Economics & Global Affairs

In recent years the crisis of the transatlantic relationship and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has become a common theme in media, and various scholars have frequently questioned the futures of both entities. Not only are the new sovereigntist and populist trends within the NATO members calling the relevance of the transatlantic relationship into question, but some have found a reason to identify a crisis in the transatlantic relationship from the rise of global actors and the emergence of China as a great power in particular. China’s economic recovery after its “century of humiliation” is reshaping the international geopolitics and shifting the economic epicenter of the world from the Atlantic to the Pacific. 

Former U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson offered his take on global leaders and hotspots, from Iran and Saudi Arabia to North Korea and Syria. He was joined by Professor Nicholas Burns, Professor James Sebenius and Professor Robert Mnookin.

If left unchecked, Beijing’s aggressive use of its “rules” threatens to turn Western firms into the Communist Party’s enforcers.

If a symbolic denouncement is indeed the goal, Magnitsky sanctions are likely the right tool, as they would send a powerful message of solidarity with protesters to both the Hong Kong and mainland authorities. 

The Aspen conversation wasn’t a call to arms against China, but rather a call to prudent national security policy. 

While there may yet be a solution to the trade war, Kevin Rudd declares, the technology war between China and the United States has barely begun.

China isn’t a monolith, former World Bank president Robert B. Zoellick writes, and in order to make headway with China, the United States should also pressure the country’s leadership with non-economic means. A deal that opens up trade would be useful, but the U.S. needs a multifront strategy and continuing engagement with China, not a single transaction. America should coordinate with partners—including reformers in China—to change China’s behavior.

America’s sanctions strategy is increasingly burdened by the involvement of systemically important financial institutions and sovereign investors in global financial statecraft. In the post-9/11 world, Washington’s strategy was highly effective in pursuing non-state actors like al-Qaeda or ISIS, as well as small, rogue nations like Iran. Yet in addressing larger sovereigns like the Kremlin, US strategy has struggled to maintain the same effectiveness given the cross-border financial connections linking these entities to Western markets. As an era of great power competition among Washington, Moscow, and Beijing sets in, these foes will crowd out smaller, non-state actors, thus demanding an adequate response from the Treasury.

While Putin’s hopes of integrating Ukraine into the Eurasian Economic Union were dashed by the 2014 revolution, the Russian leadership has refused to yield in its battle with the EU over Ukraine’s shrinking labor force, Simon Saradzhyan writes.