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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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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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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When U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, it was clear that the U.S. approach to women’s rights and gender equality around the world would shift. Republican administrations have long diverged from Democratic ones on this front, favoring women’s economic empowerment and private-sector development over broader campaigns to challenge traditional gender norms or expand reproductive rights.

Yet rather than again steering U.S. global engagement on women’s rights in a more conservative direction, the second Trump administration has dismantled the bipartisan policy architecture that sustained those efforts. In doing so, the White House has overturned more than six decades of policy precedent, including from Trump’s first term.

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In his second administration, U.S. President Donald Trump has succeeded in turning an institution of legal justice into his own personal weapon. A fragile wall was constructed to separate the Department of Justice (DOJ) from the political interests of the Oval Office in the aftermath of Watergate in 1974. In a matter of months, Trump has shattered that wall, using a legal team at his disposal to go after domestic opponents and conduct political investigations.

The most recent shocking example of how far the president is willing to go occurred last week when New York Attorney General Letitia James was indicted for mortgage fraud. James is the latest person to be targeted by Trump’s DOJ. Trump has been venting about James ever since she won a civil fraud case against him and his family business.

The news comes just weeks after U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, concluded that there was insufficient evidence to move forward with indictments of former FBI Director James Comey, who along with James has been another one of the people at the very top of Trump’s list of enemies due to his role in investigating possible connections between the 2016 Republican presidential campaign and Russia. Under pressure from the president to resign—in late September, Trump told reporters, “Yeah, I want him out”—Seibert stepped down from his position. Trump replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, a 36-year-old former insurance lawyer from Florida with no prosecutorial experience.

Keeping up the pressure, Trump sent out a message on social media directed at Attorney General Pam Bondi, stating in clear language: “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!” Days later, Halligan brought the case to a grand jury in Virginia, which then indicted Comey.

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The United States is deploying up to 200 troops to Israel to help oversee the Gaza cease-fire process in coordination with regional partners, including Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. But the troops, some of whom have already arrived in Israel and will continue to do so through the weekend, won’t be there to conduct offensive operations and won’t be going into Gaza, a U.S. official told Foreign Policy on Friday.

The troops will focus on planning and establishing a civil-military coordination center, the official said, without offering specifics on precisely where it will be in Israel. The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to the developing and sensitive nature of the matter. The center will “help facilitate the flow of humanitarian, logistical, and security assistance into Gaza during this cease-fire agreement implementation process,” the official said. “Secondly, it will also serve to monitor the implementation of the cease-fire agreement [to] ensure that it remains on track.”

The aim is to provide a hub for coordination to avoid introducing chaos “in an already strained area,” the official said, and the center will look to “unify the effort to maximize the flow of support that is poured into Gaza.” The effort is designed to help lay the groundwork for the goal of transitioning to civilian governance in the territory, the official added.

The U.S. official could not say how long the deployment might last, stating that there are a lot of “unknowns.”

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U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday threatened to unleash new tariffs on China and cast doubt over a potential meeting between him and Chinese President Xi Jinping later this month in South Korea, further escalating a now monthslong trade spat between the two powers. 

Trump’s threats came after China sharply expanded its export controls for rare earths, the powerful materials that underpin everything from semiconductors and clean energy technologies to the U.S. defense industry. Beijing dominates the world’s rare-earth supply chains, commanding about 85 percent of processing and 92 percent of magnet production. That has given it key leverage that it’s harnessed in multiple rounds of negotiations after Trump first launched his trade war in April. 

Under Beijing’s new controls, which are set to take force on Dec. 1, foreign firms must secure approval from the Chinese government to export magnets and certain semiconductor materials that include at least 0.1 percent Chinese rare earth content. The moves will “safeguard national security and interests,” the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said in its announcement.

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The breakthrough cease-fire reached in Egypt this week follows two years of unprecedented bloodshed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—marked by levels of cruelty and violence that have shaken the world’s conscience. Although the agreement’s terms have not been fully disclosed, what has been alluded to—and what can be inferred from context—raises serious doubts that the vague framework outlined in the U.S. 20-point “peace plan” being discussed will ever be fully fleshed out and implemented. At the heart of the concern is not merely the vast gulf separating the two sides’ positions or their asymmetry of power, but also that almost everything hinges on the guarantee of one man: U.S. President Donald J. Trump.

Throughout previous cease-fire negotiations, Israel and Hamas remained far apart on several issues, including the timing and totality of Israel’s military withdrawal from Gaza, the disarmament of Hamas, and the nature and structure of future governance in the territory.

In previous talks, including January of this year, mediators addressed the problem by proposing a phased implementation process in which the sticking points were pushed to the second and third stages while the two sides implemented a gradual captive exchange and the entry of humanitarian aid. Yet this phased process allowed the stronger party, Israel, to violate the cease-fire at the end of the first phase with impunity, once it had recovered a considerable number of hostages but before it had to take steps to end the war and withdraw.

