Reports

Europe can ill afford to farm out its foreign and defense policies to Brussels. The centralized, technocratic command center of the European Union is best suited to attend to the common market. Europe will come back as a global actor only if the continental European member states and the United ...

China is cunningly enhancing its geopolitical standing in the wake of a pandemic that has spread from its territory. At the same time, the Western countries’ responses to the global crisis and to China’s rise have been woefully inadequate.

The Eastern Partnership has lacked a strategy since its creation in 2009. Designed to promote European values in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, the project has done little to reduce poverty and corruption in participating countries. Furthermore, the latter have often found themselves struggling to balance allegiances to ...

European countries say they base their foreign policies on values – but doing so has led to inconsistency in how they treat international partners. Consequently, Europe has taken the wrong stance on military exports, the Iran nuclear deal and the U.S.-China trade dispute. Recent events, however, may have provided a ...

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who currently enjoys high levels of trust among world leaders, wants to make the most of this advantageous situation by simultaneously engaging with the U.S., China and other strategic geopolitical partners, in addition to fostering better relations with smaller South Asian neighbors.

The unveiling of the $50 billion U.S. investment plan to secure peace in the Middle East by improving conditions in the West Bank and Gaza met international skepticism, and virulent opposition from the Palestinian authorities. But for President Donald Trump, solving the conflict none of his predecessors could would gain ...

Russian “meddling” in other countries is so much a part of our political discourse that it has become fodder for jokes. But what is behind this interference, and who is doing the interfering? Visions of a centralized command center in the Kremlin ignore the freestyle nature of Russian politics in ...

President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty is one in a series of withdrawals from contractual security arrangements. For the U.S., this step changes little in the bilateral relationship with Russia, but among European policymakers and media it has stirred up outrage. Paradoxically, ...

Politically and financially, Italy has come to be regarded as a weak link in the European Union. Its shaky banks and enormous public debt almost blew apart the euro area during the debt crisis of 2010-2012, and could still do so. Its government, a marriage of populists on the left ...

Unconventional as his leadership style may be, President Donald Trump, succeeded in 2018 in getting both U.S. allies and competitors to pay serious attention to his foreign policy agenda. His administration is undaunted in pursuing U.S. policy goals despite replacements of key officials in the president’s national security apparatus. Mr. ...

Ahead of parliamentary elections this spring, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has reinvented himself. Putting aside earlier economic reforms, his talk is mostly about social welfare. While the Indian leader focuses on wooing small-town voters, his government has put most foreign policy initiatives on hold. Whether Mr. Modi’s ruling BJP wins ...

Far from showing ignorance, the decision to withdraw troops from Syria may be a sign the U.S. has learned from a long history of Western failure in the Middle East.

China’s rise as an economic and military colossus has transformed the geopolitics of East Asia. Its most powerful neighbor, Japan, has embarked on a more self-reliant course, even as it continues to lean heavily on its alliance with the United States. Tokyo is expanding its contacts, both economic and strategic, ...

For U.S. President Donald Trump, Republican defeat in the 2018 midterm elections at least turned the GOP into his party. With economic successes to his credit and growing constraints on his power imposed by a Democratic Congress, the question is whether he will tone down the polarizing style that has ...

India imports oil from Iran and buys arms from Russia, while trying to mend fences with Beijing. All this seems anathema to American policy, and now President Donald Trump has turned down an invitation to visit India in January. But reports that the U.S.-India relationship is on the rocks are ...

The most important part of Europe’s security perimeter in the 21st century may be its southern rim. The migration crisis of 2015 was only a foretaste of the demographic, economic and political pressures that are building up in the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the approaches tried by European powers ...

Europe’s influence as a great power is nowhere more apparent than in the attraction it exerts on the poorer countries to its south – in the Middle East and Northern Africa. This is the region where European Union member states, often without U.S. support, have deployed their full foreign-policy arsenal, ...

As tensions increase within the transatlantic alliance, Europe has begun to reconsider its own place in the world. With the U.S. continuing a long-term strategic retrenchment, its allies across the Atlantic may need to grow beyond their role as Washington’s junior partners. From the migrant crisis to the Iran nuclear ...

The approaching anniversary of the end of World War I is a reminder that the place where that conflict started, the Western Balkans, has still not achieved a lasting peace. Three big political, legal and financial processes must still be carried through – reconciliation of former enemies, settlement of war ...

President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has hurt U.S. efforts to build a Sunni alliance against Iran. Given the risk of a region-wide conflict erupting near the Golan Heights or in southern Lebanon, its timing was also unfortunate. However, there could be a deeper logic behind ...

An uneasy truce between the major powers in the Middle East has come to an end with the defeat of Islamic State. Don't expect Iran's internal problems to provide a respite.

After a year in the White House, Donald Trump is suffering as much from his own erratic personality as from the burden of office. Foreign policy in the traditional, institutional sense has ceased to exist, and the way the president and Congress operate suggests there will be little room for ...

Honduras is a textbook example of why the one-size-fits-all U.S. policy toward Central American isn’t working. As the flow of drugs and migrants continues unabated, American law enforcement and aid programs have gotten in each other’s way. They would do better to find ways to strengthen the Hondurans who are ...

Vladimir Putin is at the heart of Russia’s political system. But less and less of what is happening in the country depends on his personal vision and volition. The president looks increasingly disengaged, while his policy of confrontation with the West is a dead end. As the first outlines of ...