Morning Brief, Monday, December 18

Two years into his first term, how has U.S. President Joe Biden fared on foreign policy? Is there a clear Biden doctrine? Is America in a stronger or weaker position globally?  The answers ...Show moredepend on whom you ask.  Join FP’s Ravi Agrawal for a lively discussion about the Biden administration’s foreign-policy successes and failures half way through his first term, with Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Nadia Schadlow, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former U.S. deputy national security advisor for strategy during the Trump administration.  

When Washington seeks to curtail Beijing’s ambitions or punish Moscow for its war in Ukraine, it often turns to a familiar tool: sanctions. In the last two years, the Biden administration ...Show morehas deployed unprecedented muscle in the form of sanctions as part of its foreign-policy arsenal.  The question is whether those sanctions work effectively. In which countries are they achieving their desired impact? Where are they less successful? And how does the use of sanctions impact U.S. power more broadly?  Join FP’s Ravi Agrawal in conversation with two experts: Agathe Demarais, the global forecasting director at the Economist Intelligence Unit, and Nicholas Mulder, an assistant professor of history and a Milstein faculty fellow at Cornell University. Together, they will explore whether sanctions are an effective tool to achieve U.S. interests abroad and how the government might improve them.  

This week, Germany and the United States announced that they would be supplying Ukraine with dozens of Leopard 2 and M1 Abrams tanks to combat Russia’s invasion. Moscow said these tanks we...Show morere more evidence of direct and growing involvement by the West in the conflict. How will the delivery of these tanks change, and potentially escalate, fighting in Ukraine? And is NATO as united as it was earlier in the war? For the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war, watch FP executive editor Amelia Lester’s timely conversation with FP’s team of reporters.