McFaul served at the highest levels of the U.S. government, but he is at heart a scholar, educator, and activist. The result is a book that is ambitious, accessible, and incisive in its arguments. But when it comes to his recommendations, even those who share McFaul’s enduring faith in democracy may conclude he has written a playbook for a world gone by.

McFaul has pushed for democratization since his student days, when he advocated against apartheid in South Africa and supported Russia’s post-Cold War transition. He comes by his convictions honestly, knowing how millions of people’s lives can change when things go well. And for so many years, they did. McFaul’s book is imbued with the spirit of the post-Cold War era, with visions of a world based on cooperation rather than conflict.

Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, Michael McFaul, Mariner Books, 544 pp., $28, October 2025

In the last two decades, that vision unraveled, and McFaul had a front-row seat. In his previous book, From Cold War to Hot Peace, McFaul details how his efforts for democratic change, from Russia to the Middle East, showed early promise, stalled, and then were rolled back. Since he left government, Russia twice invaded Ukraine, China ramped up pressure on Taiwan, and the global democratic recession deepened to include the United States itself.

To make sense of these developments, McFaul has written a book that is at once a history, net assessment, and sermon. He explains how we arrived at such a fraught moment, accounts for how U.S. capabilities measure up to those of China and Russia, and pleads with Americans not to give up on democracy promotion. The unwelcome ghost hovering over McFaul as he makes his case is Donald Trump, whom voters returned to office after this 544-page manuscript was largely completed.

McFaul has updated key sections of the book to account for Trump’s second term. But at a deeper level, he still seems to be contending with the fact that, in his contest of autocrats and democrats, the leader of the democratic team is switching jerseys. What does McFaul think it says about democracy itself that the world’s oldest and most prosperous democratic government elected Trump twice? Does he fear that the resulting damage changes the foreign policy playbook for future presidents who inherit the consequences?

To McFaul, these developments reflect the natural ebb and flow of political thought. “[I]deas about democracy and liberalism have faded in popularity many times, but eventually came back into fashion,” he writes, expecting that there may be a “window of opportunity” for his ideas in the future. The resulting prescription for wavering democrats is straightforward: double down.

McFaul offers that prescription not only to his fellow scholars but to the broader public for whom he insists he wrote the book. The writing is conversational, even breezy, and he inserts himself into the narrative to liven it up without being overbearing. Historians may quibble with the way he compresses 200 years of U.S.-Russia and U.S.-China relations into two chapters. But for readers making sense of the global map in a world that seems to have gone mad, this is a valuable service.

U.S. President Donald Trump (right) greets Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, on Aug. 15. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

On Russia, it is certainly fair to say that Barack Obama underrated the country when he mocked Mitt Romney for calling it the United States’ number one geopolitical foe, suggesting the 1980s were “calling to ask for their foreign policy back.” But the idea that the United States is underrating Russia now makes less sense. In fact, the Biden administration faced sustained criticism for putting limits on weapons transfers so as to manage the risk of Russian escalation. As for Trump, he rolled out an actual red carpet for Putin in Alaska and called Russia a “powerful nation,” chiding Ukraine for not reflecting this fact: “You don’t take on a nation that’s 10 times your size.”

Indeed, Russia is a disruptive force in global politics, but this is less a reflection of unique capabilities than of the ease of fomenting chaos in an interconnected world. As former Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn said, “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.”

Which brings us to the country that knows how to build—if not barns, then bridges, dams, ships, batteries, electric vehicles, solar panels, and drones: China. McFaul notes that China’s scale masks real weaknesses: population decline, an untested military, and economic policies that are unpopular abroad and have stunted growth at home. Awareness of these trends is a necessary corrective to the idea that China, to borrow a phrase from both Biden and Trump, is about to “eat our lunch.”

Yet McFaul undersells just how valuable China’s manufacturing edge would be in the event of a conflict. The Ukraine war highlighted the need to innovate on the battlefield but also affirmed the enduring value of conventional military capabilities. A war with China, Noah Smith has argued, would inevitably come down to “who can produce more munitions and get them to the battlefield in time.” McFaul sounds the right notes on diversifying supply chains and increasing the defense budget, but the suite of policies he recommends, wrapped up in a frame that suggests China’s military strength is overstated, belies the singular urgency of rebuilding the United States’ defense industrial base.

If McFaul’s assessments of Russian and Chinese capabilities are imperfect, his analysis of their motivations and behavior is superb. As historians know, extracting lessons from the past is a dicey business. Yet his careful and unvarnished chapters on what the United States got right and wrong in the Cold War illuminate the choices ahead by showing what is both similar and different.

In the latter category, he notes not only that the world is more economically integrated today but that China and Russia are much closer than they were during the Cold War. While his longtime colleague Condoleezza Rice has said that rather than seeking to drive a wedge between China and Russia, the United States ought to “slam them together and let them deal with their own internal contradictions,” McFaul offers a sobering case that the China-Russia alliance is real and can last for a while.

But just because the two countries are both autocratic and coordinating with one another does not mean the United States should treat them alike. McFaul makes hundreds of recommendations in this book, but none is more vital than the distinction he draws between China and Russia. To McFaul, Russia is a lost cause as long as Putin is at the helm. While McFaul’s judgment is tinged with emotion after having spent decades working to prevent such an outcome, it is hard to disagree with him. The resulting policy is difficult to execute but simple to conceive: to deter and defend against Putin’s actions to threaten his neighbors and destabilize global cooperation.

When it comes to China, however, McFaul declines to join the chorus of voices who suggest the die is cast. Lumping China with Russia is “premature,” he concludes. “Quietly, persistently, and with low expectations for success, American leaders must remind their Chinese counterparts that China is better off as a major player in the existing global order than it would be as a rogue state like Russia.” Recent talk in U.S. policy circles of a “reverse Kissinger” is understandable: Aside from his nuclear weapons, Putin cannot threaten the United States at anywhere near the scale that China can, and Xi Jinping has charted a dangerous course. But McFaul is correct that for now, if the United States is aiming for a diplomatic breakthrough, the original Kissinger is still the better bet.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Michael McFaul (right), then the U.S. ambassador to Russia, speak in Red Square in Moscow on May 7, 2013.Mladen Antonov via Getty Images

McFaul is a true believer in what he is selling—his use of phrases like “liberal international order” and “the right side of history” is frequent and unironic. What’s more, if he is positioning himself for future government office, he does not act like it. (The book includes a robust defense of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the rare policy opposed by Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz.) He insists that power is not everything in global politics; leaders and citizens matter too. He ends with a plea for confidence and unity among Americans as the essential ingredients to renew democracy.

It is a powerful message. But it is missing the one other necessary ingredient whose value policymakers have learned the hard way: humility.

Promoting democracy was tough for the United States even when the going was good. No one likes to be lectured, particularly when, given the realities of great-power politics, the lecturer will inevitably prove guilty of hypocrisy. But promoting democracy at a moment when the United States’ own democracy is under assault by its duly elected head of state is a different matter altogether.

McFaul does not ignore the issue. Rather, he says Trump’s successor can pick up the mantle where it fell. But if the United States survives as a real democracy, Trump’s successor will never be able to guarantee that he or she will not in turn be replaced by another Trump-like figure.

The United States has now elected Trump twice. For all of Biden’s remonstrations that Trump is “not who we are,” there is no denying that the MAGA movement is a central thread in the country’s tapestry. Voters right now are supremely dissatisfied. They have evicted the party in the White House in three straight elections, which has not happened in over 100 years. As a result, it would be a good time for policymakers in the U.S. to step back and, as football coaches like to say, control the controllables. In a word, it is time for realism. Not realism in the theoretical sense of believing relative power determines everything, not realism in the normative sense that self-interest should drive policy, but rather realism in the practical sense of being realistic about what can be done.

Notably, in his chapter on the lessons of the Cold War and the dangers of overreach, McFaul sets out five core U.S. foreign policy interests: Protect the homeland, deter attacks on allies, stop Russian aggression against Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe, prevent war over Taiwan, and preserve freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. This is an excellent distillation of the interests that matter right now, and none requires promoting democracy. McFaul links Russia and China’s aggressive actions to their autocratic character and identifies this as an underlying driver of conflict. But that doesn’t make it any easier to democratize Russia or China. The generational difficulty of securing McFaul’s five core interests alone suggests they are more than enough to occupy policymakers. And they are what the American people—angry, exhausted, and searching for answers—would support right now.

In the afterword to his book Lenin’s Tomb, David Remnick recounts his visit in the early 1990s with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The prominent Soviet dissident and Nobel Laureate had lived in exile in Vermont for nearly two decades and, with the end of the Cold War, was preparing to return home. Remnick asked him his hopes for Russia. Solzhenitsyn, Remnick wrote, responded that what he hoped for “was not a new empire, not the resuscitation of a great power, but simply the development of a ‘normal country.’” A normal country. It is a worthy aspiration these days for Russia, for China, and—after a decade of upheaval—for the United States.

Europeans lulled themselves into the belief that U.S. President Donald Trump is unpredictable and inconsistent but ultimately manageable. This is strangely reassuring, but wrong. From U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech denigrating Europe at the Munich Security Conference in February to the new U.S. National Security Strategy that was released on Dec. 4, the Trump administration has long had a clear and consistent vision for Europe: one that prioritizes U.S.-Russia ties and seeks to divide and conquer the continent, with much of the dirty work carried out by nationalist, far-right European forces that now enjoy backing from both Moscow and Washington. It is long past time for Europe to realize that, when it comes to the Russia-Ukraine war and the continent’s security, it is, at best, alone. At worst, it now faces two adversaries: Russia in the east and Trump’s United States in the west.

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The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it will suspend all immigration applications for people from 19 “high-risk” countries, effective immediately. Within 90 days, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) must draft a prioritized list of immigrants for review and, if necessary, removal—including those seeking green card requests or citizenship applications.

U.S. President Donald Trump issued a sweeping travel ban in June that barred nationals from 12 countries (Afghanistan, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen) from entering the United States and placed restrictions on nationals from seven others (Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela).

