive at collaborative solutions is at an ebb. In the 21st century, the old multilateral institutions, many of them created in the wake of World War II, are beset by paralysis. The return of systemic rivalry—between a core group of liberal democracies on the one side and…

IN JULY, NEARLY A DOZEN CHINESE AND RUSSIAN WARSHIPS conducted 20 combat exercises in the Sea of Japan before beginning a 2,300-nautical-mile joint patrol, including into the waters near Alaska. These two operations, according to the Chinese defense ministry, “reflect the level of the strategic mutual trust” between the two countries and their militaries. The increasingly close relationship between China and Russia has been decades in the making, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has tightened their embrace. Both countries made a clear strategic choice to prioritize relations with each other, given what they perceive as a common threat from the U.S.-led West. The deepening of bilateral ties is accompanied by a joint push for global realignment as the two countries use non-Western multilateral institutions—such as the BRICS forum and the Shanghai…

In the clubby world of Washington trade lawyers, Robert Lighthizer was always an outsider. He became wealthy representing the steel industry in its decades-long battles to block imports, while Republican and Democratic administrations alike pursued free trade deals. “It was like he was in the Galapagos,” away from the action in Washington, where trade pacts were being hammered out, one trade lawyer told me. But in Donald Trump, Lighthizer found a president who shared his protectionist ideas. Together, they shifted U.S. economic policy away from engagement with China toward confrontation. While the shift had been gathering speed for some years before 2016, none of Trump’s predecessors had been willing to bludgeon China with massive tariffs to pursue U.S. goals. Reversing U.S. policy toward China is probably the Trump administration’s most…

Ukraine is in the waiting room to join both NATO and the European Union. NATO leaders meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, in July disappointed Kyiv with only a vague statement on a future invitation to join the alliance when “conditions are met.” But at least NATO is being honest in signaling that there are still obstacles to overcome among the allies. That stands in stark contrast to the EU and its messaging on Ukrainian membership. If you think Ukraine’s path to NATO is a struggle, wait until Ukraine’s EU accession gets serious. With its grand rhetoric on Ukraine’s future in the EU, Brussels is talking as if Kyiv joining the bloc were a done deal. When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Brussels in February, EU leaders elbowed each other for a…

On July 24, the Israeli government charged ahead with plans for a judicial overhaul with the passage of a bill in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, striking down the courts’ ability to review the “reasonableness” of government and ministerial decisions. The bill passed in a 64-0 vote as many opposition members of the Knesset walked out in boycott. Thousands of protesters flooded the streets, demanding the defense of democratic values in what has been both the longest-running and largest protest movement in Israel’s history. While the majority of Israelis oppose the reform, the fear is most acute among women: In a February poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, nearly 63 percent of women expressed concern over a potential retreat in gender equality as a result of the legislation. Alongside chilling photos…

The Biden administration’s controversial decision to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions is a telling illustration of liberalism’s limitations as a guide to foreign policy. The administration’s rhetoric extols the superiority of democracies over autocracies, highlights its commitment to a “rules-based order,” and steadfastly maintains that it takes human rights seriously. If this were true, however, it would not be sending weapons that pose serious risks to civilians and whose use in Ukraine it has criticized harshly in the past. As it has on other prominent issues—relations with Saudi Arabia, the expanding Israeli oppression of Palestinians, the commitment to an open world economy—those liberal convictions get jettisoned as soon as they become inconvenient. This behavior shouldn’t surprise us: When states are in trouble and worried that they might suffer a setback,…

TIME AND AGAIN OVER THE LAST CENTURY, the United States and the other liberal democracies in Europe, East Asia, and elsewhere have found themselves on the same side in grand struggles over the terms of the world order. This political grouping has been given various names: the West, the free world, the trilateral world, the community of democracies. In one sense, it is a geopolitical formation, uniting North America, Europe, and Japan, among others. It is an artifact of the Cold War and U.S. hegemony, anchored in NATO and Washington’s East Asian alliances. In another sense, it is a non-geographic grouping, a loosely organized community defined by shared, universal-oriented political values and principles. It is an artifact of the rise and spread of liberal democracy as a way of life.…

