Foreign Policy

Nontobeko Hlela is a research fellow with the Institute for Pan African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg and columnist with South Africa’s Mail & Guardian. Danny Quah is the Li Ka Shing professor in economics and dean at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. Joseph S. Nye Jr. is a distinguished service professor emeritus of Harvard University. He is the author of, most recently, A Life in the American Century. Emile Chabal is a professor of contemporary history at the University of Edinburgh. He works on postwar European political and intellectual history, with a special interest in France. Arancha González is the dean of the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po and a former Spanish foreign minister. Bethany Allen is the head of China…

I HAVE A CONFESSION TO MAKE. I feel a sense of paralysis in these weeks leading up to the U.S. presidential election. Whether it’s the fate of Ukraine, peace in the Middle East, competition with China, or the broader question of America’s role in the world, too much is riding on who will be the next occupant of the White House. A Donald Trump presidency would be very different from a Kamala Harris one, and polls continue to show Americans are bitterly divided on how to choose between them. Key players in global crises, from Russian President Vladimir Putin to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, seem as if they are waiting to see who wins before they make their next big move. Perhaps that’s why it’s so difficult to cast…

CHINA AFRICA | ASIA& THEPACIFIC | EUROPE | MIDDLE EAST | AMERICAS In any competitive realm, rivals constantly strive to do better. They search for innovations that will improve their position, and they strive to imitate whatever appears to be working for their opponents. We see this phenomenon in sports, in business, and in international politics. Emulation doesn’t mean one has to do exactly what others have done, but ignoring the policies from which others have benefited and refusing to adapt is a good way to keep losing. Today, the need to compete more effectively with China is perhaps the only foreign-policy issue on which nearly all Democrats and Republicans agree. That consensus is shaping the U.S. defense budget, driving the effort to shore up partnerships in Asia, and encouraging an expanding hightech…

As the U.S. presidential election approaches, many are asking what the United States’ goal is when it comes to strategic competition with China. The Biden administration has said that it aims to “responsibly manage the competition” with China, but some prominent Republicans have criticized this approach and have called for “victory” as the superior objective. Proponents of victory, however, have not clearly spelled out what winning means. Washington’s goal in its contest with China should indeed be victory, and winning means getting to a point where the Chinese government no longer has the will or the ability to harm vital U.S. interests. In other words, Washington should aim for the capitulation or incapacitation of the China threat. Clearly, aiming to merely “manage the competition” does not make sense. In any other competition,…

China’s economy is performing dreadfully. The post-pandemic bounce was far smaller and briefer than the Chinese government had anticipated. Despite recording a respectable, if diminished, official growth rate of 5.2 percent in 2023, the reality may have been much slower, with some analysts estimating growth was no more than 1-2 percent. Along with the economic slowdown has come a collapse in confidence in China’s trajectory, both at home and abroad. The quantitative data is stark, showing a sudden drop in confidence by consumers and producers in the spring of 2022 following the Shanghai lockdown. Consumers’ outlook improved briefly when the zero-COVID policies ended in late 2022 but has hovered in record-low territory since. This data may understate the depth and breadth of the uneasiness that Chinese citizens have about the country’s present…

South Africa’s 30-year-old democracy is in uncharted waters. The African National Congress (ANC)—the party that led South Africa to liberation from apartheid minority rule—for the first time since 1994, failed to secure an absolute parliamentary majority and there-fore could not form a government on its own. The ANC’s foreign-policy orientation could be an ongoing source of tension with some of its new governing partners, in particular the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the Freedom Front Plus. In the lead-up to the May 29 election, foreign policy was a much-debated issue in the Daily Maverick, an influential white-owned online publication, with Ukraine and Gaza taking center stage. There was often a strongly expressed view that Pretoria should directly align with Western capitals and that its nonaligned policy in fact meant affiliation with Russia,…