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.

To this day, Azerbaijan continues to unlawfully detain and abuse dozens of Armenian prisoners of war and former political leaders—while engaging in the systematic destruction of Armenian cultural heritage and civilian property. This is all part of an attempt to deny Armenians the right to return to their homes by leaving them with nothing to return to.

The idea of putting one genocide perpetrator in charge of peacekeeping in the aftermath of another genocide is repugnant. But the situation is made even worse by the deep military and economic collusion between Israel and Azerbaijan. Indeed, Azerbaijan’s war in Nagorno-Karabakh served as a testing ground for the weapons, tactics, and methods that Israel later deployed against Gaza’s Palestinians. Between 2016 and 2020, Israel accounted for nearly 70 percent of Azerbaijan’s arms imports. This proved to be a decisive factor in Azerbaijan’s 2020 military campaign, which set the stage for the ethnic cleansing in 2023. Azerbaijan, in turn, supplies Israel with 40 percent of its oil imports, making it an indispensable energy partner.

That Azerbaijan could be considered for a role in Gaza despite all this lays bare the distorted logic behind Trump’s approach to conflict resolution. Justice and accountability have been divorced from the concept of peace, which has become simply a means of securing geopolitical and even financial ends.

Azerbaijan’s own fraught peace process with Armenia has been widely rebuked for failing to provide any measure of justice for the victims of the former’s aggression. Despite paying lip service to peace, Azerbaijan continues to occupy portions of sovereign Armenian territory along the border and seeks to use its military advantage to impose maximalist demands.

As a result, Azerbaijan has been able to dramatically move the goalposts of negotiations. For decades, the peace talks overseen by the Organization for Security and Cooperation’s Minsk Group sought to prioritize the right to self-determination for Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenians. But Azerbaijan is now ransacking and demolishing towns once populated by Armenians and solicting foreign investment for the redevelopment and resettlement of the region. As a result, it is clear Baku has no interest in allowing for the return of Armenians to their homes, let alone granting them even the most limited autonomy.

In fact, Azerbaijan struck a symbolic death blow against the principle of self-determination by demanding the dissolution of the OSCE Minsk Group as a prerequisite for peace—a move that was finalized during a trilateral meeting with Trump at the White House in August.

In addition to imposing its terms through the threat and use of force, Azerbaijan has also successfully denied Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenians a seat at the negotiating table by arresting the region’s former leaders and its onetime interlocutors. Those officials now face show trials on politicized charges. They have been subject to abuse and mistreatment, deprived of their legal rights, and denied access to the International Red Cross.

And in a further mockery of this peace process, Azerbaijan has refused to guarantee the release of these officials—or the roughly dozen other Armenian prisoners of war and captives in its detention—as part of a final deal. In its attempt to evade accountability, Azerbaijan has also insisted that Armenia withdraw its international human rights complaints against Azerbaijan before international courts as part of the agreement. Many of these cases had already seen provisional judgements in Armenia’s favor, such as the International Court of Justice ordering Azerbaijan to comply with humanitarian law in its treatment of detainees and ensure the expedited, safe, and voluntary return of displaced Armenians to Nagorno-Karabakh.

Perhaps most egregious, however, is the proposed “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity,” which would grant the United States exclusive development and operational rights over transportation and communication networks in Armenia’s southern province of Syunik to allow uninterrupted commercial transit between Turkey and Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan and Turkey have long coveted access to what they refer to as the “Zangezur corridor” to monopolize the flow of energy and resources through the middle corridor connecting Central Asia to Europe.

What Azerbaijan once sought to secure through force has now been awarded to it through Trump’s intervention—in an effort to secure a U.S. foothold in the region while preventing Russia, Iran, and China from dominating this global crossroad. In the process, Armenia has been treated as little more than collateral damage—a necessary sacrifice at the altar of regional energy politics.

