Economics & Global Affairs

169 Items

An F-35A Lightning II flies above the Mojave Desert

USAF/Public Domain

Analysis & Opinions - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

To Enhance National Security, the Biden Administration Will Have to Trim an Exorbitant Defense Wish List

| Mar. 13, 2024

David Kearn argues that even in the absence of restrictive resource and budgetary constraints, a focus on identifying and achieving concrete objectives that will position the United States and its allies to effectively deter aggression in critical regional flashpoints should be the priority given the stressed nature of the defense industrial base and the nuclear enterprise.

A worker cleans glass panels of the Bank of China headquarters building near a decoration setup for the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in Beijing, Sunday, Aug. 26, 2018. Chinese President Xi Jinping will chair the forum held in the capital city from Sept. 3-4, 2023.

AP Photo/Andy Wong

Paper

China's 21st Century Aspirational Empire

| May 2023

This paper addresses the question of how the Chinese party-state chooses to exercise its economic, financial, diplomatic, military and soft power in the next 25 years will make a great difference to US national security and foreign policy, and to developments in the rest of the world. The paper makes three key points:

The core argument of this paper is that Beijing will likely aspire to pursue an empire-like position globally, not just seek an Asia-Pacific sphere of influence, and that this aspiration will founder. Achieving an empire-like position is both an imperative and is infeasible. The tensions between goal and reality will likely characterize China’s role in the world in coming decades and will be central to the difficulties of US-China relations. Second, there is heuristic value for US policymakers and analysts to consider a 20-year outlook on the rise of China that encompasses China’s pursuit of a global empire-like position. Third, paying close attention to how Beijing organizes its own government, corporate, and non-governmental organizations to seek an empire-like position will provide important signposts emerging tension and trends.

Chinese paramilitary police and security officers wear face masks to protect against the spread of the new coronavirus as they stand guard outside an entrance to the Forbidden City in Beijing, Friday, May 1, 2020. The Forbidden City reopened beginning on Friday, China's May Day holiday, to limited visitors after being closed to the public for more than three months during the coronavirus outbreak.

AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein

Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Affairs

The Bad Advice Plaguing Beijing’s Foreign Policy

| Apr. 27, 2023

The incursion in January of a Chinese spy balloon into U.S. airspace seemed to many observers like a bad miscalculation by Beijing. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had been scheduled to travel to China the following month, but the balloon incident led to the scrapping of the much-anticipated visit. Chinese leader Xi Jinping almost certainly would have preferred to see diplomacy proceed as planned. It is likely that he would not have sanctioned this operation had he known its consequences. If he believed that the United States would simply overlook the incursion, he was clearly mistaken.

Photo of test engineer Jacob Wilcox pulling his arm out of a glove box used for processing sodium at TerraPower, a company developing and building small nuclear reactors on Jan.

AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File

Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Policy

By Not Acting on Climate, Congress Endangers U.S. National Security

| July 21, 2022

Last week, U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin seemingly dashed Democrats’ hopes for congressional action to slow climate change. Sen. Bernie Sanders accused Manchin of “sabotag[ing] the president’s agenda”; Rep. John Yarmuth, when asked about the consequences of Congress not acting on climate change, said, “We’re all going to die”; and climate activists, as well as some Democrats in Congress, wondered if Manchin should be removed as chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

A staff member works on a mobile phone production line during a media tour of a Huawei factory in Dongguan, Guangdong, Wednesday, March 6, 2019.

AP Photo/Kin Cheung

Paper

United States Entity List: Limits on American Exports

| February 2021

The Economic Diplomacy Initiative (EDI) at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs is presenting a first-of-its-kind analysis of the makeup of the Commerce Department’s Entity List, by country, by sector, and by year of addition. Starting with raw data made available by the Commerce Department, we manually grouped blacklisted sub-entities at the parent level to give a clearer view of the companies targeted by export controls. While  the Entity List does not include industry tags, we used Federal Register announcements and secondary research to manually assign industry sectors to each entity. The analysis provides a quantitative review of the evolving use of the entity list to shed light on shifting aims of US economic and national security policy.

President-elect Joe Biden and his climate envoy, John Kerry, at The Queen theater.

Carolyn Kaster/AP

Analysis & Opinions - Bloomberg Opinion

What Does Success Look Like for a Climate Czar?

| Dec. 02, 2020

President-elect Joe Biden’s decision to create a new cabinet-level position for climate-related issues — and to choose so prominent a figure as former Secretary of State John Kerry to fill it — demonstrates Biden’s sincerity over putting climate at the very center of U.S. foreign policy. It is easy to understate the importance of this appointment, given the flurry of czars created by most new administrations.

Discussion between Nicholas Burns and Sigmar Gabriel

https://www.atlantik-bruecke.org/en/

Video - Atlantik-Brücke

Covid-19 and its implications for transatlantic relations

| May 18, 2020

Ambassador Nicholas Burns, Roy and Barbara Goodman Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations, Harvard University, discussed the effect the current pandemic has on the relationship between Europe and the United States with Atlantik-Brücke-Chairman Sigmar Gabriel.