Showing results by publisher "Foreign Affairs" in United States

Western pundits and nostalgic Muslim thinkers alike have built up a narrative of the caliphate as an enduring institution, central to Islam and Islamic thought between the seventh and 20th centuries. In fact, the caliphate is a political or religious idea whose relevance has waxed and waned according to circumstance.

The past few weeks have seen a wave of Muslims from all around the world joining the ranks of ISIS. Although most of the attention has been on those coming from the United States and Europe, the bulk of foreign fighters has actually come from places like Turkey, from which the flow of jihadists is particularly puzzling.

Russian leaders often claim the United States reneged on a promise not to expand NATO after the Cold War. They aren't lying: Although Washington never put a pledge in writing, U.S. officials worked hard to convince Moscow that NATO wouldn't move east. And in international politics, informal commitments count.

Xi Jinping’s reforms are designed to produce a corruption-free, politically cohesive, and economically powerful one-party state with global reach: a Singapore on steroids. But there is no guarantee the reforms will be as transformative as the Chinese leader hopes.

The president of the Philippines talks to Foreign Affairs about economic reform, political corruption, and Chinese aggression.

Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, critics say postcommunist reforms have failed. But the evidence says otherwise. Transition states in Europe and Eurasia have become normal countries - no worse, and sometimes better, than other states at comparable levels of development.

Discussions of the Holocaust aside, Germany and Israel are still rarely mentioned in the same breath. Yet Berlin has long been one of the most successful - and secretive - intermediaries between Jerusalem and its enemies.

With U.S. hegemony waning and no successor waiting to pick up the baton, the current international system will likely give way to a larger number of power centers acting with increasing autonomy. The post-Cold War order is unraveling, and it will be missed.

Since the early 1990s, a handful of oligarchs has dominated Greece’s economy and politics. So long as these elites have a vested interest in keeping things as they are, the country will never fully find its way out of crisis.

After 13 years of war, the loss of many thousands of lives, and the expenditure of trillions of dollars, what has the United States learned? The answer depends on not only who is asking but when.

In assembling an international coalition to combat ISIS, the United States has looked mostly to the Middle East and Europe, regions that it said face a direct threat from the militant Islamist group. But other parts of the world are just as anxious about ISIS - above all, Southeast Asia.

Europe’s political climate is more hostile to Jews now than at any time in recent memory. Rising anti-Semitism among Europe’s Muslims, especially in the wake of the war in Gaza, is one reason for this change. But to claim that the rise of Muslim anti-Semitism is the main culprit - as the German journalist Jochen Bittner did this week in The New York Times - is to overlook the role played by the European majority.

In this issue: "Pitchfork Politics", by Yascha Mounk. The Tea Party and its European cousins have emerged from the enduring inability of democratic governments to satisfy their citizens’ needs. Today's populist movements won’t subside until the legitimate grievances driving them have been addressed.

Washington's current efforts to resolve the conflict in Syria will not break the stalemate. The only way to restore peace without committing U.S. troops is to build a new Syrian army capable of defeating both the Assad regime and the extremists.

A successful right-wing campaign in India to suppress the work of Wendi Doniger, a prominent scholar of Hinduism, suggests that conservative voices are gaining the upper hand in the country’s long struggle between secular liberalism and religious nationalism.

Life in Nigeria's largest city is changing for the better, offering a potential lesson for struggling states looking to stage a turnaround: mayors and city councils are more likely to embrace positive change than legislatures and presidents -- and far more quickly and effectively.

The crisis in Ukraine has pushed Moscow and the West into a new Cold War. For both sides, the top priority must now be to contain the conflict, ensuring that it ends up being as short and as shallow as possible.

U.S. and European officials need to understand how Russia really thinks about foreign policy. To resolve the Ukraine crisis and prevent similar ones from occurring in the future, they need to get better at putting themselves in Moscow's shoes.

Contrary to popular belief, the reunification of North Korea and South Korea would not spell disaster for South Korea, nor would it pose an unacceptable risk for the United States, China, and Japan. Rather, it would produce massiveeconomic and social benefits for the peninsula and the region.

Latin America’s new regional groups claim to share lofty goals, from resolving conflicts to coordinating political and economic policies. But there is little reason to believe that they are capable of achieving them.