At the time, no action was taken against immigrants already in the United States. But with Tuesday’s new mandate, all immigrants from these countries will now face greater scrutiny—even if they arrived before the travel ban was in place.

USCIS’s order is the latest U.S. crackdown on immigration following last week’s shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., one of whom was killed. The suspect, who has pleaded not guilty to murder, was an Afghan national who entered the United States legally during the Biden administration and was granted asylum in April, during Trump’s second term. In response, Washington announced that it would prioritize the deportation of Afghan citizens who were previously ordered to leave the country.

Also last week, USCIS stated that it would reexamine green card applications for people from countries “of concern,” pause all asylum requests, and halt visas for Afghans who assisted U.S. forces during the Afghanistan War. Such pauses could affect more than 1.5 million people with pending asylum applications and another 50,000 individuals who received asylum grants during former U.S. President Joe Biden’s term.

Read more in today’s World Brief: U.S. Suspends All Immigration Requests From 19 ‘High-Risk’ Countries.

Moral indignation has been thick in the air on Capitol Hill this week from both Democrats and Republicans following the revelation that the U.S. military in early September conducted a secondary missile strike on survivors of an earlier U.S. attack on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean Sea.

In the Sept. 2 incident, which occurred as part of U.S. President Donald Trump’s divisive campaign of lethal airstrikes on suspected drug traffickers in waters near Venezuela, a follow-on strike killed two survivors who were clinging to the wreckage of an alleged drug-smuggling boat after an initial strike.

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When U.S. President Donald Trump’s 28-point plan for peace in Ukraine first leaked in late November, its potential consequences were widely viewed as an unmitigated disaster for the besieged country.

The terms—several of which have been dropped, walked back, or otherwise modified by Trump’s national security team—would have obliged Ukraine to cede strategically vital territories in its east that Russia has been unable to conquer, even at the cost of huge losses of troops. Equally disastrous for Kyiv were clauses that would have required it to reduce the size of its armed forces, permanently barred it from entering NATO, and restituted billions of dollars of assets seized from Russia, enabling Ukraine’s aggressor to rapidly rearm.

But as bad as the ill-fated plan might have been for Ukraine, its implications for the state of U.S. diplomacy and Washington’s position in the world during the second Trump presidency are arguably even worse.

By blindsiding Europe with a set of proposals to end the war in Ukraine that took almost no account of that continent’s concerns, the United States gravely deepened the yawning sense of disconnect between Washington and its European allies that has been building since Trump’s first term. By now, following decades of tightly woven interdependence, distrust has become a central feature of trans-Atlantic relations. No matter what happens next in Ukraine or how the remainder of Trump’s time in office plays out, it will be difficult to recover mutual confidence.

In the shorter term, though, not even the fundamental weakening of the United States’ most important relationship constitutes the worst of the damage. What the Trump administration’s recent diplomacy has laid fully bare is the utterly erratic, unplanned, and personalized character of the president’s method of dealing with the rest of the world.

Whereas a long string of previous U.S. presidents leaned on a gradually built-up and finely balanced system to conduct foreign relations, the Trump administration navigates according to the whims of the president’s gut.

This has resulted, in part, from the way that Trump has collapsed the country’s long-standing diplomatic architecture by appointing Marco Rubio as both secretary of state and national security advisor. The traditional separation between these two roles was intended to allow the former to lead in the hands-on practice of diplomacy while the latter concentrated on coordinating intelligence, defense, and diplomatic inputs from the country’s sprawling national security apparatus and thereby helped the president sort through foreign-policy options and decisions.

From all appearances, the Trump administration’s foreign-policy operations lack in interagency coordination, leading to galling oversights and an overall impression of sheer amateurism. How else to understand the failure to consult with Ukraine’s neighbors before announcing a peace plan delivered with a short-term ultimatum on compliance?

If Trump’s foreign policy is bereft of the systematic approach of past U.S. presidents, this cannot be altogether considered the result of a lack of design. Trump seems most comfortable in his role as the nation’s ultimate foreign-policy czar. He appears to relish coming to his own understanding of the issues and interests in play, even when it is wrongheaded or woefully oversimplified. And with nearly every major diplomatic decision, he seems to follow his own transactional view of human affairs and trusts his instincts as the surest source of wisdom and policy guidance.

This highly centralized and improvisational approach to managing world affairs has facilitated the rise of special envoys and policy freelancers in the Trump foreign-policy orbit. The most obvious example of this is Steve Witkoff, a real estate development billionaire with no prior foreign-policy experience, whom Trump entrusted as his lead negotiator in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Witkoff’s ill-suitedness for this role has been repeatedly borne out, from his amateurish participation in conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, where he has shown up without his own translator or official notetaker, to the ill-prepared August summit between Trump and Putin in Alaska.

While incompetence, or at least a lack of background knowledge, was once thought to have been Witkoff’s chief liability, views of him turned darker last week, when it was revealed that he recently gave advice to Russians close to Putin on how to use flattery in dealing with Trump to get him to adopt Russian positions. The Kremlin’s demands included abandoning the idea of supplying Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine and incorporating Russian territorial demands in Washington’s negotiating strategy to end the war.

Personal comfort level and trust with key advisors were important to previous presidents, but these considerations have come to vastly override expertise or experience in the Trump world. Witkoff’s status with Trump appears to have been strongly boosted by his leading role in negotiating a proclaimed end to the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza. In fact, that war continues, albeit in a somewhat less intense form and largely outside of the headlines, allowing Trump to prematurely claim success.

Ending Putin’s war in Ukraine is unlikely to be as simple a matter as announcing a peace in Gaza, though. Stripped to its core, the Trump-Witkoff approach to Gaza seemed to be based on a simple principle captured in the ancient Thucydidean adage, “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” Israel, the vastly stronger party, was hardly obliged to make any concessions to Palestinian interests in the pursuit of a declared peace. A quick glance at that conflict’s rapidly superseded 28-point Trump peace proposal lends to an impression that this template was simply transferred to the Russia-Ukraine war.

The ill-suitedness of this approach—which a better organized and more qualified national security team could have warned a president who was willing to listen about—begins with the White House’s neglect of the fact that Europe has deep stakes in the outcome of this war and cannot be bypassed or written out of any lasting agreement. It also ignores that after years of deep human and material sacrifice in the defense of Ukrainian sovereignty, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would destroy his own credibility as a leader—rendered even more fragile by a recent high-level corruption scandal—if he agreed to sign over undefeated portions of the Donbas region in order to appease Moscow.

At a yet deeper level, the Trump team’s failure to bluntly challenge Russia’s maximalist demands over Ukraine seems to stem from its inability to imagine that Putin’s own political survival might hinge on a perpetuation of this war. That is because an end to hostilities would focus domestic public attention on the astonishing costs that Russia has paid—including the loss of as many as 1 million lives—in its 19th century-style pursuit of imperial aggrandizement. In other words, Putin may not only be trying to grind Ukraine into submission and deplete Europe’s political patience and material resources. In the absence of a near total victory, which seems unlikely, Putin’s grip on Russia may depend on postponing any reckoning over his utter folly.

The biggest mystery of Trump’s foreign policy—and the ultimate source of erosion in the United States’ position in the world—involves the U.S. president’s own motivations. Why has he been so extraordinarily deferential to Putin for so long? Yes, Russia has a huge surviving arsenal of nuclear weapons, but it leads the world in almost nothing; has a stagnant economy of only middling size and prosperity; and has become dwarfed by China, its rich and powerful senior partner in an increasingly imbalanced alliance.

None of the potential answers that come to mind remotely justify downgrading or jeopardizing Washington’s long-standing partnership with a rich and populous Europe. One holds that Trump simply admires authoritarians’ ability to make unilateral decisions and place their personal stamps on their times.

Another possibility holds that Trump looks up to Russia for its extraordinary size and enormous natural resources. These include some of the world’s richest oil reserves, which may tickle the fancy of a U.S. leader who seems obsessed with hydrocarbons as a tool of global power and likely harbors memories from the 1980s, when U.S. oil companies coveted a big role in exploiting Russia’s oil and gas resources. A covetousness toward Venezuela’s oil reserves, which are even larger than Russia’s, might also help explain Trump’s drive to put military pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro largely on the basis of an ill-supported charge that Maduro supplies deadly fentanyl to the United States.

Yet another view imagines that Putin has ensorcelled Trump with the lure of immense investment possibilities for U.S. companies in a postwar Russia (and Ukraine). At this point, no one would be surprised if that included hints that Trump and members of his family and inner circle, such as Witkoff, could personally profit in the future from large real estate and natural resource deals.

If this theory is borne out, the Trump administration will have laid U.S. diplomacy to ruin by abandoning the principle that international borders should not be changed through force and actively disregarding the country’s longest-standing allies. If naked transactionalism is indeed the motor driving U.S. foreign policy, it will drive Washington’s standing in the world into the ground.

Russian President Vladimir Putin met with senior U.S. negotiators in Moscow on Tuesday to discuss the Kremlin’s terms for a proposed Russia-Ukraine peace deal. Representing Washington was U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, long criticized for being too accommodating to Russia, and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev and Putin aide Yuri Ushakov also attended.

Ahead of Tuesday’s meeting, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration feels “very optimistic.” But shortly before the talks in Moscow began, Putin accused Kyiv’s European allies of being “on the side of war” and trying to undermine the peace process with counterproposals. An initial 28-point peace plan, drafted without Ukrainian input, included restrictions on Kyiv’s military, ceded some Ukrainian territory to Russia, and barred Kyiv from ever joining NATO. The deal has since been whittled down to a 19-point framework that excludes several of these demands.

Putin maintained that he is committed to seeking peace and has no plans to fight Europe. However, he continued: “If Europe suddenly starts a war with us, I think it will end very quickly.” If Europe starts a war with Russia, then Moscow will soon have “no one to negotiate with,” he added.

Putin’s repeated threats to seize more Ukrainian land if Kyiv does not agree to Moscow’s conditions have further undermined foreign trust in his promises. On Monday, Russian forces claimed to have fully captured the strategic Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk. And on Tuesday, Putin threatened to sever Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea following drone strikes on Moscow’s so-called shadow fleet; Kyiv has denied any involvement in these attacks.