The picture is no less grim for the Palestinian people, who have also been denied any real agency in a peace process that will determine their future. There are clear similarities between these so-called peace processes. Both agreements have prioritized the symbolism of signatures on paper over a comprehensive approach to resolving more contentious and fundamental issues.

For Armenia, this includes the unresolved status of Armenian detainees, the fate of Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenian heritage, the security and sovereignty of southern Armenia, and the prospects of a safe and secure return for forcibly displaced populations. For Palestinians, it involves the future of Palestinian sovereignty, the possibility of return for displaced populations, the status of Jerusalem, and the ongoing occupation and apartheid in the West Bank.

In many ways, “peace” in this context merely freezes the intolerable underlying conditions of oppression that Armenians and Palestinians have been suffering—and which Trump’s plans bring us no closer to addressing.

Rather than ensuring robust international security guarantees, the agreements both rely heavily on the misplaced belief that regional investment, development projects, and trade will serve to incentivize peace and deter renewed escalation. But this is pure fantasy. Both Azerbaijan and Israel are already hubs of regional trade and investment, a fact that has done nothing to deter their adventurism.

Instead, deepening economic entanglements and mutual dependencies have only made it more difficult and costly to hold these countries accountable—while rewarding and normalizing military aggression. As a result of this absence of any real accountability, oversight, or security guarantees, the fates of the Palestinian and Armenian people have been left to the discretion of their oppressors.

These agreements also represent a complete abandonment of transitional justice. Where truth and reconciliation commissions and international war crimes tribunals were once considered the cornerstones of conflict resolution—particularly in the aftermath of genocide—these elements have not only been sidelined but also explicitly delegitimized. The efforts of both the United States and Israel to discredit international courts, and Azerbaijan’s successful bid to force Armenia to withdraw active human rights cases, have irreparably undermined the status of international humanitarian law and international human rights law.

Even measured against the admittedly modest successes of the international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda as well as the truth commissions for South Africa, Sierra Leone, Guatemala, Argentina, Canada, and elsewhere, the peace processes under consideration here fall drastically short. For both Gaza and Nagorno-Karabakh, justice and accountability have been treated as an inconvenience—obstacles to reaping the supposed economic dividends of peace.

This has perversely led to the emergence of “peacewashing,” where performative peacemaking has served to obfuscate behavior that is otherwise incompatible with peace. Azerbaijan has become incredibly proficient at using public spectacles and ceremonies to whitewash its public image: It has “sportswashed” its egregious human rights record by regularly hosting international events such as Formula 1 racing and UFC matches, and it “greenwashed” its fossil-fueled atrocities by hosting the COP29 climate summit last year. Azerbaijan’s proposed participation in the ISF is peacewashing par excellence—portraying itself as good-faith partner for peace in Gaza while consolidating its military subjugation of Nagorno-Karabakh.

But peacewashing is not just limited to perpetrators: International guarantors also use the optics of peace to get a piece of the action in the form of lucrative post-conflict reconstruction and development deals. By reducing peace to a marketing stunt for reputation laundering by war criminals and their enablers, these agreements set a dangerous precedent that will cast a shadow over efforts to mediate other global conflicts.

There is no better recipe for renewed violence than an unjust peace. When states are rewarded for their violations of international law, it legitimizes the use of violent military force as an alternative to negotiation. And when victim groups are denied justice or restitution for the crimes that they’ve suffered, it only serves to reify and reinforce the intolerable conditions of oppression that produced violence in the first place.

By putting spectacle before substance, Trump’s peace deals are set up for failure. When you reduce decades-long conflicts rooted in subjugation and genocide to mere territorial disputes, it is perhaps understandable that the proposed solutions resemble land development deals. But neither the proposed “Trump corridor” nor the “Gaza Riviera” offer much in the way of solace for the communities whose lives have been irreparably scarred by violence—and who have once again been denied a real seat at the table that will decide their future.

In eschewing justice and accountability and neglecting the root causes of these conflicts, these Potemkin peace plans risk returning us to a model of conflict resolution where might makes right and to the genocidaire go the spoils.