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Another year, another failed attempt. U.S. President Donald Trump’s inability to secure this year’s Nobel Peace Prize was predictable. The odds that he will ever win the prize remain slim. Yet this latest knockback is only likely to redouble Trump’s desire to win in future years, putting renewed energy behind one of the most important yet underappreciated forces shaping U.S. foreign policy.

In advance of Trump’s second election victory, many observers talked about taking him “seriously but not literally.” This was always foolish guidance, but it is especially so regarding his transparent obsession with Nobel recognition. Beyond mere vanity, this desire will continue to reshape global geopolitics—a point this latest perceived snub is only likely to intensify.

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The long-awaited cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas, now underway in Gaza, includes significant gains for both sides. Israel will get back its remaining hostages—about 20 are believed to be alive—along with the bodies of others. In return, it will release some 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, according to reports, end its two-year war on Gaza, and pull troops from large parts of the territory. The Trump administration deserves credit for pushing a deal through.

But the basic outline of the agreement had been on the table for many months. By accepting it, both sides are giving up on key demands. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had vowed to destroy Hamas, yet the group remains the strongest actor in Gaza. Hamas in turn wanted a complete Israeli withdrawal and guarantees that Israel would not resume operations, both of which remain uncertain.

So why did the two sides agree to something less than their maximalist goals? And why now?

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From the earliest days of his rule, Chinese President Xi Jinping has made a regular practice of purging senior members of his country’s military hierarchy. He has invoked corruption in opaque legal proceedings and presided over their public disgrace, banishment from the Chinese Communist Party, and imprisonment. In almost every instance, Xi and the propaganda apparatus that is devoted to him have pounded away at strengthening political control over China’s armed forces.

One of the most important tasks of any China scholar these days is discerning why Xi is so preoccupied with concentrating so much power in his own hands, and, in particular, ensuring obeisance from the military. Most commonly cited among his possible motives is something that Xi himself routinely invokes: the need to ensure Chinese preparedness for and eventual success in any fight over the future of Taiwan.

It is unlikely that this altogether explains Xi’s driven sense of purpose, though. To me, his motivation seems to be at least equally fed by a desire to perpetuate his own rule, which depends on thoroughly preempting any questioning of his personal authority. In Xi’s mind, maintaining absolute control of the gun, in the parlance of Mao Zedong, seems to be a minimum prerequisite for this. The Chinese leader has already thrown out the rule book that once governed Chinese political succession to two five-year mandates and is barreling toward what would be his fourth term in office, if he subjects himself to the formality of a “reelection” by party leaders, as expected, in 2028.

In past columns, I have written about the ways in which U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term seems to have borrowed from the playbook of elite politics in China, which is marked by both musclebound authoritarianism and highly personalized rule. One of the clearest signs of this has been the hollowing out of government institutions in favor of administration by political hacks who are loyal to a leader, similar to Mao during the Cultural Revolution.

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A few weeks ago, prominent Russian opposition leaders in exile made a startling plea to the Canadian government: Please accept hundreds of asylum-seekers currently detained in the United States before they are summarily returned to Russia. Apparently, Russian asylum-seekers are being deported en masse to their country of origin, where many are imprisoned upon arrival due to their involvement in opposition and anti-war campaigning. Then last week, reporters learned that hundreds of Iranian nationals already in immigration detention would be deported to Iran. Some were allegedly willing to go back, but others were not—some of the lawyers said their clients had even disappeared.

Over the last several years, experts, civil society, and governments have embraced a name for when countries reach across borders to silence dissent. It is called transnational repression, and the U.S. government used to be very much against it. Now, as these stories demonstrate, Washington has become an eager collaborator.

To the extent that people are familiar with the term, transnational repression probably evokes incidents like the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, the abduction of Rwandan activist Paul Rusesabagina from Dubai, and the murder plots against Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad in New York. Those are certainly striking examples in which governments have targeted dissidents on foreign soil. But research has consistently established that most transnational repression involves a degree of cooperation between the origin state and the host state to secure the return and punishment of dissidents.

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The Trump administration is dismantling the pillars of the United States’ democracy. Europe, whose own democracies are facing internal challenges and external threats, has seen this playbook before. Its leaders have understandably focused on maintaining economic and defense ties with a mercurial U.S. president. But this approach prioritizes short-term gains over the continent’s long-term interests.

The reality is that Europe’s growth and security are threatened by democratic decline in the United States. For the sake of its citizens and global credibility, Europe must defend democratic values now. This includes fortifying institutions at home, funding democracy groups abroad, and saying the quiet part out loud: The United States is backsliding.

The state of U.S. democracy is more alarming than many Europeans realize. For starters, the Trump administration is undermining free and fair elections ahead of the 2026 midterms. It has pardoned rioters who tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and revised intelligence assessments about foreign interference. New legislation and executive orders on voter registration—as well as efforts to prohibit mail-in ballots—could disenfranchise millions of voters, while states may lose election security funds if they fail to comply with the administration’s demands. Trump has repeatedly talked about running for an unconstitutional third term and recently joked about canceling the 2028 polls.

