Foreign Policy Summer 2022

Nina Tannenwald is a senior lecturer in political science at Brown University. Her book The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945 was awarded the Lepgold Prize in 2009. Anakwa Dwamena is a Ghanaian American journalist based in Accra, Ghana. He is the books editor at Africa Is a Country and a Fulbright-National Geographic fellow. His work focuses on the African diaspora and Indigenous knowledge systems. Shivshankar Menon is the chair of the Ashoka Centre for China Studies and a visiting professor at Ashoka University. From 2010 to 2014, he served as national security advisor to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Howard W. French is a professor at the Columbia Journalism School and columnist at FOREIGN POLICY. His latest book is Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and…

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF, WE’RE OFTEN TOLD. And it seems as if it’s happening more than usual these days. Interstate war is back. The world is once again worried about nuclear weapons. A pandemic has killed millions of people and shut down commerce—just as it did a century ago. Inflation has hit levels unseen since the 1970s. The world is running out of food. There’s an energy crisis. In a replay of the Cold War, the United States is aligning nations against Russia—and once again, despite unity in the West, several large countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America would rather stay out of the tussle. But as much as our current moment feels marked by echoes from the past, there is plenty about our world today that is better described as…

As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s army reduced one Ukrainian city after another to rubble, many observers in the rich world bemoaned the dysfunction of the United Nations for being unable to overcome an obstacle written into its charter: Russia, like the Soviet Union before it, is one of the U.N. Security Council’s five permanent members and, as such, enjoys veto power—allowing it to block any measure it disapproves of. The calls for U.N. reform this provoked came against the backdrop of another source of Western displeasure. After exuberant claims in Washington and European capitals that the world was united against Russia’s brutal and unprovoked invasion of its neighbor, people who paused to take more careful stock of the situation began to note that, in fact, much of the world was sitting…

Russian President Vladimir Putin made four major miscalculations before invading Ukraine. He overestimated Russian military competence and effectiveness and underestimated the Ukrainians’ will to fight back. He assumed a distracted West would be unable to unite politically in the face of the Russian attack and that the Europeans and Washington’s Asian allies would never support far-reaching financial, trade, and energy sanctions against Russia. But he did get one thing right: He correctly estimated that the non-Western world—what I call “the Rest”—would not condemn Russia or impose sanctions. The day the war broke out, U.S. President Joe Biden said the West would make Putin a “pariah on the international stage”—but for much of the world, Putin is not a pariah. For the past decade, Russia has cultivated ties with countries in the Middle…

Amid the enormous suffering inflicted on Ukrainians, another less heralded tragedy is unfolding. Russian President Vladimir Putin is attempting to not only wipe Ukraine off the map but eliminate the cultural objects that frame the country’s national narrative. Although immediate human needs, the equipping of Ukraine’s military, and the quest for an end to the war inevitably capture global attention, Ukrainian cultural objects also should be protected and preserved. This is another form of resistance against Putin’s assault on democracy. In addition to refugee assistance and armaments, the Biden administration should publicly emphasize and activate its extensive cultural property protection resources and experts who know how to safeguard treasures during times of war. Doing so will foil Putin’s grotesque mission to wipe Ukrainian heritage off the map. Failing to do so will…

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been a double disaster for Russian President Vladimir Putin, as he faces a poorly performing military combined with an inability to shield his country from economic punishment. Both of these possibilities historically have also been sources of apprehension for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). But China’s leadership turned its anxiety into action about 10 years ago, deliberately working to fix many of the problems and minimize the risks currently plaguing Russia in Ukraine. One result is that the Chinese military is more likely to perform well even though it has not fought a war since 1979, when it lost thousands of troops in a punitive but brief invasion of Vietnam. Adding to that, China’s economy is both far larger and deliberately more diversified than Russia’s, making sanctions…