Foreign Affairs

To have any chance of success, U.S. strategy toward North Korea must be guided by an accurate sense of how Kim’s regime thinks and what it knows about Washington. Failure to do so could lead the United States to stumble into the worst conflict since World War II.

In 2001, the reality was that there was really no better alternative than to let China join the WTO.

For about four years now, since Russia’s occupation of Crimea and China’s launch of the Belt and Road Initiative, there has been much speculation about whether another Cold War between East and West is coming. In the last month alone, headlines have proclaimed that “The New Cold War Is Here,” heralded “Putin’s New Cold War,” and warned that “Trump Is Preparing for a New Cold War.” But are we really returning to the past? Contemporary politics is full of false analogies, and the return of the Cold War seems to be one of them.

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The Trump administration must ground its summit diplomacy and overall approach to North Korea in a strategy of comprehensive coercion that clearly defines U.S. objectives, leverages Washington’s most effective diplomatic and military tools, and aligns its Korea policy with the broader U.S. strategy in Asia.

A healthy combination of strong political will in Washington and American leadership abroad can parry China’s unfair advantages without doing significant collateral damage in the process.

Putin and authoritarian leaders in his position have three primary options for succession.

Australia is pushing back against a campaign of political interference orchestrated by China.

Trump is not so much abandoning American exceptionalism as he is tapping into an earlier incarnation of it. As a grand strategy, this effort will not succeed, but its appeal has revealed the need for a new narrative to steer U.S. foreign policy.

Revealing official secrets and lies involves a form of moral risk-taking. And drawing the line between the right and wrong kinds of disclosures has grown harder than ever in the Trump era.

The key to a successful North Korea sanctions strategy is recognizing that such measures take time to achieve results.

In October of last year, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke at a gathering of his Justice and Development Party (AKP) about the steps that have been taken so far to eliminate the Islamic movement of the exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen whom he blames for organizing the July 15, 2016, coup attempt. After describing some of the domestic measures that he has pursued to stamp out the group, known officially as the Fethullahist Terror Organization (FETO), Erdogan noted his desire to also take down its networks abroad.

“Neither in the East nor in the West is a single member of this organization comfortable as before, nor will they be,” he said. “If not today, then tomorrow, one day every member of the FETO traitors’ front will pay for his treason against the country and the nation.”

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China's vast investments in clean energy will help it replace the United States as the most important player in many regional alliances and trading relationships. Washington needs to respond before it is too late.

Worries that Trump is an isolationist are out of place against the backdrop of the administration’s actions. In fact, Trump has ushered in an entirely new U.S. grand strategy: illiberal hegemony.

The international order is built to last through significant shifts in global politics and economics and strong enough to survive a term of President Trump if its defenders step up.

Washington has been wrestling with a new term that describes an old threat. “Sharp power,” as coined by Christopher Walker and Jessica Ludwig of the National Endowment for Democracy (writing for ForeignAffairs.com and in a longer report), refers to the information warfare being waged by today’s authoritarian powers, particularly China and Russia. Over the past decade, Beijing and Moscow have spent tens of billions of dollars to shape public perceptions and behavior around the world—using tools new and old that exploit the asymmetry of openness between their own restrictive systems and democratic societies. The effects are global, but in the United States, concern has focused on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and on Chinese efforts to control discussion of sensitive topics in American publications, movies, and classrooms.

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Democratic governments should not overreact to sharp power in ways that undercut their true advantage, which comes from soft power.

Sooner or later, Trump's luck will run out. And when it does, the true costs of his presidency will become clear.

For scholars studying the effects of presidential leadership on U.S. foreign policy, Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 has offered quite the test. What does it mean for the United States to elect a leader with no experience in government, little knowledge of foreign policy, and an explicit disdain for expertise?

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