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Apparently, U.S. President Donald Trump and his chief economic negotiator, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, like to play poker.

“You don’t have the cards,” Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during their meeting at the White House in February, trying to make him understand that Ukraine could not win in negotiations with Russia what it had lost on the battlefield. “They’re playing with a pair of twos,” Bessent told the press before his first face-to-face negotiations with his Chinese counterpart Vice Premier He Lifeng—attempting to unsettle his opponent.

At the end of October, Trump and Bessent will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea. But after having lost five successive hands at the tariff and supply chain table, Trump knows he doesn’t have the cards.

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On Oct. 7, 2023, I was serving as the U.S. State Department’s lead official working to expand the Abraham Accords—a set of normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab countries. As the magnitude of the Hamas’s attack on Israel that day became clear, it was obvious that work would have to be paused.

In the early days of the Israel-Hamas war, I was asked by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf to help lead a task force working on day-after planning. I quickly concluded that unless Hamas was truly defeated and removed from power, there would be no day after.

I understood that in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack, no Israeli leader—not Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, nor any other—would have the legitimacy to tell their public that the current war in Gaza would end as all the previous ones had: with Hamas battered and bruised but still clinging to power and preparing for the next round. And that meant giving the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) time to conduct its campaign, which we hoped would be as targeted as possible, eliminating Hamas leaders and assets while minimizing harm to the civilians among whom they embedded.

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Even in a region as angry, dysfunctional, and conflict-ridden as the Middle East, it’s hard to believe we’re entering the third year of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza—a conflict that has now surpassed in duration, horror, fury, and blood all previous Israeli-Palestinian confrontations. There is now a recently minted U.S. peace plan on the table, but its salience and relevance are yet to be tested.

Maybe we are hostage to pessimistic realism born of experience, having been around so many well-intentioned but failed peace plans and negotiations. But we’re wary of events and initiatives that are marketed as game-changers, inflection points, sea changes, and transformations designed to bring about peace forever—especially those that are not connected to a process for reaching agreement or implementing them.

Much about the post-Oct. 7, 2023, Middle East, two years on, thus remains depressingly, even horrifyingly, familiar. Nonetheless, there are some takeaways that are new and potentially significant—ones that not just reflect current headlines but also may well shape future trend lines to come. These will constitute the choices and policies for U.S. policymakers.

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It’s not every day that a  U.S. president publicly demands the return of a military base from a former adversary. But that’s exactly what happened last week, when President Donald Trump said that his administration is “trying to get” Bagram back from the Taliban.

The statement sparked a mix of surprise and skepticism. Once the nerve center of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, the Bagram Airfield was abandoned during the messy 2021 U.S. withdrawal and quickly taken over by the Taliban. Now, four years later, it has resurfaced as Trump’s latest foreign-policy gambit, rekindling debate over the United States’ unfinished business in the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

Trump, who has repeatedly raised the issue of control of Bagram since the withdrawal, now appears to be ramping up his push. “We want it back and we want it back soon. Right away,” he warned on Sept. 20.

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“Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!” U.S. President Donald Trump implored Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a 2019 letter. The jury might be out on how tough or flexible Erdogan is, but he is certainly no fool. Indeed, he has proven his skill at playing Trump. Not long after receiving the White House’s missive (which he theatrically threw in the bin, according to reports), Erdogan got Washington to swallow a Turkish military intervention in Syria directed against the United States’ Kurdish allies.

On Sept. 25, the Turkish leader was back to the White House, ready to do more geopolitical business with his “valued friend,” Trump. But the fact that talks yielded so little highlights the extent to which the United States and Turkey diverge. The chemistry between Trump and Erdogan, two strongmen with reputations for wheeling and dealing, makes things better—but only slightly.

The reality is that the problems in U.S.-Turkish relations are baked in, and the opportunities for breakthroughs are small. Moreover, the stakes aren’t that high anymore, and U.S.-Turkish relations are a much duller affair than they were during Trump’s first term. As a result, both sides are happy to enjoy a photo op and pocket what wins they can.

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The Trump administration’s decision to impose a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visa applications stems from legitimate concerns about wage suppression and job displacement.

Critics have long argued that some companies abuse the program by using it to replace U.S. workers with cheaper foreign labor. These concerns have merit. Studies have documented consulting and other firms paying foreign H-1B workers less than their U.S. peers in similar roles and even engaging in wage theft.

Yet the U.S. government’s sledgehammer approach to these real problems will likely produce consequences far worse than the abuses it seeks to address. Rather than encouraging companies to hire more Americans, the dramatic fee increase—from roughly $1,000 to $100,000—will drive high-skilled work overseas and accelerate the decline of U.S. technological leadership. In addition to the fee, Washington will replace the current H-1B lottery with a new system that strongly benefits the largest employers instead of favoring startups and universities, where foreign workers would contribute more to innovation and future job growth.

