Foreign Policy January 2018

Supriya Nair is a Mumbai-based journalist and editor of The Caravan Book of Profiles, a collection of long form reporting about South Asian politics and culture.Her work has been featured in the Atlantic, Vogue India, and the Mumbai Mirror. Saul Elbein a freelance writer from Austin, Texas, and a former staff writer at the Texas Observer. His work has been featured in theNew York Times Magazine, the New Republic, and This American Life. Carter Malkasian is a writer and former diplomat. He served as a political advisor to Gen. Joseph Dunford in Afghanistan. He is the author of War Comes to Garmser: Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier. Alice Hill is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. She previously served as a special assistant to U.S. President Barack Obama…

TO THE EXTENT THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION has a discernible Middle East strategy, it is to contain and confront Iran. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, and President Donald Trump himself have all denounced Iran’s regional activities. (In February, after Iranian ballistic missile tests, Trump tweeted that the country was “playing with fire.”) In October, the White House announced that moving forward, the official U.S. policy is aimed at “neutralizing Iran’s destabilizing influence and constraining its aggression.” Trump and his aides appear to have embraced the view that Iran is a potential hegemon poised to dominate the Middle East—and specifically to control the oil-rich Persian Gulf. This logic helps make sense of Trump’s unswerving support for Saudi Arabia, including his endorsements (both tacit and…

HARARE, ZIMBABWE— When the U.S. Embassy here put out a statement in February denouncing the “continuing deterioration of the human rights situation in Zimbabwe,” then-President Robert Mugabe’s spokesman responded by suggesting that American critics of the Zimbabwean government, including U.S. Ambassador Harry K. Thomas Jr., should “go and hang on a banana tree.” It was a mild rebuke by the standards of Mugabe’s government, which treated American diplomats with a level of contempt more befitting U.S. exchanges with Iran or North Korea than of a nation that maintained full diplomatic relations with the United States and was highly dependent on U.S. aid. Like a long line of U.S. ambassadors before him, Thomas was attacked by Mugabe’s government and by its mouthpieces in the press. The pro-government Sunday Mail called him an…

AS THE ISLAMIC STATE LOST one of its last villages in Iraq, Brett McGurk, the U.S. special envoy to the coalition battling the group, took to Twitter for a victory lap. The organization’s “phony ‘caliphate,’” he wrote, is “coming to an end.” It is true that the Islamic State has lost the vast majority of its territory, which at its peak in 2014 included about one-third of Iraq and half of Syria. Once dubbed “the world’s richest terrorist organization” by the United Nations, it has also lost an estimated 80 percent of the funds it acquired by conquering territory and mimicking the functions of a state, collecting taxes and tariffs from the citizens under its control. Rumors of the Islamic State’s demise, however, have been greatly exaggerated. For all of the victories…

JAWAD SITS INSIDE AN AMBULANCE IN TIRIN KOT, in southern Afghanistan, where he’s been waiting to be evacuated to Kandahar by plane for nearly six hours. Blood from a bullet wound in his stomach has stained his police uniform, and he is struggling to breathe. But the medics and soldiers around him don’t seem to be in a rush. “I was lucky there’s a flight today,” the 20-year-old policeman says as medics help him board a Cessna plane. A coffin wrapped in the Afghan flag is loaded from the back of the ambulance onto the aircraft behind him. “I was inside an armored vehicle, and my commander told me to go save some injured soldiers from the field and bring back the dead bodies,” Jawad says. “When I went, the Taliban opened…

synergymediaspecialists.com Taiwan continues to impress global markets through its focus on innovation, technology and stability. An expanding economy, GDP is expected to grow at 2.27 per cent in 2018. The self-governing island nation seeks to secure its position as the most prominent of the ‘Four Asian Tigers’ - Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea. As America’s tenth largest trading partner with two-way total trade amounting to US$ 84.9 Billion, the symbiotic relationship between The US and Taiwan is undeniably intertwined. Further-more, the numbers recently increased: US exports to Taiwan rose 5.3 per cent and imports from Taiwan rose 9.6 per cent in the first 10 months of 2017. ‘We hope that after the conclusion of the current NAFTA negotiations, the US government will look to Taiwan as a potential partner and enter…