Witkoff and Kushner are expected to meet with Zelensky in Europe later this week.

Read more in today’s World Brief: Putin’s Threats Against Europe Undermine Russia-Ukraine Peace Talks.

Whatever else the United States is up to around Venezuela, it’s probably not after the country’s oil.

There is lots of chatter—and plenty of memes—about U.S. interest in the world’s largest oil reserves. Similar shadows hung over the United States with Bolivia and its lithium in 2019—theories that were baseless but boundless. 

Still, there is reason to wonder, given U.S. President Donald Trump’s own oft-repeated complaint that the United States should have “kept the oil” from Iraq after the U.S. invasion, and because business interests seem to dictate much of Trump’s foreign policy. 

But while some Republican lawmakers have said that Venezuela’s oil riches are the reason to invade, that is not the Trump administration’s official line. In fact, the clearest call about a threat to Venezuelan oil (aside from neighboring countries) came from the Caracas regime itself, in a letter sent to OPEC that accused Washington of angling to steal the country’s mineral wealth.

“It’s a Venezuelan regime narrative. There has never been an official U.S. statement about seeking Venezuela’s oil,” said Pedro Burelli, a former board member of Venezuela’s state-owned oil firm who advises Venezuela’s opposition groups.

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U.S. President Donald Trump held a meeting at the White House on Monday to discuss next steps against Venezuela, just days after warning that the U.S. military is planning to expand its counternarcotics operation onto land “very soon.”

Until now, Washington’s military campaign has been limited to the sea. Since early September, the U.S. military has carried out 21 strikes on suspected Venezuela-linked drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing at least 83 people.

Over the past several weeks, though, Trump has increasingly been signaling that direct military action against Venezuela may be coming. The Trump administration has amassed more than a dozen U.S. warships and some 15,000 U.S. troops in the region. In October, the White House notified Congress that the United States is in a “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations,” and in November, the United States formally designated Cartel de los Soles, which Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is accused of overseeing, as a foreign terrorist organization.

However, mounting anger from within Washington could curb the White House’s apparent regime-change ambitions. Over the weekend, lawmakers in the House and Senate Armed Services committees signaled their support for bipartisan congressional reviews of the boat strikes. The inquiries follow a Washington Post report, published on Friday, that accused U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of ordering U.S. forces to leave no survivors after a Sept. 2 strike on a boat in the Caribbean initially left two people alive.

Hegseth has denied the report, calling it “fake news” in a post on X and maintaining that “current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both U.S. and international law”—a claim that many legal experts reject.

Read more in today’s World Brief: Trump Intensifies Pressure Campaign on Venezuela.

Senior U.S. military officials held talks with the leaders of several Caribbean nations on Wednesday as part of the Trump administration’s growing focus on narcotrafficking operations in Latin America. The meetings also come as U.S. President Donald Trump weighs possible next steps in his pressure campaign against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whom the Trump administration has accused of heading a criminal organization that oversees drug smuggling into the United States.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met with Dominican President Luis Abinader and Defense Minister Carlos Antonio Fernández Onofre on Wednesday to “strengthen defense relationships and reaffirm America’s commitment to defend the homeland.”

That same day, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, met with Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, during which the two “exchanged views on challenges affecting the Caribbean region, including the destabilizing effects of illicit narcotics, arms, and human trafficking, and transnational criminal organization activities.” This was Caine’s second time visiting the region since the U.S. military kicked off its counter-narcotrafficking operation there.

In early September, the United States began launching strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats. Since then, Washington has carried out 21 known attacks on vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing at least 83 people. At the same time, Trump has ordered a massive military buildup in the area. Around 15,000 U.S. personnel are now deployed in the Caribbean, including around 5,000 service members in Puerto Rico. This is the United States’ largest military presence in the region in decades.

On Tuesday, Trump floated potentially holding talks with Maduro to de-escalate tensions. Experts have argued that Trump’s Caribbean operation is part of a larger effort to remove Maduro that could see direct U.S. military action against Venezuela.

Read more in today’s World Brief: Top U.S. Military Officials Meet With Caribbean Leaders.

Republican opposition continues to grow to the Trump administration’s handling of the chaotic Russia-Ukraine peace negotiations, with two senior House members heaping opprobrium on the lead U.S. envoy to the talks, Steve Witkoff, and slamming what they characterized as a lack of a professional and unified interagency process from the U.S. side.

On Tuesday, Bloomberg published a leaked transcript of an Oct. 14 call between Witkoff and Yuri Ushakov, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s top foreign-policy advisor, in which Witkoff suggested coming up with a 20-point peace plan to end the Russia-Ukraine war and offered advice on how Putin should pitch the idea to U.S. President Donald Trump.

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From Gaza to Nagorno-Karabakh, U.S. President Donald Trump claims to have resolved some of the world’s most intractable conflicts in a matter of months with his made-for-TV peace plans. Many seasoned observers have warned that these agreements are less than they seem. They are incomplete and deeply asymmetric, with implementation largely reliant on the magnanimity of the victors.

But that only begins to capture what is so dangerous about them. In prioritizing spectacle over substance in his ill-fated bid to secure a Nobel Peace Prize, Trump’s peacemaking has only served to consolidate genocidal gains while further disenfranchising victims. In doing so, he has rehabilitated a “victor’s peace” model of conflict resolution that will undermine peacemaking globally.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in recent reports that Azerbaijan is under consideration to lead the international stabilization force (ISF) in Gaza—the multilateral body that would oversee security and cease-fire monitoring as part of Trump’s peace plan. It is difficult to imagine a worse country for this role. Only two years ago, Azerbaijan forcibly displaced the entire Armenian population of the Nagorno-Karabakh region by means of blockade, starvation, and military force—measures that the International Association of Genocide Scholars have described as genocidal.

Whether or not Azerbaijan ends up playing a role in the ISF, Trump’s approach has already abandoned the Palestinians of Gaza, like the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, to the mercy of those who seek to destroy them.

Following a military victory against Armenian forces in 2020, Azerbaijan imposed a blockade against the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh in December 2022. For the next 10 months, Azerbaijan deprived the region’s 150,000 Armenians of food, fuel, medicine, and other essential humanitarian goods before launching a military assault that resulted in the ethnic cleansing of its entire Armenian population.

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For a few months in 2024 and 2025, it looked like Israel had become a regional superpower, dispatching troops and fighter jets against enemies who were no match for its strength. It started with the defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon in November 2024, followed the next month by the bombing of Syrian military assets and the occupation of a handful of strategic sites after the collapse of the Assad regime. In March 2025, Israel broke its cease-fire with Hamas to restart the war in Gaza, and in June, it overwhelmed Iranian air defenses and, with U.S. help, destroyed much of Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities. Finally, in September, Israeli fighter jets bombed a compound hosting Hamas leaders in Qatar.

It seemed as if Israel was willing and capable of acting as it chose. The only one who could stop it was U.S. President Donald Trump, and that is what he has done. But rather than simply calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the carpet, Trump has been weaving a web of diplomatic arrangements and military presences to enforce them that leave little room for Israel to maneuver militarily.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed interest on Tuesday toward meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump “as soon as possible” to finalize a 19-point peace plan to end the Russia-Ukraine war. Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, told Axios that talks could occur as early as this week, though the White House has relaxed the Thanksgiving deadline that it had previously given Kyiv.

The original 28-point proposal, which the United States secretly consulted with Russia on, demanded that Ukraine cede some of its territory to Russia, including its entire Donbas region. It also called for Kyiv to accept curbs on its military’s size and capabilities and barred Ukraine from ever joining NATO.

But on Tuesday, U.S. and Ukrainian officials agreed in principle to a heavily modified version of the original document. According to Yermak, the new draft would make U.S. security guarantees “legally binding” and not contingent on Ukraine formally abandoning its constitutional commitment to eventually join NATO.

However, several issues remain in contention, including whether Ukraine would be forced to make territorial concessions to Russia, which Zelensky has long considered a nonstarter.

Tuesday’s announcements came as U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll met with Russian officials in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, to hammer out each side’s core demands. Moscow has vowed to reject any deal that fails to grant Russia control of occupied Ukrainian territory, enforce the large-scale disarmament of Ukraine’s military, and ban Kyiv’s future NATO membership. On Tuesday, Trump posted to Truth Social that he had directed U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

Read more in today’s World Brief: Ukraine Agrees in Principle to Revised U.S. Peace Proposal.

The 1938 Munich Agreement left the Czechoslovak state with no choice but submission. Led by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Britain joined France and Italy in accepting Adolf Hitler’s demands for Czechoslovak territory. The Führer managed to neutralize two of the country’s other neighbors, Poland and Hungary, by offering them other chunks of Czechoslovak land—which also effectively thwarted the Soviet Union (another ally of Czechoslovakia at the time) from intervening, since the Poles refused to allow Soviet troops to cross their territory.

At the time, Czechoslovakia had one of Europe’s most advanced arms industries and might have been able to marshal an effective defense with a bit of allied support, but it was left on its own. A few months later, Hitler’s armies marched into other parts of Czechoslovakia that Chamberlain had not already given him.

Today’s Ukraine is not 1938 Czechoslovakia. Yet the 28-point “peace plan” negotiated between the United States and Russia and leaked to the media late last week suggests that U.S. President Donald Trump considers the Munich deal a precedent. Like Chamberlain, he seems to believe that he can make a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin about Ukraine’s land and future over the latter’s head.

But this calculation is flawed. It betrays Trump’s fundamental misunderstanding of European geopolitics—both Russia’s unbroken designs to control Ukraine and the Ukrainians’ continued willingness to fight for their land and independence.

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Ukraine has been on a shopping spree lately. On Nov. 17, Kyiv announced plans to buy up to 100 French-made Rafale fighter jets over the next 10 years. Just a few weeks earlier, the Ukrainian government had disclosed a similar deal to purchase up to 150 Swedish Gripen jets. These announcements were not made at random: Ukraine has recently made a point of showing European Union countries that it would make good use of Russia’s immobilized central bank reserves if the bloc were to finally seize and transfer these assets to Kyiv’s coffers.