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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Relations between the Trump administration and Colombia took their fourth turn for the worse this year over the weekend, after President Donald Trump threatened steep new tariffs on a free-trade partner and said he would suspend U.S. aid and assistance to one of its key Latin American allies.

The punitive steps, announced Sunday, came after Colombian President Gustavo Petro again criticized the ongoing and legally dubious U.S. military attacks on civilian small craft in the Caribbean, ostensibly part of the Trump administration’s war on drug trafficking. Just after Trump’s announcement, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth announced another U.S. strike, this time on what he claimed was a boat crewed by Colombian guerrillas carrying narcotics.

“President Gustavo Petro, of Colombia, is an illegal drug leader strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Sunday, vowing to cut off the trickle of U.S. assistance that still reaches the country.

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China’s growing influence over key infrastructure in Latin America and the Caribbean has set the Trump administration on edge. Nowhere have the White House’s concerns been sharper than around the Panama Canal, where Hong Kong-based company CK Hutchison operates two ports. U.S. President Donald Trump has inaccurately characterized the firm’s activity as tantamount to China “operating the Panama Canal” and vowed that his administration would be “taking it back.”

Under pressure from Washington, CK Hutchison announced in March that it had agreed to sell off its 80 percent ownership stake in 43 port holdings outside of China and Hong Kong—including the two in Panama—to a consortium led by the U.S.-based investment firm BlackRock. The move seemed to be an early win for Trump’s brand of aggressive dealmaking diplomacy.

But Beijing had other plans. Within weeks of the announcement, China launched a regulatory and public relations blitz against CK Hutchison, forcing the private company to back away from the planned sale.

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The tenuous trade truce between Washington and Beijing has collapsed. What lies ahead is less a conventional trade war and more of a sustained struggle in which both powers codify coercion into their economic statecraft and increasingly weaponize interdependence as a source of leverage. In this new, emerging phase, confrontation will no longer be perceived as a policy failure but as a policy tool to test supply chains, exploit asymmetries, and pressure rivals without tipping into all-out economic warfare.

Yet if the Cold War’s nuclear balance imposed mutual restraint, then today’s economic contest seems to reward escalation. Each side appears to gain leverage by showing that it can steer disruption, not shun it. Put differently, deterrence then was about surviving destruction; deterrence now is about mastering instability, with both countries convinced that they could outlast, outmaneuver, and outperform the other.

Behold the era of mutually assured disruption.

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On Friday, Venezuelans opposed to President Nicolás Maduro awoke to unusually hopeful news: Opposition leader María Corina Machado had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee recognized her tireless work to advance Venezuela’s return to democracy in the face of Maduro’s authoritarianism.

In a way, the prize honors not only Machado, but also the millions of Venezuelans eager for change who mobilized around her ahead of the 2024 presidential campaign. Her leadership contributed to the opposition’s overwhelming victory in that election, according to verified independent counts—and galvanized resistance when Maduro blatantly stole it.

The prospects for a peaceful democratic transition in Venezuela remain unclear. Machado has close ties to several members of the Trump administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But since U.S. President Donald Trump took office in January, he has sent mixed signals on his policy toward Caracas.

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The initial response to the Israel-Hamas cease-fire agreement clinched by the Trump administration last week has been rapturous. Palestinians are reveling in the prospect of an end to two years of almost unimaginable brutality and grinding starvation that have decimated every part of the long-suffering people and land. Israelis celebrated the return of 20 living hostages released by Hamas and the chance of an end to international isolation. Enthusiastic crowds in Israel and Egypt showered U.S. President Donald Trump with appreciation.

But it is difficult to share Trump’s optimism that the cease-fire has unlocked a broader transformation of the Middle East—or even that it will survive contact with reality on the ground in Gaza.

