North America

Ice in the Arctic is melting at record rates and warming at twice the global average — and the Trump administration continues to hand over control of the Arctic to Big Oil. The House Natural Resources Democrats hosted a forum on Monday, October 5, to learn how the higher temperatures are wreaking havoc on wildlife, fisheries and humans who have call the Arctic home for generations.

Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook spoke to German national radio on President Trump's COVID diagnosis and how it will affect the next few weeks of the campaign.

To survive the challenges we must reinforce respect for science and nature, sensible public policy and the interconnected world.

Over the past few years, China’s rise has become a top priority in Washington and in many European capitals—and a big-ticket item on the wider transatlantic agenda. However, the United States and Europe have so far not been able to capitalize on this convergence by building anything resembling a coherent agenda to address jointly shared challenges from China. This task will be among the most pressing on the transatlantic agenda over the next four years. 

Unilateralism and isolationism are making a comeback in the United States. Are Trump and his America First approach to the world a cause or a symptom? What are the ideological sources of the intimate connection between isolationism and the American experience? Will the COVID-19 pandemic undercut or deepen globalization? What impact will it have on U.S. grand strategy? The United States seems headed for an inevitable pullback of its global commitments. What should retrenchment look like? Can Americans find the middle ground between doing too much and doing too little?

In recalibrating its international engagement, Canada should start by deepening its foreign policy collaboration with the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, writes Graeme Thompson.

Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook from Harvard Kennedy School criticizes the course of the debate. In terms of content, she sees Biden ahead.

It was the first TV duel between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Many topics were up for debate, but there were fewer concrete discussions because the US president barely allowed his political opponent to speak. When Joe Biden commented on his content, Trump confronted Biden with his family history.

Joseph Aldy and Richard Zeckhauser write that the world needs a new strategy to fight climate change aggressively and effectively.

This article revisits the Cutter Incident in the United States in April 1955 when mass-produced doses of polio vaccine containing insufficiently inactivated (killed) live polio virus were released to the U.S. public. The Cutter Incident also affected subsequent vaccine development and these lessons remain relevant in the international quest to create a rapidly developed vaccine for COVID-19. The Cutter Incident shows how things can go wrong when a vaccine is manufactured in haste and without adequate safety precautions during mass-production