However, the U.S.-Russia plan to end the war has other ideas for the future of these assets, which total roughly $300 billion and are mostly held at EU-based institutions. A clause in the 28-point road map suggests that the reserves would serve as the equivalent of a signing bonus for the United States, which may help explain U.S. President Donald Trump’s keen interest in quickly sealing the deal. While the provisions of the U.S.-Russia plan are alarming, they also present an opportunity for Europeans to potentially block it: If the EU seizes Russia’s central bank assets before Washington does, the bloc may be able to significantly curb Trump’s interest in what is a bad and dangerous deal for both Ukraine and Europe.

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Is the United States now a rogue state?

There are certainly plenty of reasons to believe so—and plenty of people willing to say so. The exhibits of this Trump administration’s disdain for lawfulness, both domestically and internationally, are legion.

The attacks on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean as well as the designation of Venezuela’s leader as the head of a drug cartel—and thus a “terrorist” and a legal target under legal authorities designed to deal with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks—are just the most glaring examples. There are also the threats of military action against Mexico, Nigeria, perhaps Panama, and potentially even Greenland.

There are the questionable tariffs levied on the whole world, an expansion of executive power never contemplated before and currently under Supreme Court review. And there are other tariffs, abusing narrow national security exceptions, that also breach international trade norms. Even seemingly innocent things, such as international maritime shipping standards, are cause for contempt and personal intimidation of foreign diplomats.

There are also the domestic measures, from a rampaging Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Border Patrol, to U.S. national guard troops being sent to U.S. cities for no reason, to the politicization of the justice system to prosecute Trump’s political opponents. There is a formal end to enforcement of anti-corruption statutes, such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and the informal embrace of apparent corruption, from alleged bagfuls of cash to cryptocurrency schemes to gifted 747s.

People deeply versed in statecraft and law—and who served Democratic and Republican administrations in the past—are as much at a loss for adjectives as they are for optimism. They worry that if the United States turns into what is essentially a rogue state, the rest of the world would take note—and not in a good way.

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The war in Ukraine is not going well. The fortress city of Pokrovsk has fallen to Russian forces after months of heavy fighting, and President Volodymyr Zelensky is embroiled in a corruption scandal that has already claimed several members of his cabinet. U.S. President Donald Trump is making another push for a high-level, quick peace deal—one that everyone expects to fail, just as his past few initiatives have.

Even before the proposed peace deal was leaked last Friday, Ukraine’s supporters in Washington were back to their favorite pastime: hoping for a Trump pivot toward increased military and financial support for Ukraine. European capitals, meanwhile, continue to tout their steadfast support for Ukraine and their commitment to stepping into the breach left by the United States—even as their aid continues to decline in practice.

This wishful thinking obscures a darker truth. For all of the dysfunction of Trump’s attempted peace process with Russia, almost everyone else has given up on anything better than the horrifying status quo in Ukraine. The White House’s new plan might fail, but the alternatives to a peace process are worse.

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HALIFAX, Nova Scotia—Fresh controversy around a divisive plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine emerged on Saturday, introducing new confusion into what was already a chaotic diplomatic process.

At an annual trans-Atlantic gathering in Canada, several senior U.S. senators, including at least one Republican, told reporters that they had spoken with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio that day and been told that the 28-point proposal that the Trump administration has spent the last several days pushing Ukraine to accept represented Moscow’s wish list and was not the position of the Trump administration.

However, the State Department later that day called the information provided by the senators “blatantly false.”

Republican Sen. Mike Rounds said during a press conference at the yearly Halifax International Security Forum in Canada that Rubio had initiated a call that afternoon with Rounds and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat and the longtime leader of the annual bipartisan congressional delegation to the conference.

“He made it very clear to us that we [the United States] are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives,” said Rounds, who told reporters that he was sharing the contents of the call with Rubio’s agreement. “It is not our recommendation. It is not our peace plan. It is a proposal that was received [from Russia], and as an intermediary, we have made arrangements to share it, and we did not release it. It was leaked.”

The revelation was met with bewilderment, raising serious questions such as why, if the proposal was Russian-authored and not backed by the United States, has U.S. President Donald Trump been pushing so hard for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to accept it—even going as far as giving him a deadline of Thursday to respond?

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U.S. President Donald Trump has a long and well-documented history of launching incendiary rhetorical attacks against the press and his political opponents. But rights groups warn that the president’s anti-free speech crusade reached an alarming and dangerous new level this week, raising grave concerns about the potentially rippling consequences for reporters and freedom of expression more generally.

Since last Friday alone, U.S. President Donald Trump called a female reporter “piggy,” lambasted another reporter for questions that she asked during his meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and appeared to endorse the idea that congressional Democrats should be executed over public statements they made encouraging U.S. troops to uphold their oath to the Constitution and refuse any unlawful orders.

“President Donald Trump’s comments this week marked a new low for an administration that has routinely shown contempt for the truth or facts. Berating and demeaning journalists for doing their job—asking questions—is the action of a playground bully not a head of state. It is not ‘frankness,’ as Karoline Leavitt argued, it is behavior meant to intimidate, humiliate and demean,” Jodie Ginsberg, the CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists, told Foreign Policy.

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While no single factor explains this, a key challenge in the last few years is that the foreign-policy community uses the wrong platforms. It remains markedly absent from where young Americans consume information: TikTok.

Despite TikTok’s dominance as an information source—with 43 percent of U.S. adults under 30 regularly getting news from the app—the foreign-policy establishment has barely touched it, citing security concerns about the Chinese-owned platform or dismissing it as an unserious venue for choreographed dances. Politicians and domestically focused policy groups are active on the platform and understand its power, but their foreign-policy counterparts are missing in action.

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Despite U.S. President Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s display of bonhomie at the White House this week, a formal U.S.-Saudi civilian nuclear cooperation deal remains out of reach, with the two sides at odds over Riyadh’s continued insistence that it be allowed to domestically enrich uranium.

Though the White House and U.S. Energy Department touted the signing of a “Joint Declaration on the Completion of Negotiations” for a bilateral nuclear trade deal, the reality is that a formal  “123” agreement, which Congress is statutorily required to review, has not been formalized, and neither side has offered a timeline for when it might be reached. Named after a section in the 1954 Atomic Energy Act, 123 deals permit the export of U.S. atomic energy reactors, related equipment, and nuclear reactor fuel.

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U.S. President Donald Trump greeted Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman with pomp and pageantry on Tuesday, as part of a White House effort to treat Riyadh less like a problematic but important regional player in the Middle East and more like a treasured ally and business partner. But despite Trump’s attempt to focus on the country’s U.S. investment pledges, Saudi Arabia’s abysmal human rights record and the Trump family’s financial ties to the country have brought heavy scrutiny to the historic visit.

Tuesday was Mohammed bin Salman’s first trip to Washington since 2018, the same year that the crown prince is believed to have ordered the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump and the crown prince both deny the latter’s involvement, contradicting U.S. intelligence.

Under Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia has accelerated its brutal crackdown on dissent, and this year alone, the country has dramatically increased the number of executions that it has carried out. Yet, Trump heralded the Saudi crown prince on Tuesday, saying, “What he’s done is incredible in terms of human rights and everything else.”

Trump thanked the crown prince for having previously pledged in May that Saudi Arabia would invest $600 billion in the United States. However, on Tuesday, Mohammed bin Salman suggested that this pledge could be raised to as much as $1 trillion, a number previously floated by Trump that is roughly the size of Saudi Arabia’s entire sovereign wealth fund.

The two leaders will also discuss other potential deals, including greater Saudi investment in U.S. artificial intelligence, a U.S.-Saudi defense agreement, bilateral cooperation on developing a civil nuclear energy program in Saudi Arabia, and Riyadh purchasing 48 F-35s from Lockheed Martin.

Read more in today’s World Brief: Trump, Mohammed bin Salman Dismiss Khashoggi Questions to Focus on Investment.

Republican and Democratic U.S. lawmakers are in the thick of negotiations for reauthorizing and turbocharging a key international development agency with an eye toward allowing it for the first time to invest in projects in high-income countries.

The U.S. Development Finance Corporation (DFC) not only survived President Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg earlier this year through the U.S. foreign aid bureaucracy but also is now positioned to become the centerpiece of his “America First” approach to international assistance.

But first, the agency, which offers low-interest loans for infrastructure projects in developing countries, needs to pass through the dense thicket of negotiations between the Senate and House over just how much to accede to the Trump administration’s push to weaken the agency’s congressional mandate to focus on global poverty alleviation.

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The rehabilitation of Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman from global pariah to global patron is one of the most extraordinary political feats of our time. This week, the crown prince will triumphantly return to Washington after nearly a decade of banishment. He is expected to dole out $600 billion in promised investments in U.S. companies and, as part of this exchange, obtain a long-desired security guarantee from the United States. This may well be a great deal for the corporations that stand to benefit from the lavish shopping spree, but it remains a raw and risky deal for the American people, who will be stuck with the bill.

In the aftermath of the 2018 murder of DAWN founder Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi operatives, Mohammed bin Salman faced global sanctions and isolation. Corporate executives pulled out of Riyadh investment conferences, official state visits were suspended, and megadeals with the Saudi government were canceled. The Trump administration sanctioned 17 of those involved in the murder in November 2018.

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When Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman meets with U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday, several critical issues will be on the agenda, including a potential U.S.-Saudi defense pact and the Trump administration’s push for Riyadh to normalize ties with Israel.

The defense pact on the table is reportedly similar to the one that Trump agreed to with Qatar in September in which the United States committed to treat any attack on Qatar as a threat to U.S. security and to “take all lawful and appropriate measures — including diplomatic, economic, and, if necessary, military — to defend the interests of the United States and of the State of Qatar and to restore peace and stability.” Importantly, that agreement was only an executive order, which, unlike a Senate-ratified treaty, carries basically no legal weight and can easily be undone by a future president.

