Foreign Policy Fall 2019

Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the political reform program at New America. He is the author of The Business of America Is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became More Corporate and the forthcoming book Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America. He won the American Political Science Association’s Robert A. Dahl Award in 2016. Amy Hawkins is a writer who focuses on China. She reports on technology, culture, and society for publications including Wired, the Sunday Times, the Atlantic, and the Financial Times. Michael Pettis is a finance professor at Peking University and a senior fellow at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center. He has advised governments in Latin America and Asia on bank privatization and debt restructuring and spent 15 years on Wall Street. He…

WHEN GRETA THUNBERG DEPARTED EUROPE FOR NEW YORK on Aug. 14 in a zero-emissions racing yacht, she accelerated a global discussion of the morality of flying, which has become a particular fixation of the climate change movement. According to the German nonprofit Atmosfair, a single round-trip flight from London to New York generates 986 kilograms of carbon dioxide per person. People everywhere who care about emissions often feel a particular kind of shame when they burn an annual household’s worth of carbon on a single trip. But Germans are among the few who have a word for it: Flugscham, or “flying shame.” The term is actually an import: It comes from flygskam, which was coined in Thunberg’s native Sweden. Flygskam has enjoyed a tremendous career in Sweden—a popular Instagram account shames celebrities…

Each year, the editors of Foreign Policy review the accomplishments of leading officials and diplomats worldwide to acknowledge those who have made the greatest contribution to international relations. We are honored to host and present the 2019 Diplomat of the Year award to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg for his exceptional direction at a time of uncertainty regarding NATO’s future. His leadership has continued to strengthen the coalition’s commitment to freedom, democracy, and cooperation against tensions over the fundamental values underpinning trans-Atlantic relations. NOV. 12, 2019 WASHINGTON, D.C. To learn more, contact Susan Sadigova at susan.sadigova@foreignpolicy.com.…

AROUND THE WORLD, Brexit is widely seen as an exercise in populist politics. Many observers believe the 2016 referendum vote was won on the back of a toxic form of nationalism combining racism, xenophobia, and imperialist nostalgia for the heyday of the British Empire. The real story is not so simple. Arguments for Brexit were made on historical, constitutional, and democratic grounds. Their proponents ranged across the political spectrum, and they appealed not only to nativist plutocrats but to a significant number of minorities and immigrants, too. But more important, the conventional wisdom ignores the possibility that some Leave advocates might have been fighting to prevent a populist takeover of Britain—by strategically adopting the same position as a band of xenophobic extremists in order to strip them of their mobilizing force. Dominic…

5G MAY HAVE BECOME A BUZZWORD, but the notion that countries must rush to be first to deploy it is mistaken and reckless—and increases the odds of security breaches. There’s no doubt that 5G is important, promising the high speeds and unparalleled connectivity that are required to unleash the full potential of the “internet of things”—the ever-growing network of web-connected devices—and artificial intelligence. 5G could prove critical to economic competitiveness, but not only will a race to install the system end up backfiring, there is also reason to think twice about the claims of China’s Huawei that it alone can shape our technological future. Huawei’s marketing—and Chinese government propaganda—has built the impression that it’s either Huawei or no way to 5G. The telecommunications firm declares itself the unparalleled leader in 5G…

“I’M GOING TO DO EVERYTHING TO WIN,” Dorian Munoz, who leads the far-right National Rally’s youth outreach in the Var region of southern France, told me in a recent interview. He’s just 27, but he’s running for mayor in La Seyne-sur-Mer, one of the region’s only remaining left-leaning cities. For months now, the National Rally—formerly the National Front—has been aggressively campaigning for the March 2020 municipal elections. It comes after the party’s success in last May’s European Parliament elections, in which it won 23 percent of the national vote, ahead of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist En Marche. And in its strongholds—the northern mining basin, where unemployment is high, and along the Mediterranean coast, where the memory of the Algerian war still resonates—its numbers soared, in some areas exceeding 40 percent. “Local politics…