Showing results by publisher "Foreign Affairs" in Politics & Social Sciences

A loose confederation of conservative thinkers and politicians is developing a new strategy for reaching out to the American middle class. These reformers could save the Republican Party - if only they could win over their fellow conservatives.

The Millennium Development Goals are due to expire at the end of 2015, and debate has turned to what should come next, with hundreds of new targets already proposed. Governments need to focus carefully and decide which goals offer the greatest returns on investment.

The 18th-century British politician and writer Edmund Burke is often called the father of modern conservatism. A new intellectual biography of Burke shows why that label fails to capture the complexity of Burke's thought and legacy.

CFR Senior Fellow Max Boot, Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies Director Richard Betts, RAND Senior Political Scientist Rick Brennan, Georgetown Professor Daniel Byman and Brookings Fellow Jeremy Shaprio, and former U.S. Special Envoy to Afghanistan Peter Tomsen debate the lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq.

In today's dollar-dominated financial system, changes in U.S. monetary policy can have immediate and significant global effects, wrecking economies and toppling regimes. As a result, for many countries monetary sovereignty is nothing but a dream.

Machines are substituting for more types of human labor than ever before. This means that the real winners of the future will be neither the providers of cheap labor nor the owners of ordinary capital, but rather those who can innovate and create new products, services, and business models.

Revolts against authoritarian regimes don’t always succeed - but they're more likely to if they embrace civil resistance rather than violence. Over the last century, nonviolent campaigns have been twice as likely to succeed as violent ones and they increase the chances that toppling a dictatorship will lead to peace and democracy.

Indonesia’s new president talks to Foreign Affairs about his recent victory, his national agenda, and the threat of Islamic extremism.

Washington doesn’t have the luxury of simply avoiding insurgencies, so it needs to figure out how to fight them better. Drawn from more than a decade of war, here are 10 lessons for doing so.

As the youngest daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the right-wing French political party the National Front, Marine Le Pen grew up in politics, starting to campaign with her father at 13. Trained as a lawyer, she won her first election in 1998, as a regional councilor, and in 2011, she succeeded her father as party leader. She soon distanced herself from his more extreme positions, and eventually - after he reiterated his claim that the Holocaust was a "detail" of history - she expelled him from its ranks.

Although today’s right-wing populists share some similarities with the interwar fascists, the differences are more significant. And more important, what today’s comparisons often fail to explain is how noxious politicians and parties grow into the type of revolutionary movements capable of fundamentally threatening democracy, as interwar fascism did.

The year 2015 was a dreadful one for Europe in general and for the EU in particular. It started with the terrorist attack against the magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris and ended with an even more deadly jihadist assault in the same city. In between, the EU battled an economic crisis in Greece, which threatened the entire eurozone, and endured a staggering inflow of refugees from the Middle East and other war-torn regions.

Just after 6 PM on August 1, 2007, at the peak of rush hour, 111 vehicles were driving across the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis when a thin metal plate in the bridge’s central span ripped. The bridge collapsed, plunging vehicles and passengers into the river more than 60 feet below. Thirteen people died, and 145 were injured.

Venezuela is in the throes of its most tumultuous political and economic period in decades. The collapse of global energy prices has wreaked havoc on the country’s economy. Estimates vary, but oil production has fallen from a peak of around 3.2 million barrels per day in 1997 to somewhere between 2.2 million and 2.5 million barrels per day today. Oil and gas account for more than 95 percent of Venezuela’s revenues from exports, and the country produces few other goods.

Almost as soon as the financial crisis struck in late 2007, policy-makers began working to prevent another one. The roots of the crisis, they contended, lay in reckless lending and excess debt. Banks had made massive loans to “subprime” borrowers, who had little ability to repay them, and the banks funded these investments with borrowed money. When the US housing bubble burst, millions of Americans defaulted on their mortgages, and the overleveraged banks collapsed.

Europe currently finds itself in the throes of its worst political crisis since World War II. Across the continent, traditional political parties have lost their appeal as populist, Euroskeptical movements have attracted widespread support. Hopes for European unity seem to grow dimmer by the day. The euro crisis has exposed deep fault lines between Germany and debt-ridden southern European states, including Greece and Portugal.

The July/August 2019 Issue of Foreign Affairs.

The November/December 2018 issue of Foreign Affairs.

The March/April 2017 issue of Foreign Affairs.

The January/February 2017 Issue of Foreign Affairs.