Foreign Policy Fall 2022

Zongyuan Zoe Liu is a fellow for international political economy at the Council on Foreign Relations. She was formerly an instructional assistant professor at Texas A&M University and a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. Alicia Kennedy is a writer based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She is the author of the forthcoming book Meatless: The Radical Cultures and Innovative Cooks That Have Shaped Plant-Based Eating. Saloni Shah is a food and agriculture analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, where she focuses on agricultural innovation and productivity. Sarah Taber is a crop scientist, author, and ex-farm worker with 25 years’ experience in the food system. She runs a farm consulting business and a small farm in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Kólá Túbòsún is a Nigerian linguist and writer. He was formerly a Chevening fellow at the British…

BACK IN JULY, I HAD A REVELATORY CONVERSATION with Ertharin Cousin, the former head of the U.N. World Food Program. Most people think about the issue of hunger in the wrong way, she said. It’s not that there are too many people on the planet, as many of us assume; nor is the problem that we can’t make enough food. “If we embrace science and innovation,” Cousin said, “we can feed every person on this planet.” Consider this issue an embrace of those principles—a collection of practical ideas for getting smarter about food production, making supply chains more efficient, and wasting less. We at FOREIGN POLICY felt a sense of urgency about exploring this topic because feeding the planet has become even more critical lately. For a long time, the proportion of…

Chinese policymakers are increasingly convinced that the United States is determined to implement a full-fledged strategy of containment against China. Beijing views the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity as the economic mirror of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and AUKUS, two U.S.-led security pacts that Beijing regards as anti-China coalitions. Chinese officials, academics, and media rhetoric increasingly talk of self-reliance and are preparing for a forced decoupling from the United States. Even the more moderate voices have acknowledged the profound changes in U.S.-China relations behind the “decoupling theory” and called for China to “prepare for the worst but strive for the best.” While part of the likely response will be the further strengthening of China’s military, the party-state will also tighten two economic strings in its bow. It will double…

As globalization was gaining steam in the 1990s, Western publics learned about a new concept: off-shoring. Even then, it was often unpopular with the public, even as corporate executives gleefully embraced the prospect of cheaper—and less empowered—labor. And China, with its well-trained workforce and growing middle class keen to buy Western goods, was the ideal combination of manufacturer and market. What a difference a couple of decades make. Now companies are trying to move production to friendly countries where they won’t need to worry that they’ll be caught in the geopolitical line of fire. Friendshoring has arrived. “President Bush is on an eight-day tour of Asia. He’s visiting American jobs,” talk show host David Letterman quipped in 2005. Lots of American jobs had indeed left the country—but that was just the…

In the early hours of July 22, hundreds of Sri Lankan soldiers marched through the country’s capital. They were preparing for a brutal crackdown on anti-government demonstrators who slept in tents at Galle Face Green, an oceanside park in Colombo. Without warning, soldiers attacked the camps and beat protesters, leaving at least 50 injured. Amnesty International described the crackdown as a “shameful, brutal assault.” Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was appointed acting president on July 13 (and subsequently elected) after the former president was ousted following civil unrest, has not shied away from using military force and extended a state of emergency he declared as acting president. When faced with criticism, Wickremesinghe reportedly lashed out at diplomats, telling U.S. Ambassador Julie Chung to “read your country’s history starting from Abraham Lincoln.” “Would your…

A February poll found that 71 percent of South Koreans wanted their country to have nuclear weapons. Another in May found that 70.2 percent supported indigenous nuclearization, with 63.6 percent in support even if it violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The drivers, unsurprisingly, are North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs, and China’s growing belligerence. These factors impact the Japanese nuclearization debate, too, though interest there is noticeably lower. The United States has long opposed South Korean and Japanese counter-nuclearization. But in the light of the Russia-Ukraine war, Washington should not hegemonically dictate the outcome of its allies’ WMD debates. NATO anxiety over possible Russian use of WMDs following its invasion of Ukraine illustrates the potential limits on U.S. counter-escalation when facing a nuclearized opponent. Western pundits have been…