Governance

Stephen Walt provides A realist POV on the war in Ukraine, competition with China, COVID, and more in the second part of an interview with Foreign Policy Editor-in-Chief Ravi Agrawal.

Stephen Walt argues the war in Ukraine continues to be discussed in ways that are self-serving—and self-defeating. A narrowing of debate is typical of most wars—at least for a long time—with governments encouraging patriotic groupthink and marginalizing dissident views. And this war has been no exception thus far.

Chris Li spoke to Newsweek about how the outcome of the 2022 U.S. midterm elections and Republican control of the House of Representatives might constrain the Biden administration's foreign policy options on China.

Days before the midterms, The Harvard Crimson sat down with three scholars for a conversation about U.S. democracy. The mood was anxious.

Stephen Walt's argument tries to answer the following question: What impact will the decisions taken at the recent Party Congress have on the balance of power and U.S.-China competition? From a U.S. perspective, was what just took place in Beijing good news or not?

Ivan Arreguin-Toft analyzes the West's information technology asymmetry of capability, which has given way to asymmetry of vulnerability. While democracies worldwide remain threatened, they also contain the means to restore themselves.

Stephen M. Walt describes a "gnawing fear that we are living through a series of disruptions that are overwhelming our collective ability to respond." What does this mean for public confidence in the entire political system, and is there any cause for optimism?

This working paper offers strategies to protect subjugated groups and inform a broad  pro-democracy struggle should an authoritarian administration gain power in 2024.

Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy Grant H. Golub discussed the World War II–era expansion of the now-defunct U.S. Department of War during a virtual International Security Program seminar on October 13, 2022.

Hostile foreign states are using weaponized information to attack the United States. Russia and China are disseminating disinformation about domestic U.S. race relations and COVID-19 to undermine and discredit the U.S. government. These information warfare attacks, which threaten U.S. national security, may seem new, but they are not. Using an applied history methodology and a wealth of previously classified archival records, this article uses two case studies to reveal how and why a hostile foreign state, the Soviet Union, targeted America with similar disinformation in the past