Morning Brief, Thursday, December 20

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 author of Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests, and Nicholas Mulder, an assistant professor of history at Cornell University and author of The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War. Together, they will explore how sanctions impact U.S. interests today and whether policymakers need to change course.

The new Israeli government is said to be the most far-right, religiously extreme, and ultranationalist coalition in the country’s history, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-ser...Show moreving prime minister.  Is Israel’s democracy really at risk? What would the government’s planned judicial overhaul mean for Israel’s standing, global cooperation, and economic investments? How does the new government complicate matters for U.S. President Joe Biden’s national security strategy?  Join FP’s Dan Ephron in conversation with Amir Tibon, a senior editor and writer at Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. They’ll discuss Israel’s new far-right government, its plans to overhaul and weaken the judiciary, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ongoing corruption trial, and U.S. policy on Israel under President Joe Biden. 

To mark the halfway point in U.S. President Joe Biden’s first term in office, Foreign Policy asked 20 experts to grade his administration’s performance on relationships with Russia and C...Show morehina, as well as on issues such as defense, democracy, and immigration. The assessments ranged all the way from A- to a failing grade. But more broadly, is there a way to define his administration’s agenda? Is there a Biden doctrine? FP’s Ravi Agrawal spoke to experts with very different perspectives for insights. Nadia Schadlow was a deputy national security advisor in the Trump administration and is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a longtime advocate for ending so-called forever wars. Perhaps surprisingly, Wertheim was more critical of Biden’s foreign policy—specifically on China—than was Schadlow. Is that because Biden has largely doubled down on former President Donald Trump’s China policies? Watch the interview or read the condensed transcript to find out.