If a U.S.-Saudi defense pact also consists of nothing stronger than an executive order, it will be little more than a symbolic gesture. Yet even a symbolic pledge to treat an attack on Saudi Arabia as a threat to the United States could face pushback from the “America First” wing of the Republican Party. Trump has already faced sharp criticism from some of his supporters for strengthening security cooperation with Qatar.

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U.S. President Donald Trump this week secured five new trade deal frameworks to reduce U.S. costs of living, foster greater foreign investment, and address Washington’s trade deficits with other nations.

On Friday, the United States reached a dual trade deal with Switzerland and Liechtenstein that will lower tariffs from 39 and 37 percent, respectively, to 15 percent. The new rate, set to take effect within the next few weeks, is expected to offer much-needed relief to Bern, which received one of the highest U.S. duties in the world; Switzerland’s initial 39 percent levy was more than double the rate that Washington imposed on the European Union.

Trump justified his particularly high tariffs on Switzerland by pointing to the nation’s nearly $40 billion goods trade surplus with the United States in 2024. To address this, Bern committed on Friday to invest $200 billion during Trump’s second term in key U.S. industries such as pharmaceuticals and gold smelting. Of that, $70 billion is set to be invested next year.

That deal came one day after Washington struck similar frameworks with four Latin American nations: Argentina, Ecuador, Guatemala, and El Salvador. These deals will keep overall U.S. tariffs of 10 percent on Argentina, Guatemala, and El Salvador and 15 percent on Ecuador, but they will remove U.S. duties on some select goods, such as bananas and coffee.

U.S. imports of Argentine beef, which originally faced a 10 percent tariff, are expected to now be exempted, though the United States likely won’t change its quota to expand the amount of Argentine beef entering the country. The beef exception highlights Trump’s friendly relationship with far-right Argentine President Javier Milei, whose country Trump gave a $40 billion bailout to despite anger from his fellow Republicans.

Read more in today’s World Brief: Trump Secures New Trade Deal Frameworks in Europe and Latin America.

That deadline has been extended both formally and informally, and the trade deals have been few and far between since that initial announcement.

But several countries have signed trade agreements with Trump with varying degrees of permanence and formality, often locking in lower tariff rates than the ones he previously threatened in exchange for lowering their own trade barriers to U.S. goods.

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The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to vote on a Senate-passed bill late Wednesday to fund the federal government until Jan. 30 and end the record-breaking shutdown. Republican leaders are “very optimistic about the vote tally tonight,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said. If the legislation passes, it would just need final approval from U.S. President Donald Trump, who has said he will sign it. This means that, barring any last-minute upsets, Washington’s 43-day standstill is nearing its end.

Congress reached an impasse on Oct. 1, when Democrats demanded that the funding bill guarantee an extension of expiring enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies, which help millions of people afford health insurance. Republicans denied the request and refused to negotiate with the Democrats until after the government reopened.

But headway was finally made over the weekend, when eight centrist Democrats broke party ranks to strike a deal. The new package, passed by the Senate on Monday, would fund the government until Jan. 30 and some key agencies through the remainder of fiscal year 2026. This would mean that if Washington were to shut down again over the next few months, essential federal food assistance, known as SNAP, would continue to be funded.

That legislation does not include the Democrats’ primary demand of an extension of the enhanced ACA tax credits, though, which are set to expire at the end of the year. Instead, Senate Republicans merely guaranteed as part of the deal that they would hold a December vote on the issue. However, Johnson has not agreed to hold a vote, making an extension unlikely.

Read more in today’s World Brief: Congress Prepares to End Record-Breaking U.S. Shutdown.

A provision in the continuing funding resolution that the U.S. Congress is expected to shortly pass—ending the longest federal shutdown in U.S. history—has the union representing hundreds of diplomats laid off this summer hoping for a reprieve.

In July, the U.S. State Department sent layoff notices to more than 1,300 employees, including 1,107 civil servants and 246 U.S.-based foreign service officers, as part of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s dramatic reorganization of the department.

However, because the July announcement didn’t immediately take place but rather kicked off a 120-day administrative leave period for the impacted foreign service officers, their permanent separation from the department wasn’t scheduled to go into effect until Nov. 10.

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The Trump administration’s negotiators are in top shape these days. Within just the past few weeks, the United States clinched trade deals with four members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)—Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam—and finessed the details of the investment pledges that Japan gave the White House in July. The spirit of all these accords is simple: In return for lower tariffs than those that U.S. President Donald Trump imposed or threatened, these economies are accepting a surprising number and scope of Washington’s demands.

Trade deals are usually a great antidote to insomnia. The recent agreements between Washington and Asian economies, however, are different. The fine print shows that these countries made unusual concessions to clinch an accord. The agreements offer clues of how Trump has successfully turned tariff threats into leverage to force partners to invest in the United States, give Washington a say over domestic affairs, and decouple from China.

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U.S. President Donald Trump’s sanctions on Russia in late October may have been belated—they were the first of his second term—but they already seem shatteringly effective.

Big buyers of Russian oil, especially in Asia, are forsaking Urals crude, and major Russian oil companies such as Rosneft and especially Lukoil are under pressure worldwide as the specter of U.S. secondary sanctions chokes their business and prospects.

Russia’s economy is already shaky (interest rates are in the double digits, inflation is still a bugbear, and what economic growth there is is fueled by rampant and unsustainable defense spending), and its earnings from fossil fuel exports were already at their lowest point in September since the war began. Now things are going to get dire. 

“You never know what the straw that breaks the camel’s back is,” said Edward Fishman, a former U.S. government official now at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “The benefit of stopping the oil trade is that you are hitting the Russian military-industrial complex at its source.”

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As the U.S. military escalates its posture around Venezuela—with naval deployments in the Caribbean, B-52 overflights, lethal strikes on alleged drug boats, and confirmed CIA covert operations—advocates of regime change are reviving a dangerous analogy. Many have pointed to the United States’ 1989 invasion of Panama and toppling of dictator Manuel Noriega as proof that swift, surgical operations can get the job done.

In private conversations with several current and former U.S. officials, they have nodded toward this parallel. Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who just last month was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, has appealed to the United States for help fighting what she calls Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s “war.” When asked about striking Venezuelan territory, U.S. President Donald Trump has refused to rule it out, saying, “Well, you’re going to find out.”

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During his recent visit to Hanoi, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth inked a new pact with Vietnam to reaffirm U.S. cooperation on sensitive war legacy issues. The memorandum of understanding covered several key issues from the Vietnam War era, including Agent Orange decontamination, unexploded ordnance removal, and better information exchange to determine the whereabouts of killed or missing soldiers from both countries.

Washington should handle these war legacy issues not only because it’s the morally right thing to do, but also because it makes for smarter strategy. Such programs reduce the Vietnamese perception that Washington is exclusively engaging Hanoi in order to counter China—an approach that has sometimes worried Vietnamese leaders, who strenuously seek to avoid aligning with either side of the great-power competition that is intensifying across Southeast Asia. Additionally, the people-to-people ties that such projects usually entail will further instill trust in the United States for future generations of Vietnamese, some of whom will rise to leadership positions in the Communist Party and state structure. These connections will fuel U.S.-Vietnam relations in a positive direction for decades to come.

This is an important and positive development for both Washington and Hanoi. Perhaps more significantly, it also suggests that the Trump administration isn’t necessarily against dispensing aid after the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) by the Department of Government Efficiency run by Elon Musk earlier this year—especially when that aid goes to key allies and partners. Take the example of Vietnam: In 2023, Hanoi elevated bilateral ties to be at the level of a comprehensive strategic partnership—on par with China, India, Russia, and several other powers. This elevation of the U.S.-Vietnam relationship could strengthen overall ties and help Washington counter Beijing. It stands to reason that the Trump administration might want to keep relations with Hanoi and other partners in good health. Releasing U.S. assistance that had been blocked by the USAID shutdown—or even increasing it, as Washington did when it topped up its original grant package for Agent Orange removal with an additional $130 million for a total of $430 million in aid—simply makes good strategic sense.

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U.S. President Donald Trump hosted Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa at the White House on Monday, marking the first time that a Syrian head of state has visited Washington in almost 80 years. The meeting—notable also for Sharaa’s history as the leader of al Qaeda’s Syria affiliate—represents a major thawing of relations with the onetime pariah state.

Sharaa is hoping to use that “tough guy” image to strike a deal with the United States to permanently lift U.S. sanctions on Syria. In 2019, Trump imposed sanctions under the Caesar Act to punish Damascus for alleged widespread human rights abuses under Assad’s regime. But in June, Trump waived those penalties via an executive order, citing the need to “give Syrians a chance at greatness.”

Trump appeared to try to appease Sharaa’s demands on Monday by having the Treasury Department announce that it is halting most sanctions on Syria, except for those involving transactions with Russia and Iran. But Sharaa seeks a permanent solution, which requires an act of Congress, and U.S. lawmakers appear hesitant to grant such a request unless Damascus adheres to several conditions, such as guaranteeing religious pluralism in the country and improving ties with Israel.

But Sharaa is not the only one seeking to gain from a new U.S.-Syria partnership. Trump is hoping to convince Damascus to join Washington’s 89-country coalition dedicated to fighting the Islamic State—something that Syria’s new military and its Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces already do. He also aims to expand the Abraham Accords by having Syria formalize ties with Israel, establish a military presence at Mezzeh airbase in Damascus, and build a Trump Tower in the capital.

Read more in today’s World Brief: Sharaa’s White House Visit Marks a Reshaping of the Regional Order.

U.S. plans for Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa are coming into view as he visits the White House on Monday. The United Nations and Britain have lifted sanctions against the former jihadi, and reports are swirling across the region about Syrian plans to offer an air base outside Damascus to the United States and a Trump Tower in the capital, showing Sharaa’s understanding of today’s Washington game. All signs point toward a U.S. vision of integrating the new Syria firmly into the Washington-led regional order—if he can deliver on consolidating a stable, and likely autocratic, regime and if Israel can be prevented from wrecking the entire gambit.

