Table of contents for April 2018 in Foreign Policy

AROUND THE TIME OF President Donald Trump’s inauguration last year, there seemed to be no stopping politicians across the globe who claimed to speak for the people but built followings by demonizing minorities, attacking human rights principles, and fueling distrust of democratic institutions. Italy’s recent election shows that this threat remains. Yet a popular reaction, bolstered in some cases by political leaders with the courage to stand up for human rights, has begun to take some of the wind out of the populists’ sails. Even as this struggle has played out, however, many Western powers have become more inwardly oriented. With the United States led by a president who displays a disturbing fondness for rights-trampling strongmen, and the United Kingdom preoccupied by Brexit, two traditional defenders of human rights are…

IN RECENT MONTHS, international media coverage of Myanmar has focused on the plight of the Rohingya people in the west of the country. And for good reason: Since August 2017, brutal army attacks on this Muslim ethnic minority have sent more than 750,000 people—90 percent of the Rohingya population living in Rakhine state—fleeing over the border to Bangladesh, in what can only be described as a coordinated campaign of genocide. The numbers are staggering, but the hate isn’t new: The Rohingya, one of the world’s largest stateless groups, have long been a favorite target for persecution by the country’s Buddhist central authorities. The Rohingya have a different religion, a different skin color, and speak a different language than most of their neighbors. Yet their well-publicized tragedy has obscured a darker…

MORE THAN A DECADE AGO, Kanhu left the homeland of the Kamayurá, an indigenous tribe with some 600 members on the southern edge of the Brazilian Amazon. She was 7 years old. She never returned. “If I had remained there,” Kanhu, who has progressive muscular dystrophy, told Brazilian lawmakers last year, “I would certainly be dead.” That’s because her community would likely have killed her, just as, for generations, it has killed other children born with disabilities. The Kamayurá are among a handful of in-digenous peoples in Brazil known to engage in infanticide and the selective killing of older children. Those targeted include the disabled, the children of single mothers, and twins—whom some tribes, including the Kamayurá, see as bad omens. Kanhu’s father, Makau, told me of a 12-year-old boy…

IN JANUARY, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave the thousands of primarily Eritrean and Sudanese asylum-seekers living in Israel an ultimatum: Take $3,500 and leave for a third country, reportedly Rwanda or Uganda, or face incarceration and deportation. In the wake of his announcement, tens of thousands of Israelis and African migrants took to the streets of Israel in protest. Holocaust survivors and rabbis compared the plight of the asylum-seekers to that of the Jews who had unsuccessfully begged countries around the world to take them in as they fled the Nazis before and during World War II. Some protesters implored their fellow citizens to remember the biblical injunction to welcome the stranger. A group of rabbis called on Israelis to hide asylum-seekers in their homes. Hundreds of doctors, nurses,…

OVER THE LAST DECADE, German filmmakers have begun churning out lavishly produced movies and television series dealing with the dark side of Germany’s recent history. The latest, most expensive, and internationally most successful example is Babylon Berlin, a crime series set in the dying days of the Weimar Republic, now streaming on Netflix in Australia, Canada, and the United States. Germany is not the only country looking backward, of course. Many recent British and American movies have also focused on the run-up to World War II and the war itself, including The King’s Speech and Darkest Hour. But these films are stories of redemption, culminating in the heroism of the war against Adolf Hitler. Germany, by contrast, has to deal with a history of guilt and shame. Most Germans today…

CAPE TOWN, a city of some 4 million people, is on the verge of running out of water. Terrifying as it may sound, water scarcity never happens by surprise. At the national, provincial, and municipal levels, South Africa’s leaders ignored Cape Town’s shrinking water supply until it became a crisis. The mistakes were made at every level. Cape Town had no comprehensive, long-term water plan to match water resources with the city’s soaring population. No official program encouraged planting water-efficient crops or the use of water-saving technologies. The city reused only 5 percent of its wastewater for industrial and irrigation purposes. Its water has long been free or heavily subsidized, with no market-based incentive to conserve. And most remarkably, although Cape Town sits on a long seacoast hugging the southern…

“I WILL NEVER SHY AWAY FROM calling out other countries for actions taken in conflict with U.S. values and in violation of human rights and international norms,” Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor-turned-U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, assured senators during her January 2017 confirmation hearing. It was a remark primed to set her apart from the new U.S. president and the rest of his administration, who have seemed more inclined to cut deals with the world’s autocrats than to lecture them for mistreating their people. Haley has used her current job to make the defense of human rights part of her political identity. She has denounced Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as a coldblooded “war criminal,” warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin could never be a “credible partner” of…

When Russia decriminalized domestic violence in February 2017, civil servants tasked with protecting women in the country’s far east were dismayed by the new vulnerability of their wards. Yet few officials opposed the measure. President Vladimir Putin signed off on the bill after the lower house of the Russian parliament, the Duma, overwhelmingly approved it by a vote of 380 to 3. The new law recategorized the crime of violence against family members: Abuse that does not result in broken bones, and does not occur more than once a year, is no longer punishable by long prison sentences. The worst sanctions that abusers now face are fines of up to $530, 10-to 15-day stints in jail, or community service work. That’s if the courts side with the victim. They rarely…

