The Free World Teeters on the Edge of a Knife
Doubts about U.S. reliability have multiplied under the Trump administration, thanks to its withdrawal from numerous international pacts, its conditional approach to once-sacrosanct U.S. alliance commitments in Europe and Asia, its distancing from several partners in the Middle East, and the gap…
Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to
Richard Haass • The World
Exporting your way out of a recession is fine and good — it’s basically how Germany and South Korea shrugged off the Great Recession in the early 2010s.3 But China’s export boom is heavily subsidized, both with explicit government subsidies, and — more importantly — with ultra-cheap abundant bank loans. Subsidies are distortionary — they mean that ... See more
Noah Smith • The Pettis Paradigm and the Second China Shock
It was extremely difficult to construct the internationalist regime that prevented nuclear war and safeguarded global peace. No doubt we need to adapt this regime to the changing conditions of the world, for example by relying less on the United States and granting a greater role to non-Western powers such as China and India.5 But abandoning this r
... See moreYuval Noah Harari • 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
since the conclusion of World War II, Europe has known unprecedented stability, prosperity, and freedom. Much of the credit goes to the two great undertakings of the post–World War II era, namely, the NATO alliance and the project of European integration. Still, there is a question of whether Europe’s best days are behind it. The future of both NAT
... See moreRichard Haass • The World
Countries will also need to work together to address problems of globalization, including but not just climate change, trade, and proliferation. These will require not resurrecting the old order but building a new one. Efforts to limit, adapt to, and possibly offset climate change need to be more ambitious. The WTO must be amended to address the so
... See moreRichard Haass • The World
The Reagan era has reached its limits and can’t sustain the economy. The failure is in the process of creating a new set of competing social classes. This is reflected in the intensifying political crisis of the Trump presidency, in which the new social forces begin battling each other. This crisis will last through to the 2020s. In 2024, a new pre
... See moreGeorge Friedman • The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond
Russian threat to Europe has reemerged. This might have been inevitable given that the Soviet Union lost the Cold War, saw its external empire in Eastern Europe break free, and then experienced its own internal breakup. Russia accounts for roughly half the population and three-fourths of the land area of the former Soviet Union. It has retained a p
... See moreRichard Haass • The World
One critical factor in determining the region’s future will be the role that the United States chooses to play going forward. As already noted, one reason for the region’s phenomenal success over the past seventy years is the presence of the United States. Yes, the United States badly overreached by trying to unite all of the Korean Peninsula by fo
... See more