A jihadi-turned-statesman entering the White House as an honored guest is one of the most astounding recent developments anywhere in the world. Despite his sharply cut suits and savvy public relations campaign, Sharaa is still the same man who fought alongside Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Iraq, stewed in the United States’ notorious Camp Bucca prison, and fashioned one of the most effective and deadly Syrian jihadi groups, Jubhat al-Nusra. To be sure, the experience of governing Idlib province for seven years clearly changed his approach to politics. He has surrounded himself with pragmatic technocrats, and he relentlessly keeps on message about the need for foreign investment and economic development. But it’s still worth acknowledging the surreal nature of Monday’s visit.

It’s the culmination of a yearlong process of global acceptance for Sharaa. He was feted in New York at the U.N. in September, where he addressed the General Assembly; shared a stage with retired Gen. David Petraeus, who led U.S. forces in Iraq; and met with a wide range of Trump administration officials. He enjoys strong support from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose forces protected the Idlib administration of Nusra successor Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and who provides significant support to the new Syrian leader. Jordan, to the south, is on board, if wary. Perhaps most interesting, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who introduced him to Trump in Riyadh in May, supports him despite Sharaa’s seemingly natural orientation toward the Qatar-Turkish side of regional politics. (The fiercely anti-Islamist United Arab Emirates is not a fan; nor is the Shiite leadership of Iraq, which has neither forgotten nor forgiven his role in the insurgency.)

Why so much regional and international support for the former jihadi? In part, regional leaders are simply weary of the long years of wars in Syria and want to see stability return to the Levant by any means possible. Syria’s neighbors such as Lebanon and Jordan want large numbers of refugees to return home to ease the economic burdens and appease local anti-immigrant sentiment. They need at least the semblance of stability to justify pressuring refugees to leave. Ideally, these displaced Syrians would feel confident and enthusiastic about a post-Assad Syria and would not need much urging to go home. More widely, Sharaa’s close ties to Erdogan—and his evident ability to win over Mohammed bin Salman—seem to have reassured most skeptics. And if Washington will co-sign, most see the benefits as worth the risks.

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As U.S. President Donald Trump pushes the boundaries of executive power in the matters of trade and military action further and further, Congress’s conspicuous absence in pushing back against the president’s bold usurpation of authorities that the U.S. Constitution explicitly delegates to the legislative branch has become all the more glaring.

Recent votes in the Senate have highlighted just how far afield the Republican Party has traveled from its own previous long-standing stances in support of free trade. On other key votes in recent days on the permissibility of the Trump administration’s expanding regional maritime strikes on alleged drug-running vessels and the legality of any military action against the Venezuelan government, Republican lawmakers have overwhelmingly accepted the administration’s assertions that it is targeting “narco-terrorists” and have declined to preemptively put limitations on a potential effort to overthrow the Nicolás Maduro regime.

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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban showered U.S. President Donald Trump with praise during his White House visit on Friday in an effort to secure an exemption to threatened U.S. sanctions. Although Orban is one of Trump’s fiercest allies on the world stage, their friendship has become strained in recent months over Budapest’s continued purchases of Russian oil.

Last month, Trump announced sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies to try to cut off the Kremlin’s main source of funding for its war effort. Those will take effect on Nov. 21. But Washington’s penalties don’t end there. Trump also threatened to impose secondary sanctions against countries that continue to purchase Russian oil—namely, China, India, and Hungary.

Budapest is the biggest buyer of Russian crude in the European Union. And while other EU countries are working to wean themselves off Russian energy, Hungary has gone the other direction. Since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Hungary’s reliance on Russian oil jumped from 61 percent pre-invasion to 86 percent in 2024.

Orban has repeatedly denounced penalties on countries that buy Russian oil, accusing them of hurting Hungary’s economy at a time when the prime minister is facing one of his toughest reelection bids in his career. Notably, Orban has also been one of the friendliest European leaders toward Moscow’s ambitions. Like Trump, he has previously suggested that Ukraine cede territory to Russia to end the war.

Hungary already has an exemption from European Union sanctions on Russian crude. But to get one from the United States, experts suggest that Orban may need to offer concessions, such as dropping his opposition to NATO sending military aid to Ukraine and his stance against allowing Kyiv to join the EU.

Read more in today’s World Brief: Orban Seeks Exemption From U.S. Penalties on Russian Oil Imports.

U.S. President Donald Trump prepared to host the leaders of five Central Asian nations at the White House on Thursday as part of Washington’s ongoing bid to bolster its sway in the mineral-rich region. But for the so-called C5—consisting of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—Thursday’s talks are about maintaining a delicate balance between seeking U.S. investments and not angering Russia and China, which have long dominated influence in the region.

Thursday’s meeting will address bilateral cooperation across a host of sectors, including energy logistics, infrastructure investments, technology transfers, educational exchanges, and water-resource management. At the top of the agenda, though, will be negotiations over critical minerals. China’s restrictions on rare-earth exports, some of which were paused during negotiations with the United States last week, as well as Beijing’s overwhelming monopoly on processing the vital minerals have driven Washington to seek alternative places to both procure the raw materials and process them.

Cue Central Asia, which has a wealth of oil, gas, and energy reserves and is also looking to diversify its economic and security partnerships away from Russia and China, particularly after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 left the former Soviet states concerned for their own safety.

Still, though, competition over Central Asia remains fierce. In June, Chinese President Xi Jinping attended C5 talks in Kazakhstan to boost Central Asian involvement in Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. And last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin joined a C5 summit in Tajikistan to strengthen military cooperation.

Read more in today’s World Brief: Trump Seeks to Counter Russia, China in Their Own Backyard.

After the latest announcement of the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier steaming toward the Caribbean theater, the U.S. Navy now counts around 10 percent of its total deployed assets in the Southern Command area of responsibility, which spans Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. In recent weeks, the deployment has been supported by flights of B-52s and B-1s departing from air bases in the continental United States. These aircraft have engaged in simulated bombing runs, flying within 20 miles of Venezuela. In late October, several major news outlets reported that U.S. President Donald Trump had reviewed a target list and that missile strikes could be “imminent” in Venezuela.

The impending arrival of the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group, led by the most advanced aircraft carrier in the United States’ arsenal, could represent a “crossing the Rubicon” moment. If the Ford were to participate in an air campaign against targets inside Venezuela, then it would not be able to loiter in the Caribbean forever. Competition for the Ford’s presence from other regional combatant commands will be strong.

Following more than a dozen strikes against suspected drug-laden vessels, the United States has likely shut down known drug trafficking routes in the southern Caribbean—at least in the short term. Trump has vowed to take the campaign to the next phase, which could involve strikes against land-based targets in Venezuela.

“We are certainly looking at land now, because we’ve got the sea very well under control,” Trump said in mid-October. What began as a counternarcotics mission, demonstrating a paradigm shift in dealing with cartels that have been newly designated as foreign terrorist organizations, may expand to encompass a campaign against the regime of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.

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Several high-profile state and local elections on Tuesday marked the first major litmus test of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term—and Democrats won big. From gubernatorial races to mayoral elections, Democrats swept their Republican opponents by campaigning on an anti-Trump platform.

The results were stark. In the first round of elections since Trump took office in January, Democrats won nearly all seats up for grabs. Most notably, Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani swept the New York City mayoral vote, becoming the Big Apple’s first Muslim mayor. His win delivers a major setback for Trump, who personally endorsed Mamdani’s main rival, independent candidate Andrew Cuomo, and had threatened to cut off federal funding to New York City if Mamdani won.

Among Democrats’ other major wins, Mikie Sherrill was elected governor of New Jersey, Abigail Spanberger won the race for governor of Virginia, and Pennsylvania voted to retain three liberal state Supreme Court justices. Even races further down the ballot turned blue. In Virginia, 13 seats in the state House of Delegates flipped in favor of Democrats, while Democratic candidates Ghazala Hashmi and Jay Jones were elected lieutenant governor and attorney general, respectively. Atlanta, Cincinnati, Detroit, and Pittsburgh all elected Democratic mayors. And Democrats ousted two Republicans in a statewide election for the Georgia Public Service Commission.

To cap things off, Californians also voted on Tuesday to approve Proposition 50, which will allow the Democratic-controlled state legislature to redistrict its congressional map for the 2026 midterm election.

Trump, however, attributed the GOP’s poor showing on two things: himself not being on the ballot and the U.S. government shutdown, calling the latter a “big factor, negative.”

Read more in today’s World Brief: Sweeping Democratic Wins Serve as a Referendum on Trump 2.0.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday heard oral arguments in what is at once a wildly abstruse case, as most cases that reach the highest court usually are, but which boiled down to some pretty basic and seemingly important issues: Does the president have absolutely unfettered powers to mess with the entirety of the U.S. economy and a few dozen trillion dollars’ worth of international trade? The consolidated cases at issue challenge U.S. President Donald Trump’s sweeping global tariffs after he declared a national emergency.

The oral arguments featured plenty of deeply enjoyable and not at all impenetrable back-and-forth among the nine justices; U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer; Neal Katyal, the lead lawyer for the corporate plaintiffs; and the Oregon state solicitor general, Benjamin Gutman.

The first (layman’s) takeaways: One issue that was not deeply interrogated, and surprisingly so, was whether the five-decade existence of U.S. trade imbalances with some countries, and with all of them overall, constitutes the kind of supposed national emergency that triggered Trump’s novel use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to raise taxes on Americans unilaterally.

The second noteworthy element was that the court, which in recent years has been steadfast in drawing the line on letting presidents unilaterally make major changes to the balance of powers among and between the branches of the U.S. government, seemed largely unconcerned with that possibility in this case. Several conservative justices took umbrage with Katyal’s argument that giving Trump unchecked power to tax Americans and disrupt the global economy was a “question of major doctrine”—that is, a statutory interpretation so politically or economically significant that the executive branch can’t make it without explicit congressional authorization—even though those same justices considered Biden-era rules on student loans and evictions during the COVID-19 pandemic to be wild executive overreach.

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How the United States responds to the devastation that Hurricane Melissa wreaked last week across the Caribbean, particularly in Jamaica, is shaping up to be a key test of the Trump administration’s ability to still provide essential international disaster relief after this year’s controversial dismantlement of the country’s humanitarian response infrastructure.