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The administration couched the removals as consistent with the presidential prerogative to choose its military advisors. Previous presidents did have this power, and every administration has fired a few military leaders, made some surprise appointments, or exercised close presidential scrutiny of the selection of personnel to a few of the seniormost positions. None has relieved so many, nor shaped the appointments so forcefully, this early in the president’s tenure. No previous administration exercised its power in this dramatic fashion for fear that doing so would effectively treat the senior officer corps as akin to partisan political appointees whose professional ethos is to come and go with changes of administration, rather than career public servants whose professional ethos is to serve regardless of changes in political leadership.

These personnel moves have been poorly explained to both the public and the individuals relieved, but one thing was made clear: None of the officers had committed a grave fault—insubordination or dereliction—that would have made their removal obvious and noncontroversial. To relieve so many senior officers so soon in an administration amounted to a dramatic break with past precedent, raising two obvious questions: What are historical norms and best practices around relieving senior military leaders, and how should senior officers still serving function in the present moment?

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On Sept. 25, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order that he says will allow TikTok to continue operating in the country while complying with national security concerns. After a phone call with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Sept. 19, Trump said he had reached an agreement for a U.S. investor group led by Oracle to take control of 80 percent of TikTok’s U.S. operations. But as details have come to light, serious questions are surfacing.

For one, the national security concerns that led Congress to pass a law banning TikTok in the first place are left unresolved. TikTok’s algorithm—its “secret sauce” governing what users see on the app and possibly serving as a key weapon for Chinese influence operations—will remain in ByteDance’s hands. Under the deal, a copy of will be licensed to the U.S. investor group, which will then retrain it using data from users based in the United States.

But that still leaves a big loophole. What happens, for example, when ByteDance releases updates to its algorithm? Will the U.S. version continue to be updated to operate in parallel with the Bytedance version of the app? Rather than cutting ties with China, the deal allows Beijing to retain considerable influence.

Trump’s administration is expected to collect billions in fees from the transaction. As Trump has described it, “The United States is getting a tremendous fee-plus—I call it a fee-plus—just for making the deal, and I don’t want to throw that out the window.”

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In President Donald Trump’s America First approach to foreign policy, Israel can seem like an exception, a country that gets support even when its policies stray from U.S. interests—or the personal preferences of the president himself. Israeli leaders like to talk about the values that the two countries share, which is certainly part of the explanation. But there are other reasons as well.

Israel has many supporters within Trump’s inner circle, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, and Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, as well as many important pro-Israel donors. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has proved adept at flattering Trump, with Israel naming settlements after the president, lauding his accomplishments, and otherwise playing on his vanity. Netanyahu also has strong support among Republicans in Congress and with pro-Trump media, such as Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax. This mix of media support, congressional backing, and flattery seemed to work for Israel at a key moment, when Trump decided to join Israel in its attempt to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure in June.

Yet it is not difficult to imagine scenarios where Trump would turn his back on Israel. The president is mercurial, and he has turned on friends again and again. Canada, Denmark, Germany, and the United Kingdom are only a few of the very close U.S. allies that have felt his sting. After many years of praising Russia and President Vladimir Putin, Trump is now even criticizing them, deriding Russian military prowess and calling for Ukraine to take back all of its territory

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Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva feels comfortable at the United Nations. He has plenty of experience speaking before the body, having governed Latin America’s largest nation from 2003 to 2011 and again since 2023. He is also an advocate for multilateral governance, valuing the U.N. as a platform that allows so-called developing countries to exert influence and participate meaningfully in shaping global decisions.

“Let my first words before this World Parliament be of confidence in the human capacity to overcome challenges and to move toward higher forms of partnership, both within and among nations,” Lula declared at the outset of his first address to the annual U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) more than 20 years ago.

But if Lula has one thing in common with the world body’s most vocal critics—chief among them U.S. President Donald Trump—it’s that he doesn’t believe the U.N. is meeting this tumultuous historical moment. The two leaders ran into each other backstage this week at UNGA and had a brief, unplanned exchange that could pave the way for a thaw in U.S.-Brazil relations.

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I am in New York this week for the U.N. General Assembly. At various events over the last few days, I’ve already had the opportunity to chat with former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak; Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares; and Trump’s designee for undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy, and the environment, Jacob Helberg, among many others.

Of course, a main topic of discussion was U.S. President Donald Trump’s nearly hourlong U.N. speech on Tuesday morning. Some media outlets have tried to fact-check the speech, but this misses the point. Whether or not climate activists want to “kill all the cows,” for example, was not central to Trump’s message.

The serious argument that resonated most with me was Trump’s claim that the United Nations is not living up to its founding purpose to resolve global conflicts. It may have been impolitic to deliver that message directly to the UNGA, but that does not make it untrue.

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During his first campaign for the presidency, in 2015, now-President Donald Trump rose to become a dominant figure in U.S. politics by turning repeatedly to a jeremiad against migration.