ON THE NIGHT OF JUNE 23, 2016, the ballots came in divided across the United Kingdom. The results looked more like a Bosnian election than a British one: 69 percent voted to leave the European Union in the ex-mining town of Doncaster, while in the multiethnic London borough of Lewisham, it was 70 percent for Remain. Britons’ votes in the Brexit referendum weren’t so much a response to EU membership as the expression of a new social divide. The Brexit debate crystallized identities long in the making. The narrow final result (52 percent to 48 percent in favor of Leave) did not mean the country was willing to split the difference but that it had been split in two. Then came Britain’s 2017 general election, which marked the final breakdown…

TUNISIA MARKED the seventh anniversary of its Jasmine Revolution in January with large protests in response to new austerity measures, similar to those that followed the self-immolation of a street vendor in December 2010 that first set the region on fire. This year’s protests also turned violent. Security forces arrested 930 demonstrators—a worrying sign that the only Arab country to manage a somewhat successful transition to democracy may be starting to unravel. But Safwan Masri, a Columbia University scholar on education in the Arab world, sees it differently. For him, the protests are a sign that democracy is alive and well in Tunisia, as Tunisians use their newfound rights to hold their elected leaders accountable. Masri’s new book, Tunisia: An Arab Anomaly (Columbia University Press, 416 pp., $35), explores the…

Situated in the heart of the Persian Gulf, Bahrain is a hotbed for foreign investment and a hive of modernity. As a regional pioneer of smart economic diversification, the island nation is making substantial progress under its Economic Vision 2030 program. In 2017, foreign investments spanned several strategic growth sectors, including information and communication technologies, manufacturing, tour-ism and financial services. This success is largely attributed to a highly supportive regulatory environment, advanced infrastructure, and a productive and talented workforce that “is among the most educated in the Gulf region,” according to Abdul Hussain bin Ali Mirza, the country’s Minister of Electricity and Water Affairs. Companies act as key enablers A preeminent success story, Aluminium Bahrain (Alba) recognizes the talents of the Bahraini people to the extent that 85% of its…

WELL OVER A YEAR into U.S. President Donald Trump’s tenure, the State Department is in disarray. Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson embarked on a zealous drive to reform the department as the White House proposed steep budget cuts. But what he called a much-needed push to trim and streamline a vast bureaucracy, many critics saw as a hollowing out of the U.S. diplomatic corps. Dozens of key positions, including 38 ambassadorships, remain unfilled—leaving the delicate art of diplomacy in too few hands with too many world crises at the boiling point. With so many empty posts, the State Department is relying on lower-level officials to pick up the slack, even in embassies of strategic importance. The State Department claims it has a cadre of talented career diplomats filling the…

Staif and Ayla Haddad, together with their two young daughters, set off from Damascus, Syria, to Istanbul in May 2015. The journey began with a taxi to Beirut, where they boarded a flight to Turkey. Their plan was for Staif to continue on to Germany and seek asylum. His wife and children would travel back to Syria and wait for him to send for them. At the time, Germany was granting refugee status to the vast majority of new Syrian arrivals and, crucially, also allowing them to send for their immediate families. The trip was a send-off as well as a vacation. One morning, after just over a week in Istanbul, Staif kissed his 4-year-old daughter, Layla, goodbye. His 6-year-old, Rana, was still asleep. As he prepared to leave, Ayla…

TWO YEARS AGO, Jordan Peterson was a relatively obscure psychology professor at the University of Toronto with but a single book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (Routledge, 564 pp., $73.95), and a quiver of scientific papers to his name on political psychology, personality, alcoholism, and other mainstream psychological topics. Today, Peterson is famous. His second book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Random House Canada, 409 pp., $34.95), published in January, quickly topped Amazon’s best-seller list. His public lectures are sold-out affairs, his YouTube videos have garnered more than 40 million views, and he has more than 500,000 Twitter followers. Some 8,000 supporters give him more than $66,000 a month, or an average of $10.93 each, on the crowdfunding website Patreon. In return, they receive an…

The Wealth of a Nation: A History of Trade Politics in America C. DONALD JOHNSON, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 664 PP., $34.95, APRIL 2018 DURING THE U.S. CIVIL WAR, in the midst of one of the country’s many protectionist benders, a man named Joseph Wharton successfully lobbied for high tariffs on imported nickel. It made sense for him: He owned the nation’s only working nickel mine. He also got Congress to mandate a new 5-cent coin so there’d be a market for his monopoly. But Wharton is perhaps best known for endowing the world’s first business school, to which he assigned a clear mission: “to advocate economic protectionism unequivocally,” writes C. Donald Johnson in The Wealth of a Nation. Perhaps it’s due to a certain Wharton graduate that protectionism has stomped…