Foreign Policy Summer 2020

Sheri Berman is a professor of political science at Barnard College, researching European history and politics, the development of democracy, and the history of the left, as well as a columnist at foreign policy. Her latest book is Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day. Melissa Chan is a national and foreign affairs reporter based between Los Angeles and Berlin. She is a collaborator with the Global Reporting Centre and a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations. Robert Kuttner is a co-founder and co-editor of the American Prospect and a professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School, teaching courses on political economy and globalization. His latest book is The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy. Peter C. Perdue is a professor of history at…

WE ARE ALL STATISTS NOW. Since the coronavirus pandemic struck and the global economy unraveled, we have looked to governments to mobilize medical resources, implement containment measures, and spend previously unimaginable sums to support workers and businesses. Out of these emergency policies could arise new institutions and ways of solving problems that will benefit us long after the pandemic. There is a dark side, too. Governments have assumed new powers to trace, track, and control. Some of them have already abused these powers, and it is entirely conceivable that they may never give them back. To help us understand how the pandemic will permanently expand government powers—for good or for bad—foreign policy asked 10 leading thinkers from around the world to weigh in. After the Pandemic, Big Brother Will Be Watching by STEPHEN M.…

RACE IS NOT A PERSPECTIVE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS; it is a central organizing feature of world politics. Anti-Japanese racism guided and sustained U.S. engagement in World War II, and broader anti-Asian sentiment influenced the development and structure of NATO. During the Cold War, racism and anti-communism were inextricably linked in the containment strategy that defined Washington’s approach to Africa, Asia, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. And today race shapes threat perception and responses to violent extremism, inside and outside the global war on terrorism. Yet mainstream international relations (IR) scholarship denies race as essential to understanding the world, to the cost of the field’s integrity. Take the “big three” IR paradigms: realism, liberalism, and constructivism. These dominant frames for understanding global politics are built on raced and racist intellectual…

FOLLOWING THE BRUTAL POLICE KILLING OF GEORGE FLOYD in Minneapolis in late May, activists and protesters are calling on the government to “defund the police.” The Minneapolis City Council has declared its intention to do exactly that. But national Democratic pundits and elected officials have been wary of adopting the idea. Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has opposed defunding the police; so has his erstwhile primary opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders. But throttling cash flows to harmful institutions isn’t a new idea on the left or for Democrats. For decades, Democrats and the left called for the defunding of the military in much the same terms as protesters and activists are now calling for the defunding of the police. “Defund the military” has, it’s true, largely been abandoned as a…

FEW SOUTH KOREAN POLITICIANS SHOW Thae Yong-ho’s sartorial flair. The recently elected South Korean legislator will regularly appear in a dark fedora hat, a gray suit with a white shirt, tortoiseshell sunglasses—which he keeps on indoors—and a luxury Salvatore Ferragamo or Hermès tie checkered with an African menagerie print of giraffes, zebras, and spotted panthers. Thae dresses with the pride of a man who knows he has arrived. The cosmopolitan politician speaks fluent English and Chinese in addition to his native Korean. For a regular South Korean official, all this would be unusual enough. For a man raised in one of the most closed dictatorships on Earth, and who spent more than three decades as a senior diplomat for Pyongyang before becoming one of the highest-ranking defectors in 2016, it is…

ON OCT. 7, 2006, THE RUSSIAN JOURNALIST ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA was spending an unremarkable Saturday afternoon running errands. When she arrived home, she took what groceries she could carry out of her car and up to her seventh-floor apartment before heading back downstairs for the rest. As the elevator reached the ground floor and the doors shuddered open, a man in a baseball cap stepped forward and shot the 48-year-old dead. The person who ordered her assassination has never been found, but there’s little doubt about why someone might have wanted her dead. Politkovskaya spent years exposing human rights abuses, corruption, and the misuse of power. It is a beat that has proved lethal for many Russian journalists—particularly for those such as Politkovskaya who had no krysha, or protec-tion, from the…