Foreign Policy Fall 2021

Chibuihe Obi Achimba is a Nigerian writer and activist whose writing has been published in the New York Times and the Harvard Review. He is the founding editor of Dgëku, a literary magazine for queer Africans. Emily Ding is a freelance journalist based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Berlin. She covers migration, culture, and the environment. Jerry Hendrix is a vice president at the Telemus Group. A retired U.S. Navy captain, he is the author of To Provide and Maintain a Navy and Theodore Roosevelt’s Naval Diplomacy. Mina Al-Oraibi is a columnist at FOREIGN POLICY and the editor in chief of the Abu Dhabi-based newspaper the National. She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s International Media Council and was named a Yale World Fellow in 2015. Nina Goldman is a deputy copy…

AN AGENDA FOR THE 5TH DOMAIN Leading thinkers in government, academia, and industry discuss how the international community can secure and defend cyberspace. PART ONE What’s at Stake As cyberspace has become the modern domain of human productivity, it has also become a place of conflict and risk. Cyberattacks increasingly threaten key infrastructure, and the damage can be catastrophic. Our essayists explain why a new domain demands new rules to ensure responsible behavior in cyberspace. RESEARCH The Cost of Inaction As digital connectivity grows, so does the global attack surface. This special report from Foreign Policy Analytics finds an urgent need to establish new norms of responsible behavior in cyberspace to mitigate the mounting costs of cyberattacks and risks to human security. PART TWO An Action Agenda An effective global strategy for a rules-based order in cyberspace must ensure digital…

I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN TROUBLED BY the phrase “war on terror,” partly because it revolves around an amorphous enemy. Twenty years after 9/11, it is now clear that the global war on terrorism, by its very formulation, was not only unwinnable but was also designed to go on forever. Perhaps that’s why these wars won’t end simply by Washington deciding to up and leave. With the Taliban now returned to power in Afghanistan, FP’s Mina Al-Oraibi writes from her perch in Abu Dhabi that political leaders across the Middle East feel abandoned (Page 7). These leaders have come to the realization, Al-Oraibi writes, that the United States “can no longer claim to be the ‘leader of the free world.’” Washington may still have a role to play, if it can become…

As the last U.S. soldier pulled out of Afghanistan in the dead of night on Aug. 30 and the Taliban walked into Hamid Karzai International Airport, many in the Arab world were looking on and wondering if similar scenes would one day be seen at Baghdad International Airport or elsewhere in the region. Since then-U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama ran on a platform of “ending the war in Iraq” in 2008, popular domestic support for ending overseas military engagement has been a driving force for U.S. politicians. Although Obama was able to declare an end to the Iraq War in 2011 as president, he also ordered a U.S. military intervention, named Operation Inherent Resolve, to defeat the Islamic State there in 2014. It appears that resolve is now lacking. Former U.S. President Donald…

After the Taliban entered Kabul on Aug. 15, the United States focused on evacuating Americans and vulnerable Afghans, and more than 100,000 were flown out of Afghanistan in a historic effort. Many more Afghan allies remain in the country, at risk of reprisal from the Taliban, and U.S. President Joe Biden pledged to bring them to safety. When he and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken talk of the enduring U.S. commitment to Afghanistan, they are primarily talking about finishing the evacuation. For every Afghan who made it out, there are countless others left behind. The United States’ enduring commitment must include work to ensure those left behind are not forgotten by pushing Afghanistan’s new rulers to deliver for their people. That will take a level of engagement with—and even support…

The speed with which the United States withdrew from Afghanistan was matched only by the speed of the Taliban’s accession to power. Images of Kabul’s swift fall, rife with scenes of desperate Afghans attempting to flee, left the world scrambling to make sense of what happened—and what to do now. What comes at the end of forever? This chaotic uncertainty reflects the failure of the United States’ Afghanistan policy across multiple decades and administrations—Republican and Democrat. But it is more than that. It is a warning against the confused shortsightedness that plagues the foreign policy of the left. Broadly, the mainstream U.S. left is of two schools of thought when it comes to the country’s role in the world. A generation of centrist liberal internationalists welcome the responsibility and power associated with…