Hurricane Melissa was a Category 5 storm—and one of the most powerful hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean—when it hit Jamaica on Oct. 28 and a Category 4 when it moved on to Cuba. Melissa’s death toll is slowly ticking up as rescue crews work to reach rural and less accessible areas in the Caribbean. As of Nov. 1, there have been 28 fatalities in Jamaica and at least 30 in Haiti.

“Nothing could prepare you for the level of devastation that we’ve seen—whole communities inundated, churches destroyed completely, people on the streets, power lines down. It’s really shocking, and it’s really only the beginning,” said Brian Bogart, the World Food Program’s Caribbean country director, in a video post shared from Black River, a coastal town in Jamaica.

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With 10 naval vessels and 10,000 troops already deployed to the Caribbean—the largest military buildup there since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis—and a carrier strike group led by the USS Gerald R. Ford taking up position, some sort of military attack on Venezuela appears imminent. U.S. President Donald Trump’s rationale for this aggressive military action is that Venezuela is a hub of drug trafficking and that supplying drugs to U.S. consumers is the equivalent of an armed attack on the United States, justifying a military response.

But the real aim is to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government and then, by cutting off the flow of Venezuelan oil to Cuba, fulfill the Republican right’s decades-long dream of collapsing the Cuban government. It’s a strategy that John Bolton, national security advisor in the first Trump administration, tried without success in 2019, but Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio now intends to try again. It’s unlikely to work this time, either, though the cost of a military conflict will be higher for U.S. regional interests and much higher for Venezuelans.

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On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on whether some, though not all, of President Donald Trump’s tariffs are legal, including some of the ones on Canada; China; Mexico; and, actually, the entire rest of the world.

At issue is the president’s ability to set rates for import duties (taxes, for the layman) under an entirely novel reading of Carter administration-era legislation meant to address sudden national emergencies: the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). 

But at heart is something bigger, which is the question of whether the U.S. Constitution, which grants exclusive power over both taxation and foreign commerce to Congress, still matters, or whether the executive branch can set tax rates without recourse to the will of the people or oversight whatsoever. 

The reason the case is at the Supreme Court is because a pair of lower courts found the Trump tariffs illegal, and the administration appealed.

What’s really interesting about the case is that nobody knows whether, when the decision comes down (probably early next year), it will be 9-0 for the administration or 9-0 against, or something in between. 

The reason that the case is tricky—and attracting so much interest this week—is because Congress has spent decades delegating trade authority to the executive branch. And courts in the past, including the Supreme Court, have allowed some tariffs in some circumstances (such as during the Nixon administration years) under legislation similar to the one in dispute now. So perhaps there is a sweet spot for just how much taxation authority, and for how long, the executive branch can arrogate. Or not.

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Russell Vought is one of the most powerful people in Washington. The director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), also a leading architect of Project 2025, is running roughshod over federal workers, federal spending, and federal regulations. Quietly, methodically, and brutally, Vought is manifesting the mission that Steve Bannon called for years ago: destruction of the administrative state.

In contrast to Tesla titan Elon Musk, who acted as a wrecking ball when he served as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Vought is much more deliberate in the way that he uses existing government processes to his advantage. He has been exploiting ambiguities, vulnerabilities, and loopholes in federal processes and administrative rules to tear down the government that President Donald Trump heads.

Vought’s power did not come out of nowhere. In an insightful profile for The New Yorker, Andy Kroll explained that Vought is powerful simply by the fact he controls the OMB: “What it lacks in cachet, however, it makes up for in the vast influence it wields across the government.”

But how did this “little known” office become such a political behemoth? What made this agency filled with number-crunchers such an awesome force?

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As China flexes its rare-earth muscle in trade talks, U.S. President Donald Trump has been waging an all-out effort to ramp up domestic critical mineral production and secure new partnerships abroad. 

That campaign has kicked into high gear in recent weeks as the Trump administration has chased minerals in its diplomacy in the Asia-Pacific, striking a raft of deals in just this past month with Australia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Japan. At home, the U.S. leader has also embraced a more unorthodox—and hands-on—approach to resuscitating a domestic mining industry as his administration increasingly takes equity stakes in private companies. 

“The acceleration of efforts to counter China has been at breakneck speed,” said Gracelin Baskaran, director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.  

Few issues have imbued the second Trump administration’s agenda quite like critical minerals—a group of around 50 mineral commodities that the U.S. Geological Survey has deemed critical to U.S. national and economic security. Among those commodities are the not-so-rare rare earths, which are 17 metallic elements that underpin everything from F-35 fighter jets to wind turbines.

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For decades, the United States’ relationship with Cambodia has been among the most fraught across Southeast Asia, a region where the U.S.-China great power rivalry is fast intensifying. In the past, Washington and Phnom Penh have vigorously sparred over issues like democracy and human rights as well as concerns about Cambodia’s strengthening Chinese ties. Under U.S. President Donald Trump’s second administration, however, this is shifting—perhaps rapidly and much to Washington’s strategic benefit and Beijing’s strategic detriment. Indeed, recent developments with regard to Cambodia suggest that the United States may have finally found a way to play offense in China’s backyard.

While attending the annual Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Malaysia last week, Trump signed a new agreement with Cambodia (along with Malaysia and Thailand) to secure critical minerals and gradually reduce reciprocal tariffs on select Cambodian exports to the United States. He further presided over an ASEAN ceremony to mark a ceasefire (which Trump mislabeled as a “peace deal”) between Cambodia and its neighbor, Thailand. For the phone call Trump made to both sides on July 26 to push them to deescalate their conflict, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in August, lauding Trump for his “extraordinary statesmanship” that Hun argued was “vital in preventing a great loss of lives and paved the way towards the restoration of peace.” The question of merit aside, the nomination was a smart piece of Cambodian diplomacy given Trump’s obsession with the peace prize.

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U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping used their first meeting since Trump returned to office to agree to a temporary truce on their trade tensions, stopping short of a full agreement but dialing back some of their harshest mutual countermeasures. It leaves the U.S.-China trade relationship only slightly worse than it was one year ago but less contentious than it could be.

Most of the details on the talks came from Trump, who spoke to reporters on Air Force One en route back to Washington and published a lengthy Truth Social post touting breakthroughs on soybeans, energy, rare earths, and fentanyl. Beijing’s readout was more circumspect, simply saying that the two leaders had an “in-depth exchange of views on important economic and trade issues, and reached consensus on solving various issues” and that the two sides “should work out and finalize the follow-up steps as soon as possible.” China’s Ministry of Commerce, however, confirmed some details that Trump laid out.

The two sides agreed to a one-year pause on further trade hostilities, leaving open the possibility of revisitation or renegotiation.

Here’s what we know about what was—and was not—agreed to.

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U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent social media post—in which he said he had “instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis” with Russia and China—demands immediate, sober clarification from the White House. Multiple outlets have now reported the news, but the single most dangerous element is not the post itself. It is its ambiguity.

History shows that ambiguity about nuclear intent is destabilizing. A phrase such as “resume nuclear testing” can be interpreted in different ways: a political flourish to show resolve; an order to increase testing of nuclear-capable delivery systems; an instruction to expand simulations and subcritical experiments; or, worst of all, authorization of explosive nuclear warhead detonations.

The first three are serious policy choices that merit debate. The last would mark an epochal reversal of U.S. policy and international norms. Journalists, diplomats, and lawmakers should treat this distinction as urgent and material, not rhetorical. This episode also comes as the last remaining U.S.-Russia arms control treaty, New START, is less than 100 days from expiration, with no successor agreement in sight—further heightening the risks of drift without guardrails.

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On Sunday, Argentine President Javier Milei’s far-right political movement achieved a strong showing in the country’s midterm elections. His La Libertad Avanza (LLA) party secured nearly  41 percent of the national vote, a plurality. Roughly half of the lower house and one-third of the Senate were up for grabs. The LLA gained seats in both chambers, increasing its share of deputies from 37 to 101 and senators from six to 20.

The LLA still lacks a congressional majority. But its increased influence will boost Milei’s libertarian agenda and pro-market reforms, which have involved drastic public spending cuts and sowed division across Argentine society since he took office nearly two years ago.

While Milei’s signature austerity measures have succeeded in lowering the country’s runaway inflation—the annual inflation rate dipped to 31.8 percent last month, down from more than 200 percent a year prior—they have also gutted social services, alienating many of the working and middle-class voters who helped propel Milei’s outsider candidacy to power.

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Nearly one month into the U.S. federal government shutdown, foreign-policy and national security needs are being increasingly strained in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

So far, the White House, State Department, Defense Department, and other agencies have mostly minimized the negative impacts to U.S. defense and diplomacy operations. All active-duty military personnel are still required to report for duty, and many civilian workers with national security-related jobs are working without pay during the shutdown.

But with another scheduled military payday coming up on Oct. 31, it doesn’t appear that the Trump administration has another hat trick it can pull off like it did earlier in the month to reallocate $8 billion earmarked for defense research to instead pay service members.

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In recent decades, as China adopted a sharply muscular approach to the Pacific Ocean, other countries began to sound the alarm, decrying Beijing’s pushy new attitude toward a region full of much smaller and weaker countries.

Although China seemed to be adopting a bygone and largely discredited maritime strategy employed a century earlier by Western powers, many of its tactics were novel. As it pressed legally and historically dubious claims to outright ownership of nearly all of the South China Sea, Beijing boldly built artificial islands from dredged sand in far reaches of the ocean for use as military outposts to enforce its control.

China seized and sank vessels and used powerful water cannons to warn away those from other Asian nations that did not respect its writ, oftentimes in water far closer to the shores of these neighbors than to China’s terrestrial boundaries. In one incident in 1988, it opened fire on Vietnamese soldiers who were pressing a rival claim to a tiny island, reportedly killing 64 people.

Late in the Obama administration, the United States began to push back against China’s maritime policies. It provided diplomatic support for China’s neighbors in these face-offs, invoked international tribunal rulings that invalidated Beijing’s expansionist claims, encouraged Asian countries to bolster their defense cooperation, and stepped up U.S. naval patrols in the region as a warning to China that its pushiness could ultimately bring about Washington’s direct involvement in containing Beijing and enforcing international law.

