Diplomacy and International Politics

Foreign Affairs has recently published a number of articles on how the United States should engage with the Taliban government in Afghanistan, extremist forces within the regime, how the West can help ordinary Afghans, and the fate of the country’s women. To complement these essays, Foreign Affairs asked a broad pool of experts for their take. As with previous surveys, Foreign Affairs approached dozens of authorities with expertise relevant to the question at hand, along with leading generalists in the field. Participants were asked to state whether they agreed or disagreed with a proposition and to rate their confidence level in their opinion. Two Belfer Center experts participated, International Security Executive Editor Jacqueline L. Hazelton and Future of Diplomacy Project Senior Fellow Paula Dobriansky.

In an event co-hosted by the Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship’s (PETR) and the Asia Center, Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook, Executive Director of the Future of Diplomacy Project and the Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship, moderated a panel discussion on China’s technological rise and its impact on the US-EU relationship. The panel featured Joel Brenner, Senior Research Fellow at the Center for International Studies; Danil Kerimi, Head of Technology Industries Sector, Digital Economy and Global Technology Policy, the World Economic Forum; Meicen Sun, PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Sciences at MIT; and Daniel Weitzner, Founding Director of the Internet Policy Research Initiative. 

The Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship (PETR) and the Asia Center will be hosting a new event series over the course of the Fall and Spring semesters of the 2019-2020 academic year, focusing on China's rise and its implications on the transatlantic relationship.

Decades after invading Afghanistan to topple the Taliban, the US now is negotiating with them.

Europe is beginning to face up to the challenges posed by a rising China. From the political debates roiling European capitals over the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei’s involvement in building 5G mobile networks to the tense EU-China summit earlier this year, recent events have shown that European leaders are growing uneasy in a relationship that until recently both sides saw as immensely beneficial. They worry about the political influence China has gained, especially over the EU’s smaller members, and its growing economic clout and technological prowess. They are starting, tentatively, to push back.