Table of contents for Spring 2020 in Foreign Policy

Snigdha Poonam is a national affairs writer with the Hindustan Times in New Delhi. She is the author of Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World. She has recently written on Chinese dating apps, TikTok, conflict, and India’s justice system. Raghuram Rajan is a finance professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He previously served as the 23rd governor of the Reserve Bank of India and chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. He is the author of The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind. Henry Farrell is a professor of political science and international affairs at the George Washington University and editor in chief of the Monkey Cage blog at the Washington Post. His most recent book, with Abraham L.…

A PREVIEW OF FP ANALYTICS’ SPECIAL REPORT WOMEN AS LEVERS OF CHANGE PREVIEW Today, a number of well-established legacy industries are facing growing pressure to innovate and transform to remain competitive in the global economy. Increased governmental regulation; intensified global competition; and rising consumer, employee, and investor concerns over the environment, human rights, and global health are pushing companies to improve business practices and products. Failure to address and surmount these challenges could compromise these industries’ survival and may even render some companies obsolete. Increasing gender diversity in traditionally male-dominated industries can be an effective means to address escalating challenges as well as facilitate and accelerate progress toward global sustainable development. Representing half of the global labor force and half of new graduates with higher education each year, women are…

AS NEW TECHNOLOGIES INTEGRATE MARKETS across the world, making them more competitive and more demanding, small manufacturing towns in industrial countries are bearing the brunt of the resulting economic disruption. They have been devastated as big employers move factories overseas or automate operations and reduce workforces. While this trend started decades ago, the volume and speed of expansion of Chinese manufacturing and exports in the past 20 years have significantly accelerated the process. Historically, markets have created new jobs as they destroyed old ones. Unfortunately, the new jobs today are typically emerging in the service sectors of flourishing megacities like London and New York, not in the small single-employer-dominated manufacturing towns where job losses have been most acute. And even among these jobs, the ones paying good salaries require higher…

BY MOST MEASURES JIMMY CARTER’S PRESIDENCY was a lackluster one. Americans were experiencing malaise at home and a string of apparent defeats abroad, highlighted by the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. Yet these twin crises produced the Carter Doctrine, which has served the United States and its allies well ever since. The Carter Doctrine explicitly committed the United States to defend the oil fields of the Persian Gulf against external threats. Carter’s successor, President Ronald Reagan, built on this strategy with what should be seen as a “Reagan Corollary,” which committed Washington to defending the free export of Gulf oil against threats from within the Middle East as well. Since then, both Republican and Democratic administrations have recognized that the U.S. role in protecting Gulf…

FIGURING, PERHAPS, THAT READERS MIGHT BY NOW have summoned the time and energy to read his previous world-shattering bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the superstar French economist Thomas Piketty is back with an even bigger, even more imposing encore—one that shares much of the good, and some of the bad, with its predecessor. If you liked Capital, you’ll probably like the new doorstopper, which came out in French last year and recently hit the shelves in English. Piketty makes the same data-driven arguments about wealth and inequality as before, though on a much broader canvas, and prescribes similar if even more pie-in-the-sky solutions. In Capital and Ideology, Piketty seeks to do a couple of things he didn’t in the previous book: better explain why and how inequality persists and…

WHEN WE FIRST STARTED PLANNING THIS ISSUE a few months ago, I never imagined that, at the last minute, we would have to make room for discussion of a then-unheard-of virus that would soon circle the globe. Of course, I also didn’t imagine that I’d be making the final edits to this issue from my kitchen table while my stir-crazy 5-year-old practiced tae kwon do over FaceTime; while my wife, who works on technology innovation for New York City, scrambled to somehow find millions of N95 face masks; and while two pounds of venison jerky quietly cooked away in the backyard meat smoker I’d bought a week earlier during a late-night session of online apocalypse prep. (It seemed like a good idea at the time.) But if there’s one thing…

UNTIL RECENTLY, MOST POLICYMAKERS AND INVESTORS remained complacent about the potential economic impact of the coronavirus crisis. Until late February, most wrongly assumed that it would have only a brief, limited, China-specific impact. Now they realize that it is generating a global shock, which may be sharp—but which most still expect to be short. But what if the economic disruption has an enduring impact? Could the coronavirus pandemic even be the nail in the coffin for the current era of globalization? The coronavirus crisis has highlighted the downsides of extensive international integration while fanning fears of foreigners and providing legitimacy for national restrictions on global trade and flows of people. All sorts of businesses have suddenly realized the risks of relying on complex global supply chains that are specific not…

JUST A FEW DAYS AFTER THE UNITED KINGDOM LEFT the European Union on Jan. 31, Boris Johnson traveled across the Thames to the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich to give a speech outlining the kind of country he as prime minister now hoped to build. Hair typically tousled, Johnson began by pointing up at James Thornhill’s vast ceiling painting titled “The Triumph of Peace and Liberty Over Tyranny.” Britain’s departure, he suggested, could be a moment of liberation and transformation. An island long shackled by continental constraints would fly like Superman, Johnson opined, “ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion” for the benefits of free trade and charting your own national path.…

The Scientist and the Spy: A True Story of China, the FBI, and Industrial Espionage MARA HVISTENDAHL, RIVERHEAD BOOKS, 336 PP., $28, FEBRUARY 2020 IN SEPTEMBER 2011, years before U.S. President Donald Trump pushed the United States into a trade war with China, Iowa state police caught three men trespassing near a cornfield under contract with the agrochemical giant Monsanto. The encounter caught the attention of the FBI and led it to the Chinese-born engineer Robert Mo, who became a suspect in the industrial espionage investigation that is the focus of the journalist Mara Hvistendahl’s new book, The Scientist and the Spy—a nuanced look at some of the pawns in the U.S.-China rivalry. The FBI suspected Mo and his associates at the Beijing-based agricultural company DBN of a plot to…

WASHINGTON’S POLICY OF ENGAGEMENT TOWARD BEIJING has been embraced, with a few bumps along the way, by eight successive U.S. presidents—an incredible record of continuity. The approach was born in 1972, when the fervently anti-communist President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, set off for Beijing to make a game-changing proposal: The United States and China should end their decades-long hostility by allying against the Soviet Union. As Nixon declared to Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, whose hand former U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had refused to shake at a Geneva conference in 1954, “If our two people are enemies, the future of this world we share together is dark indeed.” He went on to insist that the two countries had “common interests” that transcended their…

IN SEPTEMBER 2019, two months before officially taking office, the new European Commission president was already insisting that the European Union needed to change. On the one hand, Ursula von der Leyen promised a new “geopolitical Commission,” but on the other, she wanted the EU “to be the guardian of multilateralism.” The difficult question was left unstated: How exactly is the EU supposed to reconcile the great-power maneuvering of geopolitics with the more level playing field of multilateralism? Geopolitics is the ruthless pursuit of self-interest by powerful states, no matter the cost to others. Multilateralism involves mutual agreements among states pursuing their collective welfare. At a minimum, the two sit awkwardly with each other; at the worst, they are radically incompatible. The latter is true of the current system of…

ON JAN. 26, A SUNDAY BUT ALSO A NATIONAL HOLIDAY, India celebrated its 70th constitutional anniversary. The government hosted a grand military and cultural parade at Rajpath, a boulevard that links the stone arch of India Gate to the presidential palace in New Delhi. Looking on, in a saffron turban, was Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with his guest of honor, Jair Bolsonaro. The president of Brazil had been snubbed by numerous democratic world leaders, but here he was, standing in the same place as earlier guests of honor such as Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama. In another part of the capital, the Muslim neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh was also celebrating Republic Day. The guests of honor there were two women wearing simple…