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Since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to office in January, there has been no shortage of liberal internationalists mourning the downfall of U.S. soft power. Trump’s moves to pull back from the United Nations, ravage foreign aid, and mute the Voice of America have dismantled the government’s soft power tool set, while his often derisive and self-interested approach to global engagement—coupled with rapid democratic decay at home—have dimmed the United States’ glow in the eyes of the world.

But as Americans eulogize soft power, they should push past nostalgia to consider what precisely has been lost. Although opinion surveys show that Washington’s global reputation has indeed suffered since Trump’s second term began, the connection between this downturn and the mothballing of soft power instruments is less clear.

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U.S. President Donald Trump wants a quick resolution to the war in Ukraine. But that goal has proved elusive and is likely to remain so, in part because of how highly the Kremlin values its multiple objectives in Ukraine.

The Trump administration made its latest gambit—sanctions on Russia’s top oil producers, Rosneft and Lukoil—on Oct. 22, striking a blow against one of Russia’s largest sources of revenue.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent presented the sanctions as a response to Russian intransigence in negotiations and called for an “immediate cease-fire.” Trump, speaking on the sanctions, appeared optimistic about their chances of bringing Russia to the negotiating table, saying, “We hope that they won’t be on for long.”

The Kremlin, however, isn’t budging: The next day, Russian President Vladimir Putin shot back that Moscow would not change its negotiating stance. Russia has opposed a cease-fire along the current battlelines and instead pushed for broader concessions as a precondition for ending the war. Among its core aims is control of the Donetsk region, which it has failed to conquer despite more than three years of efforts and tens of thousands of casualties.

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U.S. President Donald Trump is on a mission to find critical minerals wherever they may be, and countries around the world are lining up to deliver them.

Critical minerals and rare earths have underpinned many of Trump’s foreign-policy moves in his second term, from peace deals to tariff threats. It’s easy to see why: The commodities, around 50 of which are considered vital to U.S. security by the U.S. Geological Survey, are indispensable raw materials in many advanced military technologies including missiles and fighter jets. The problem is that China accounts for the vast majority of rare earth and critical mineral production and processing, a stranglehold it has been increasingly willing to weaponize in trade negotiations.

Several nations have stepped up to help Washington hedge against that dominance—and help themselves in the process by currying favor with Trump.

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U.S. President Donald Trump pulled off a significant diplomatic breakthrough with the recent Israel-Hamas cease-fire and Gaza peace plan. The key to Trump’s success was his willingness to (finally) pressure Israel. Trump used his frustration, as well as that of Arab states, following Israel’s missile strike on Doha in September to create a new degree of strategic ambiguity with Israel—that is, uncertainty whether the United States would still support Israel if opted to continue the war in Gaza – if Tel Aviv opted to continue the war in Gaza—to get Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept terms that he otherwise would not have. It was a masterful strategic move.

The danger now, however, is that Trump may deviate from this strategy of stepping back and, in the process, do significant damage to U.S. security interests. By signing a document related to the cease-fire himself (which is unusual because the United States is not a direct party to the conflict), Trump clearly sees the peace deal in bigger terms, notably as the “historic dawn of a new Middle East,” according to him.

With his reputation—and ego—now on the line to deliver this transformation, Trump’s grand vision for the region could lead him to take on a raft of new commitments in the Middle East that are at odds with U.S. interests. In short, if Trump isn’t careful, Washington might come to “own” peace and stability in Gaza and the Middle East in ways that leave the United States overstretched and tied down in the region as bigger challenges gather elsewhere.

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Maybe it is a function of my age—dad to a 20-something and a teenager who tend to view me as an unfortunate necessity—that I long for the early years of parenting. Oh, how I miss gnawing on fat wrists and elbows; getting tackled by a kid screeching “Daddy!” as I come through the front door; hearing the extended cut of a seven-year-old’s day, in lingering detail.

This is one of the reasons that I was so gutted on a recent trip to Lebanon and Syria, where—at the invitation of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR)—I found myself among Syrian refugees. At some point, the terrible things I heard from adult refugees started to blur: the substandard living conditions, the scarce job opportunities, and the fear of police raids. These Syrians now face a terrible choice of remaining in miserable conditions in Lebanon or taking their chances in Syria, which the U.N. security team in Damascus described as “unstable and volatile.”

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U.S. President Donald Trump’s domestic policies have been painful for the United States’ workers. His foreign policy has followed suit. Nationally and internationally, this administration has undermined labor rights, gutted institutions that enforce labor standards, and targeted labor unions—to the detriment of working people everywhere.

Trump has pursued the most aggressive anti-worker policies of any administration in more than a generation. In addition to reversing wage increases and federal regulations protecting workers’ rights and safety, he will likely have put more than 300,000 federal employees out of work by the end of 2025. He has stripped collective bargaining rights for nearly half a million workers and abandoned enforcement of the labor standards that ensure that workers come home safe at the end of the day with the wages that they deserve.

Before January, I served as former President Joe Biden’s lead diplomat for international labor policy at the Department of State. Our team understood that the United States’ workers could only thrive if workers across the global economy could exercise their rights—particularly their right to organize.

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U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term has been typified by unorthodox moves that have stretched the limits of presidential power. But the escalating war against alleged drug boats that his administration has launched in the Caribbean stands out as a particularly unusual development—and there are open questions about the legality, effectiveness, and broader aims of the operation.

Since early September, the United States has conducted seven strikes against alleged drug boats off the coast of Venezuela and two in the Pacific, killing at least 37 people. The Trump administration said that the strikes are targeting dangerous “narcoterrorists,” while accusing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of heading a drug cartel, but it has offered little to no solid evidence to back this up. The operation, which undermines Trump’s campaign pledge for “no new wars” in his second term, has raised alarm bells on Capitol Hill.

Amid widespread doubts over the administration’s rationale for the strikes, there’s growing concern that the operation is part of an effort to raise pressure on Maduro and catalyze regime change in the South American country.

With so many unknowns swirling around the complicated situation, Foreign Policy spoke to several experts to get their perspectives on some of the biggest questions about the recent strikes—including the legality, Trump’s endgame, and the potential consequences for the United States.

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The U.S. Treasury Department on Wednesday levied sanctions against Russia’s two largest oil companies in what the agency framed as a response to Russia’s failure to commit to a peace process in Ukraine.

“Given President [Vladimir] Putin’s refusal to end this senseless war, Treasury is sanctioning Russia’s two largest oil companies that fund the Kremlin’s war machine,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement. “Now is the time to stop the killing and for an immediate ceasefire.”

The sanctions affect Lukoil and Rosneft. The two companies together are responsible for almost half of Russia’s crude oil exports, which are a key source of revenue for the Russian government. The United Kingdom issued sanctions against the two companies last week.

Bessent’s statement left open the possibility that the United States would issue further sanctions: “Treasury is prepared to take further action if necessary to support President Trump’s effort to end yet another war.”

The move follows the United States decision to cancel plans for a Ukraine peace summit with Russia in Budapest, which U.S. President Donald Trump had previously announced.

The plans collapsed amid reports that Russia had not altered its negotiating position and after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov rejected a cease-fire that would freeze the conflict on its current battlelines, which Trump supports.

Supporters and allies of U.S. President Donald Trump are loudly reminding him that the first “A” in MAGA stands for America, not Argentina, with a strong and growing backlash against the planned $20 billion to $40 billion U.S. bailout of the South American country’s economy and its embattled president, libertarian Javier Milei.

As part of a broader lifeline to an ideological ally, the Trump administration has also looked to boost Argentina’s farm belt—to the detriment of the United States’ own. Trump said that he was considering more imports of Argentine beef to bring meat prices down in the United States, just weeks after the liberalization of Argentine agricultural exports sent bucketloads of soybeans from Argentina to China, a market that has stopped buying the biggest U.S. agricultural export entirely this year. 

U.S. farmers and ranchers—as well as lawmakers in big agricultural states—are not happy. (Neither are lawmakers in nonagricultural states, who wonder why the Treasury Department is spending nearly all of its available rainy day fund to bail out a perennial basket case.)

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It’s been more than eight months since U.S. President Donald Trump shocked the world by halting virtually all U.S. foreign aid, terminating billions in congressionally directed funding, and unilaterally dismantling multiple development offices in charge of overseeing the spending.

Last week, the mood among the hundreds of attendees at the InterAction Forum—one of the largest annual gatherings of foreign aid workers—alternated between gallows humor, indignation, defiance, grim resolve, and cautious hope as humanitarian and international development professionals debated the best course of action for dealing with Trump 2.0 and the administration’s apparent disdain for their field.

“This kind of breach of trust is not the way a normal government behaves,” said Elisha Dunn-Georgiou while accepting a leadership award on behalf of the Global Health Council, a nongovernmental organization she heads that advocates on public health issues. The organization is leading a major lawsuit that challenges the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts, arguing that the U.S. government should be required to pay foreign aid contractors for work that was contractually agreed to during the Biden administration.

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Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese became the latest leader to use critical minerals as a fast-track into U.S. President Donald Trump’s good graces, signing a deal during his visit to Washington on Monday that will give the United States greater access to Australia’s critical mineral reserves and infrastructure.

As part of the deal, the two countries will jointly invest $3 billion in critical mineral projects over the next six months, aiming to unearth minerals worth an estimated $53 billion, according to the White House. The Pentagon will also invest in an advanced refinery in Western Australia to mine the mineral gallium.

“In about a year from now, we’ll have so much critical mineral and rare earths that you won’t know what to do with them,” Trump told reporters on Monday.

Critical minerals and rare earths have underpinned several of Trump’s foreign-policy moves in his second term, from peace deals to tariff threats. It’s easy to see why: The commodities, around 50 of which are considered vital to U.S. security by the U.S. Geological Survey, are indispensable raw materials in many advanced military technologies including missiles and fighter jets. The problem is that China accounts for the vast majority of rare earth and critical mineral production and processing, a stranglehold it has been increasingly willing to weaponize in trade negotiations.

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