The people he had in mind, though, were not generic migrants. They were predominantly brown-skinned people from Latin America whom he often portrayed as patients from “insane asylums” or rapists and other dangerous convicts who were loosed on the world by their governments and would spread violent crime in the United States.

But if this attempt to curdle the blood of U.S. voters was the primary tactic behind Trump’s brand of xenophobic populism, it was far from the only fear that the campaign that carried him to election the next year would invoke. A close second behind the theme of crime was the idea that these mostly Spanish-speaking immigrants who were willing to do low- and semi-skilled work for modest wages were taking jobs away from honest Americans, blighting people’s lives.

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Has U.S. President Donald Trump finally seen the light? In a post on his Truth Social network on Sept. 23, he wrote: “I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.” He mocked Russia, which he called a “paper tiger.” The same day, reporters in New York City asked him if NATO should shoot down Russian aircraft that enter its airspace. “Yes, I do,” he answered. Observers were suitably shocked.

Perhaps Trump really has had a change of heart. But as always, it’s worth taking a look at the fine print. His Truth Social post, for example, ended with this passage: “We will continue to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them. Good luck to all!” The language here is quite striking: Trump refers to NATO as if it were an unrelated third party—a customer that you supply with products, rather than a military alliance in which the United States is supposed to take an active and leading role. And the closing sentence can be read as a farewell: Take care and have a nice war.

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Hippopotamuses are baffling. At first glance, these creatures look calm, slow, and placid as they wallow lazily in muddy pools. Looks, however, can be deceiving. Survivors of hippo encounters tell of the unpredictable, ferocious charges that make hippopotamuses the deadliest wild mammal on earth, killing around 500 people each year. (That’s 23 times more than lions.) Humans have few good options to defend against 6,000 pounds of erratically charging hippo. Negotiation is not much of an option—it is hard to stop a hippo with offers of food. Experts advise that the best strategy is to avoid hippos altogether. If all else fails, then playing dead can be a reasonable Plan B.

Since the return of U.S. President Donald Trump to the White House in January, European leaders have been confronting a charging hippo situation. U.S. policies are unpredictable, fast-changing, and often baffling. No one knows whether Trump is about to charge or let go. Negotiation rarely works, not least because it is hard to find out what he ultimately wants.

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“They will never give me a Nobel Peace Prize. It’s too bad. I deserve it, but they will never give it to me,” Donald Trump lamented mere weeks into his second presidential term. Since then, several members of Congress and foreign officials have echoed the proposition that his name be added to the next group of laureates. But what does the record show? Does Trump deserve to be honored with a place in history alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela?

Trump has repeatedly complained about not receiving credit for peace deals reached under his watch, citing the resolving of conflicts in Armenia-Azerbaijan, Congo-Rwanda, India-Pakistan, Serbia-Kosovo, and ongoing efforts in Ukraine and Gaza as top achievements. Disturbingly, some of these so-called deals include provisions that directly benefit the private sector, reducing U.S. diplomacy to a mercantilist collection of false wins that do little to advance peace. Meanwhile, deadly wars continue to ravage Ukraine and Gaza. “Everyone says I should get the Nobel Peace Prize for each one of these achievements,” he said at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday.

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U.S. President Donald Trump appeared to issue an about-face on Washington’s Ukraine policy, posting to Truth Social on Tuesday that “I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.” This refutes past U.S. claims that Kyiv must be prepared to concede some of its Russian-occupied territory to Moscow in order to secure an eventual peace deal.

Trump’s statement comes roughly a month after hosting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and seven other European leaders at the White House, during which Trump suggested that Kyiv give up Crimea and several other regions that Russian President Vladimir Putin has demanded. Moscow currently controls roughly one-fifth of Ukrainian territory.

Read Trump’s full statement below:

“After getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine/Russia Military and Economic situation and, after seeing the Economic trouble it is causing Russia, I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form. With time, patience, and the financial support of Europe and, in particular, NATO, the original Borders from where this War started, is very much an option. Why not? Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win. This is not distinguishing Russia. In fact, it is very much making them look like ‘a paper tiger.’ When the people living in Moscow, and all of the Great Cities, Towns, and Districts all throughout Russia, find out what is really going on with this War, the fact that it’s almost impossible for them to get Gasoline through the long lines that are being formed, and all of the other things that are taking place in their War Economy, where most of their money is being spent on fighting Ukraine, which has Great Spirit, and only getting better, Ukraine would be able to take back their Country in its original form and, who knows, maybe even go further than that! Putin and Russia are in BIG Economic trouble, and this is the time for Ukraine to act. In any event, I wish both Countries well. We will continue to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them. Good luck to all!”

U.S. President Donald Trump has concentrated government power in his hands since the start of his second term. Much has been written about his one-man rule by executive order, his appointments based on personal loyalty, and his outrage at judges who defy him. But the American public should be equally alarmed by Trump’s personalization of international treaties.

