Table of contents for Summer 2022 in Foreign Policy

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…

With more than 3 billion people still living on less than $5.50 a day, poverty reduction is central to human flourishing. It’s also key to preventing the worst effects of climate change—people are much less vulnerable to climate shocks if they aren’t poor. That should be the main task of the two key multilateral institutions tasked with reducing poverty and promoting development: the World Bank, which provides loans and grants for development projects, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which helps poor countries overcome currency crises and keep their finances stable. Now, however, both institutions are under pressure from their rich donor governments to sideline economic development and poverty reduction and shift focus to reducing carbon emissions. In April, the IMF set up a Resilience and Sustainability Trust to help…

Looking to win congressional approval to bring China into the World Trade Organization (WTO), then-U.S. President Bill Clinton rhapsodized how closer economic ties would mean greater freedom for Chinese citizens. “The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people,” the president argued in a speech in March 2000. “And when individuals have the power not just to dream but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.” The growth of the internet would help ensure that hopeful outcome. “Now there’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the internet. Good luck!” Clinton said to gales of laughter. “That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” Clinton’s comments now seem not only naive but cringeworthy.…

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…

Earlier this year, a student asked me how I thought historians would characterize the period of world history he believed had just begun with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I couldn’t resist replying: “I have no idea. I just hope they won’t be calling it the ‘prewar period.’” But are we, in fact, at the beginning of a new period in history? Many have been quick to affirm the idea. Even before the invasion began, the Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker was opining that “the crisis over Ukraine … marks the definitive end of the post-Cold War era.” And no sooner had Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border than the Brookings Institution’s Daniel S. Hamilton agreed: “The post-Cold War period has ended. A more fluid and disruptive era has begun.”…

IN MARCH 1990, THE NEW YORKER PUBLISHED a cartoon by Jack Ziegler that captured the optimism at the end of the Cold War. The cartoon shows an executive sitting at his desk as a worker enters the office carrying a large bomb with fins. “Bring that H-bomb over here, will you, Tom, and just slip it into my ‘out’ box,” the executive says. “Sure thing, boss!” the worker responds. The image of putting nuclear bombs “in the outbox” was emblematic of the hope many had that a new era of cooperation between the United States and the former Soviet Union was emerging. The fear of a nuclear war breaking out between the world’s two superpowers receded, and many hoped that nuclear weapons, although they would still exist, would no longer be…

EVERY HISTORIAN WORTH THEIR SALT knows that historical and local specificities ultimately render all analogies inaccurate. Yet people navigating times of great change and uncertainty habitually seek reassurance from the past. In 1852, Karl Marx observed how revolutionaries “anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past … to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise.” By helping to legitimize major change, historical analogies have played a key role in the very making of modern history, including its ugliest episodes: The Nazis defended their camps, for instance, by pointing to British concentration camps in the South African War at the turn of the 20th century. Much of what has transpired in history has been justified by reference to some precedent. Making new comparisons thus helps shift the paradigms…

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has played out like a terribly grim but, so far at least, profoundly ennobling laboratory experiment in the relative virtues of autocracy and liberal democracy. Yet evidence that a (more or less) liberal democracy can defeat or withstand an autocracy even in war—the one sphere that so obviously favors the latter—hasn’t meaningfully diminished the forces that have undermined liberalism in the West and around the world. Indeed, the sharp division between Western democracies that regard the invasion as an intolerable violation of moral principle and non-Western and barely liberal ones, such as India and South Africa, that have treated it as geopolitics as usual only reinforces the idea that liberal democracy occupies a diminishing space in the world. It is possible that liberal democracy was a…

EARLY IN THE BLOCKBUSTER FILM Back to the Future, Dr. Emmett Brown, a wacky but lovable scientist who goes by “Doc,” slumps to his death after an attacker pumps multiple bullets into his chest at short range. This surprisingly violent moment disrupts what was, until then, an upbeat teen comedy released to entertain Americans during the Fourth of July holiday in 1985. Doc’s young protégé Marty McFly escapes the same gruesome death only by fleeing in the scientist’s newly built time machine. As a result, Marty unexpectedly finds himself stuck in a frightening past—without a way to get back to a future that had seemed so full of promise only moments before the murder. Sudden feelings of profound disruption, of panic at finding oneself in the throes of struggles seemingly past,…

ARMS CONTROL IS DYING, and arms races are roaring back to life. Over the past two decades, key pillars of the superpower arms control regime erected during the Cold War have collapsed, one by one: the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and the Open Skies Treaty. The most important U.S.-Russian agreement that remains, New START, may become a casualty of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. China, meanwhile, is rapidly building up its conventional and nuclear forces as part of a push for dominance in the Pacific and beyond. Around the globe, emerging technologies are promising dramatic advances in military power. Welcome to a world primed for arms races—a world in which tensions are sharp, the military balance is…

As a result of violent plunder over the centuries, Europe—more than any other region in the world, including Africa—holds the largest collection of ancient African artifacts. The total number of African objects in museums across the United States barely reaches 50,000. Yet Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa alone has 180,000 objects, Germany’s Ethnological Museum has 75,000, France’s Quai Branly Museum has almost 70,000, the British Museum has 73,000, and the Netherlands’ National Museum of World Cultures has 66,000. It has been 50 years since African governments, against a backdrop of hard-fought independence, started asking for the return of looted objects. Despite celebratory press coverage on returns and Western curators’ recent commitments to decolonize museums, very few items have been physically repatriated. In February, Nigeria welcomed back to Benin City…

A friend recently told me a story about his attempt to get his first dose of COVID-19 vaccine in Accra, the capital of Ghana. When he arrived at the distribution center, he was instructed to join a line outside. An attendant gave each person a number to ensure there were enough doses for everyone. Then a familiar scene appeared: A trickle of cars was ushered into the compound, one by one. Soon afterward, the attendant informed my friend that the facility had run out of shots. In Ghana, the inside connection that likely allowed the people in the cars to skip the vaccine line is called protocol, or “proto” for short. Paradoxically, protocol often means expedited access that circumvents established procedure. People in Ghana do not follow protocol; they have…