AS THE OLD MULTILATERAL INSTITUTIONS, from the United Nations to the World Trade Organization, become increasingly paralyzed and dysfunctional, minilateral organizations have emerged as another format for getting things done. Small groups of countries are focusing on specific issues and shared interests—often voluntarily, rarely as a formal bloc—as a pragmatic alternative to cumbersome multilateralism and constricting alliances. The concept goes back a long way: Think of the 19th-century Concert of Europe or the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangement born during World War II. But it’s Asia and the Indo-Pacific that have become minilateralism’s 21st-century testing ground. Geopolitical shifts are fast reshaping the region and pushing it toward a new balance of power. At the same time, the region has little tradition of—or, for now, interest in—formal military alliances beyond a handful…

Renowned for its rich heritage spanning 7,000 years, sparkling blue seas and warm hospitality, the stunningly beautiful Mediterranean island nation of Malta has always been a magnet for global travelers. “Tourism directly and indirectly contributes about 30% of our gross domestic product, employs thousands of people and has attracted many investments from international investors and local family businesses that have invested across multiple generations,” reveals Minister for Tourism Clayton Bartolo. The sector rebounded quickly from COVID-19, with the islands of Malta and Gozo welcoming 2.3 million travelers in 2022, just 17% less than 2019’s record number. The figures for the first half of this year are even better, exceeding the equivalent period in 2019 by about 5%. “We’ve seen increases in tourist arrivals, guest nights and a significant 15% increase…

The moment has been long in coming, but India is turning into a strategic actor in Southeast Asia. Amid a flurry of regional diplomacy, India has sealed an arms deal with Vietnam, sided with the Philippines over China on sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea, and enhanced defense cooperation with Indonesia. It is balance-of-power politics worthy of an international relations textbook: Even though most Southeast Asian governments have long made it their mantra not to choose geopolitical sides, China’s aggressive posture in and around the South China Sea is driving India and its partners in the region together. As yet, none of these relationships are on the level of alliances or include a serious force deployment component, but the trend is clear. And even though the United States and…

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“America is back.” That was the message from U.S. President Joe Biden, the most internationalist of recent U.S. presidents, speaking at the Munich Security Conference in February 2021. There is a “dire need to coordinate multilateral action,” he declared. But his administration’s fixation on bilateral and regional agreements—at the expense of globally coordinated action—is underplaying the potential of our international institutions, all while undermining any possibility of a stable and managed globalization. Without a new multilateralism, a decade of global disorder seems inevitable. The great irony, of course, is that the world’s preeminent multilateral institutions—from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to the United Nations—were all created by the United States in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Through U.S. leadership, these institutions helped deliver peace, reduce…

My race changed when I moved from Britain to the United States two years ago. I don’t mean that I tick a different box now. I remain born to Indian immigrants, a person with obviously brown skin. In both countries, I’m categorized as Asian. What changed when I crossed the Atlantic was what my race signified. British Asians, the United Kingdom’s largest ethnic minority group by a sizable margin, faced some of the highest mortality rates in the country in the early months of COVID-19 pandemic. In the United States, meanwhile, deaths among Asian Americans were the lowest of any group. This can be explained in large part by demographic variations, rooted in different histories of immigration. But the figures also prove that race isn’t a static quantity. It depends…

Part I explores the evolution and impacts of cyber operations and the challenges they present, including attribution of and response to cyberattacks, and the alignment of cyber and kinetic warfare strategies. Part II identifies the lessons learned from multistakeholder responses to the ongoing war in Ukraine, examining the implications of cyber operations for international humanitarian law and diplomacy, and highlighting the role of the tech community in tracking and exposing information operations. Part III looks ahead to future hybrid wars and explores opportunities for partnership across government, industry, and civil society to secure cyberspace, safeguard nuclear and space assets from cyber threats, and ensure accountability for cyberattacks against civilians and critical infrastructure. Cyberattacks ramped up preceding Russia’s full-scale invasion The prevalence of cyberattacks targeting Ukraine signal a new era of hybrid warfare.…

In late February, Nigeria held a presidential election that many citizens regard as flawed and illegitimate. The vote wasn’t expected to go smoothly, but accusations of vote-rigging were immediate. There were reports of people snatching ballot boxes and gunmen attacking polling stations. A new electronic voting system that aimed to make the election more transparent did not go according to plan; electoral staff at some locations failed to upload results, leading to further accusations of tampering. A week later, Nigerians woke up to the news that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had declared Bola Tinubu the winner. Tinubu had not technically passed the threshold for outright victory in the first round, as he did not achieve 25 percent of the vote in the Federal Capital Territory, which includes Abuja.…