Significant foreign treaties are normally ratified following either a two-thirds majority vote in the U.S. Senate or a majority vote in both houses of Congress. When a president acts alone, those treaties typically involve minor matters and are called “sole executive agreements.” Historically, all major treaties—such as those that created the United Nations, the World Bank, and NATO, but also treaties that lowered tariffs, secured human rights, and allowed the extradition of dangerous criminals—had some form of congressional consent. Congress has also famously refused consent for treaties it found wanting, such as the Treaty of Versailles, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Today, we are witnessing the death of this entire U.S. treaty system. Trump has not been shy about doing deals with foreign nations, but he has not submitted any treaties to the Senate or Congress for approval. Instead, he has acted as if treaties were solely the prerogative of the executive branch, personally taking center stage in concluding agreements, like the one with Ukraine on critical mineral resources. He authorized more than a dozen international agreements in his first six months, most notably his so-called trade deals, and is pursuing dozens more. Some of these are not binding at all, like the political arrangement on strategic civil nuclear cooperation with El Salvador. It is generally uncontroversial for the president to conclude non-binding agreements without congressional approval. But the rest of Trump’s agreements appear to rely on extreme claims of presidential authority to qualify them as sole executive agreements.

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When it comes to international conflict, U.S. President Donald Trump learns everything the hard way. On issue after issue—North Korea, Venezuela, Ukraine, Gaza, and more—Trump begins by bucking conventional wisdom and insisting that a bold new approach will yield breakthroughs. Implied, and often said outright, is that past officials who worked on the matter were feeble, inept, and craven. Trump insists that his determination and powers of persuasion will force seismic change—cowing enemies, bridging schisms, and achieving diplomatic masterstrokes.

Yet time and again, after gambles and gambits, Trump comes to the same conclusion: While he might not admit it, his approach reverts to something much closer to what policy wonks and advisors urged on him at the outset. Trump’s overconfidence and distrust of expertise drive time-consuming, costly, and sometimes embarrassing detours up clearly marked dead ends—which we may see again at his speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday. By recognizing this flash-to-fizzle arc, advocates, policymakers, and U.S. allies can work more effectively to exert their influence on the administration and push Trump more quickly up his learning curve.

This pattern has been evident since Trump’s first term. In 2017, he threatened “fire and fury” in response to North Korea’s escalating missile tests. He toughened sanctions on Pyongyang, pressed Beijing to use its leverage, and sought a face-to-face meeting with Kim Jong Un, preconditions be damned. Trump’s Singapore summit with Kim in June 2018 culminated in an airy declaration on denuclearization and peace. Yet a second summit the following year ended in deadlock, and a follow-up at the Korean Demilitarized Zone yielded nothing. Trump then defaulted to the grinding approach long advocated by experts: deterrence, isolation through sanctions, and reliance on pressure from regional allies. Bold talk of denuclearization faded.

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Welcome, America, to the age of data theater.

If U.S. President Donald Trump’s disdain for truth once played out on Truth Social or via his press secretary, the past month’s actions show that his administration is no longer content just to dispute official numbers. Instead, it is now engaging in what we term data theater. Data theater does more than present false information. Its goal is to hollow out the impartial production of knowledge by gutting the machinery that policymakers, markets, and the public rely on to know what’s real.

History is replete with examples that demonstrate the catastrophic ramifications of this strategy. Statistical manipulation has fueled debt crises, endangered citizens’ health, and threatened the global economy.

The administration’s recent actions show how reality is being rewritten on demand. When the U.S. attorney for D.C. claimed there was an (actually nonexistent) crime wave, she subsequently asserted that crime data challenging that reality was faked by the city’s police department. After the administration claimed that left-leaning domestic violence was deadlier than right-wing violence, a National Institute of Justice report showing the opposite conveniently disappeared from the site.

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Democratic Sens. Adam Schiff and Tim Kaine have introduced a joint resolution under the War Powers Act to block the U.S. military from engaging in hostilities with certain nonstate actors without congressional authorization. The move is in response to recent U.S. strikes on vessels off the coast of Venezuela. The strikes, which the Trump administration has said targeted “narcoterrorists” transporting illegal drugs to the United States, have raised alarm bells in Washington and beyond—with many questioning the justifications for and legality of the actions.

At least 14 people were killed by U.S. strikes on alleged drug cartel boats on Sept. 2 and 15. U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday also suggested that a third boat had been targeted, but he didn’t provide specific details.

Trump has characterized the strikes as necessary to protect national security. “These extremely violent drug trafficking cartels POSE A THREAT to U.S. National Security, Foreign Policy, and vital U.S. Interests,” Trump said in a recent post on his Truth Social platform.

But critics have said the strikes were illegal under both U.S. and international law, rejecting the notion that drug traffickers qualify as combatants.

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In their first phone call since June, U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping haggled on Friday over the final details of a long-anticipated TikTok deal. Although the Chinese ambassador to the United States framed the conversation as “pragmatic, positive and constructive,” neither side walked away with a clear breakthrough.

