Research

Following President Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from northern Syria, Belfer Center experts discussed the impact on America, our allies and adversaries, and the region.

With Libra’s development, the debate over central bank digital currencies has been spurred by anxieties that regulators will be left behind by the rapid pace of private innovation. 

Morgan Kaplan writes that the decision to remove U.S. troops from northern Syria may drive Kurds further from America's political sphere, harm broader U.S. credibility in the region, and lead to a resurgence of the Islamic State.

How should the US and Australia plan for a future of both strategic competition and cooperation with China? How do we get the balance between them right? The distinguished American diplomat Nicholas Burns, the Lowy Institute’s 2019 Rothschild & Co Distinguished International Fellow, addressed these questions in the 2019 Owen Harries Lecture.

The 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China was not a birthday I felt like celebrating.

As Dutch historian Frank Dikotter has shown in his searing three-volume history of the Mao Zedong era, the Communist regime claimed the lives of tens of millions of people: 2 million in the revolution between 1949 and 1951, another 3 million by the end of the 1950s, up to 45 million in the man-made famine known as the "Great Leap Forward," and yet more in the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution, Mao's campaign against the intelligentsia, which escalated into a civil war.

In this interview, former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy discusses her many years of experience in community health, statewide government, and at the EPA, where she focused on initiatives relating to public health and the environment, including work on domestic climate policy, and the historic 2016 Paris Climate Agreement, in which more than 150 countries committed to reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions.

In Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For, Susan E. Rice—National Security Advisor to President Barack Obama and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations—reveals her surprising story with unflinching candor as she recalls pivotal moments from her dynamic career on the front lines of American diplomacy and foreign policy.

 

“Environmental Insights: Conversations on policy and practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program” is hosted by Robert Stavins, A.J. Meyer Professor of Energy and Economic Development at Harvard Kennedy School, and director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.

Stephen Walt summarizes his analysis of how impeachment proceedings will affect the foreign policy of Donald Trump: His administration's decisions will be erratic, ill-considered, and ineffective—in other words, business as usual.