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The deal between Israel and Hamas to end two years of war is a triumph for U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump thrust himself to the center of one of the world’s bloodiest conflicts and brokered a cease-fire at a moment of great geopolitical uncertainty. Although Trump’s startling bombast often evokes head-shaking from diplomats and policy wonks trained to eschew self-aggrandizement, the deal shows that his flair for high-wire, personality-driven diplomacy can be remarkably potent.

Trump understands that politics is in large part about performance. In his second term, unconstrained by more traditional and cautious advisors, he has turned diplomacy into must-see reality TV that lets viewers tune into unscripted Oval Office meetings, rambling speeches, and off-the-cuff Truth Social posts. Like Larry David or Jerry Seinfeld, he plays an exaggerated version of himself in public, mugging to a crowd that revels in his antics. He is auteur, leading man, and screenwriter all in one.

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For years, many democracy experts have warned that U.S. President Donald Trump is pushing the country toward authoritarianism. During his first term, they raised alarm bells as Trump repeatedly tested democratic guardrails with unprecedented and, at times, incendiary actions—particularly his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election.

When Trump was reelected last year, many of the same experts predicted that the U.S. political system—weakened by his first term—would face even more existential challenges during his second round in the White House. Some of the nation’s top experts on democracy, fascism, and related topics have even taken steps to leave the country during Trump 2.0.

Nicholas Grossman, an international relations professor at the University of Illinois, is among the political scientists who’ve raised grave concerns about Trump and his impact on the United States. Nearly nine months into Trump’s second term—and in the wake of several controversial moves that the Trump administration has made, including deploying National Guard troops to U.S. cities—Foreign Policy spoke to Grossman to get his take on whether the country has moved closer toward authoritarianism, and if so, whether that can be stopped or reversed.

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In recent days, there has been much speculation about the causes for a supposed discrepancy in the relative success of U.S. President Donald Trump’s foreign policy versus his domestic policy.

The reason for this is fairly obvious. From the moment that a cease-fire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas was announced, Trump has basked in accolades for having brought about the seemingly impossible. It’s not just his devoted supporters who have given him credit but his usual detractors and political opponents as well.

Realistically speaking, however, the notion that there has been a grand success in the Middle East is overblown—or at least premature. When one takes a careful look at Trump’s foreign policy more broadly, the idea that he has compiled a strong record of success since his return to office in January stands on even flimsier ground. In fact, the erratic and highly personalized way Trump conducts international relations raises almost as many troubling questions as anything his critics have found fault with at home.

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As the two-week standoff over the U.S. government shutdown dragged on—imperiling hundreds of federal programs that the Democratic Party has created over the past century—the nation’s top Democrat, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, suggested at one point that he’s fairly satisfied with his party’s progress.

“Every day gets better for us,” chortled Schumer, apparently full of vim that he wasn’t swiftly surrendering to President Donald Trump as he did to avoid a shutdown in March.

But few in the country agreed—and Democrats continue to earn record-low ratings among voters (who still trust Republicans more on economic issues, even though the Democratic Party is polling slightly better on the shutdown). And therein lies the latter political party’s long, woeful tale of impotence against Trump, the most powerful demagogue that the United States has ever seen.

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U.S. President Donald Trump landed in Israel on Monday to a rapturous welcome, from banners on the beach near Tel Aviv to a standing ovation in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, where his personal and pivotal role in bringing home the last 20 surviving Israeli hostages was thanked, effusively, by families, service members, and many—though not all—Israeli politicians.

Trump’s lightning trip to Israel started with a meeting with families of former hostages in Jerusalem. Hamas released all 20 of the remaining living captives early Monday, just before Israel released nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees. The exchange was part of what is currently a cease-fire but which Trump hopes will be the first step in a comprehensive peace deal that sorts out the Gaza Strip’s future and disarms Hamas. 

For starters came a valedictory, and a well-deserved one, as the cease-fire is in place, the hostages are home, and the cheers from Khan Younis, in the devastated Gaza Strip, to Tel Aviv echoed in unison.

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