Neither Beijing nor Washington has released further details on the proposed deal. But according to the Wall Street Journal, the arrangement under discussion would see Chinese company ByteDance divest control of TikTok to a new U.S. entity created to operate the app. This consortium of new investors and existing backers would own around 80 percent of the platform, with ByteDance ownership falling below 20 percent to comply with U.S. law. People familiar with the talks told the Journal that it could take weeks for legal concerns to be addressed.

Such a TikTok deal would mark a win for China hawks in the U.S. Congress and the Trump administration, who have expressed fear that the app’s user data could be accessed by the Chinese government, allowing Beijing to monitor Americans’ activity and conduct influence operations. Where Trump himself stands on the issue is more complicated, as he initially pushed to ban the app in the United States, only to then use the app to connect with younger voters during his reelection campaign.

Beijing has also tried to frame the TikTok deal as a win for Xi. Even though China would be losing control over TikTok, experts suggest that Xi would be gaining leverage for future deals with Washington, specifically over Trump’s tariff war and Chinese tech ambitions; China and the United States are negotiating a broader trade agreement focused on curbing fentanyl production and reducing high levies.

Read more in today’s World Brief: Trump, Xi Inch Closer to a TikTok Deal.

When U.S. President Donald Trump returned to office in January and began to pull the United States out of United Nations agreements such as the Paris climate pact, some senior U.N. officials predicted that he might quit the U.N. altogether. Eight months later, Trump is set to speak to the General Assembly for the first time since 2020. While it is unlikely that he will announce that he is ripping up the U.N. Charter, diplomats and international officials expect him to continue limiting diplomatic and financial support to the world organization. Nobody is sure how the U.N. will evolve if the United States keeps it arm’s length.

While Washington has frequently had a troubled relationship with the U.N., it has always acted as the organization’s political and financial underwriter. U.S. leadership has been central to many of the U.N.’s flagship successes, from putting together the coalition to expel Iraq from Kuwait in 1991 to negotiating the 2015 Paris climate agreement. By contrast, the U.N.’s most difficult periods have often involved friction with Washington, as in the disputes with the George W. Bush administration over the 2003 Iraq War.

But these periods of tensions have tended to end with the U.N. and the United States making up. Two years after the United States toppled Saddam Hussein, Bush joined other leaders in New York at the 2005 World Summit, a meeting at which leaders signed off on significant institutional reforms such as the creation of the Geneva-based Human Rights Council. This time around, reconciliation appears very far off.

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After a day of royal pomp and pageantry, U.S. President Donald Trump shifted to politics alongside an unlikely ally: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who heads the Labour Party. The two leaders met at Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence, on Thursday to signal the importance of the two countries’ “special relationship” while dodging tough questions about some of their domestic and foreign policies.

For Starmer, the two-day state visit is part of Downing Street’s ongoing strategy to woo Trump as London seeks to strengthen its economy and ease U.S. tariffs. Inviting Trump for a day of royal treatment—complete with horse-drawn carriages, a military flyover, and an opulent state banquet at Windsor Castle—was only step one of the plan, though. Step two entails a $338 billion bilateral investment package.

Dubbed the Technology Prosperity Deal, major U.S. companies such as Blackstone, Microsoft, and OpenAI will invest more than $200 billion in Britain over the next decade. In exchange, several British corporations, including pharmaceuticals giant GSK, will invest in the United States. The deal also pledges greater bilateral cooperation in artificial intelligence, nuclear energy, and quantum computing.

During the meeting, Trump and Starmer also two glossed over key differences—such as on Israel’s war in Gaza and the importance of wind power—to focus on where they find common ground. They both agreed that extra pressure must be placed on Russia to force President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table, though they remain at odds on how best to do that. And they pivoted away from questions about Starmer’s plan to recognize an independent Palestinian state, which Trump disagrees with.

Read more in today’s World Brief: Trump, Starmer Seek Common Ground in State Visit.

In a saner America, Viktor Murikhanov would have been welcomed as a hero. That isn’t how it has worked out.

Soon after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Murikhanov—a Russian citizen living in Irkutsk, 2,600 miles east of Moscow—took part in anti-war protests and posted a video criticizing the invasion. He knew that his actions would come at a cost, and he also knew that they were unlikely to receive much publicity. But he did what he did because he knew it was right. In an interview, he told me: “I just can’t accept it. Peaceful people are being killed, cities are being destroyed, millions of refugees are fleeing. And Russia is the aggressor.”

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The first time that U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration carried out a deadly aerial strike against a high-speed boat allegedly crewed by a drug cartel as it headed north into international waters from Venezuela, one could still speak of the operation as an isolated incident.

Critics, including some in the U.S. Congress, denounced the attack as an extralegal execution. Others complained that neither the White House nor the Defense Department had bothered to brief members of the House or Senate intelligence committees or provide any evidence that the victims were ferrying narcotics to the United States, let alone that they were terrorists or enemies of the country in any conventional military sense.

With a fresh second attack on a boat out of Venezuela this week, though, the Trump administration showed not only that it was unbothered by this brief flurry of objections, but also that these strikes were not mere incidents at all. Taken together with other disturbing developments in U.S. relations with Latin America, what we are seeing instead is confirmation that Trump is ushering in a dramatic new era in the geopolitics of the Western Hemisphere.

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Just days before his death, Charlie Kirk was on a speaking tour in Asia—stopping in South Korea and Japan. At Build Up Korea 2025 in Seoul, under elaborate pyrotechnics, he told a crowd of mostly Christian youth that a conservative wave among young men was rising worldwide. He boasted that he had “brought Trump to victory,” tying U.S. right-wing triumphs to a global phenomenon.

In Tokyo, Kirk appeared at a symposium hosted by Japan’s nationalist Sanseito party, which has gained support with anti-immigration and “Japanese first” messaging. He warned of a “silent invasion,” urged resistance to the “globalist menace,” and praised Japan’s social order. Sanseito’s leader later mourned Kirk as a “comrade committed to building the future with us.”

These visits were not routine speaking gigs. They were symbolic acts of alignment between American and Asian far-right forces. When Kirk was killed soon after returning home, the trip took on a near-mythical significance: proof that the movement he embodied was already globalizing. But it also raised questions about this outreach, including: Why would Kirk’s white grievance politics resonate so strongly with nonwhites abroad—masses of people far removed from the culture wars of the United States?

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The killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah last Wednesday sent shockwaves across the United States and is already having rippling consequences amid a historically divisive period. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox on Friday said Kirk’s killing was a “watershed in American history” that could mark “the end of a dark chapter in our history or the beginning of a darker chapter.”

In the wake of Kirk’s killing, experts on political violence warn that the United States has entered a dangerous new era akin to what the country experienced in the 1960s—a decade in which a number of U.S. political leaders were assassinated—and they’re urging political and community leaders to take steps to reduce tensions.

Robert Pape, a political scientist and the founding director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), told Foreign Policy that he’s concerned about “rising support for political violence across the political spectrum” in the United States.

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The European Union-United States trade deal, announced to fanfare this summer, is already showing signs of unravelling. The most surprising aspect may be that this is hardly a surprise.

The EU signed the “Framework on an Agreement on Reciprocal, Fair, and Balanced Trade” in late July in the hopes it would substantially assuage fears among European businesses about an all-out trade war with the United States. But this month, U.S. President Donald Trump seemed to revoke that understanding as he threatened to impose more tariffs on Europe if Brussels doesn’t loosen its rules and regulations that police online disinformation, election interference, and hate speech.

“We cannot let this happen to brilliant and unprecedented American Ingenuity,” he wrote on Truth Social after the EU fined Google nearly 3 billion euros ($3.4 billion) for violating anti-monopoly laws. EU spokespeople played down the turbulence—but they may be trying to wish away a major problem.

An even bigger challenge confronting the deal is Trump’s expectation of billions of dollars’ worth of energy purchases from Europe. The EU has said it “intends to procure US liquified natural gas, oil, and nuclear energy products with an expected offtake valued at $750 billion,” during Trump’s remaining term in office. But the White House seems to see it as a commitment—a done deal.

This mismatch in intentions and expectations could derail the deal.

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U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has inflicted immense damage on the United States’ vaccination program. Although Kennedy, a well-known critic of vaccinations, had promised Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican physician, that he would not undercut public confidence in vaccines during his confirmation hearings, the Trump administration has undertaken a fierce campaign to dismantle key pillars of the nation’s public health program.

Kennedy refused to strongly endorse vaccines when Texas faced an outbreak of measles shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump was inaugurated. He has sharply curtailed funding for vital research programs, including the development of mNRA vaccines. Soon after Dr. Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine expert, resigned in March to protest Kennedy spreading misinformation, the agency informed the public that COVID-19 vaccines would only be approved for Americans categorized as high-risk and for those over the age of 65.

Kennedy fired every member of the 17-person Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which is the panel of experts in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that has been the scientific gold standard for information about vaccine guidelines. Kennedy will soon replace them with questionable figures who have been staunch vaccine skeptics. He also fired Susan Monarez, the CDC director who Trump appointed. She claims she was relieved of her job for refusing Kennedy’s directive to “preapprove the recommendations” of the vaccine advisory panel that he put together.

What is taking place is nothing less than a full-scale war on public health.

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Likewise, Trump scolds and praises Russian President Vladimir Putin for “killing a lot of people” while dropping the demand for a cease-fire and spewing happy-talk about business deals with Russia. Trump publicly rebuked Putin for Russia’s increasingly deadly barrages on Ukrainian cities—writing in April on Truth Social: “Vladimir, STOP!”—and subsequently imposed 50 percent tariffs on India (but not Russia or China, its main backer) partly over its Russian oil imports. Such chaotic vacillations have muddied the outlook and slowed progress to the end goal. Trump variously raises and lowers expectations about which side needs to make the most concessions, which makes diplomacy a guessing game and increases the risk that Washington simply walks away.

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