Research

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.

The following is an event write-up about the recent Future of Diplomacy Project (FDP) seminar on “The Geopolitics of Latin America amid the War in Ukraine and China-U.S. Tensions” moderated by Negah Angha, Fellow at the Institute of Politics, on March 29, 2023.

The Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School hosted a virtual conversation with Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba Wednesday (Feb. 22) to discuss the war in Ukraine as it reaches a full year since Russia's invasion. 

U.S. President Joe Biden spent five hours in the Ukrainian capital on Monday, meeting President Volodymyr Zelensky and even taking a stroll through the streets of Kyiv – despite the sound of air sirens – to visit The Wall of Remembrance, which displays portraits of the approximately 4,500 Ukrainian soldiers who have died since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

The trip was kept under a media blackout until a few hours after Biden’s arrival, with the president’s official schedule only saying he would fly in the evening to Warsaw for a planned visit. The New York Times reported, quoting an anonymous official source, that Biden arrived in Kyiv early this morning after making the same 10-hour long journey from Poland that every world leader visiting Ukraine since the start of the war has.

On April 6, 2022,  the Belfer Center's Future of Diplomacy Project and Indo-Pacific Security Project as well as the Center for Public Leadership hosted a hybrid seminar with Ambassador Shivshankar Menon, former National Security Advisor of India and former Foreign Secretary in India’s Ministry of External Affairs, and Ambassador Richard Verma, former U.S. Ambassador to India and Belfer Center Senior Fellow, on India’s foreign policy and U.S.-India relations in a changing world order. The discussion explored why India abstained from recent U.N. votes deploring Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, what that means for U.S.-India relations, both bilateral and through the Quad, and how the war in Ukraine will affect geopolitics in Eurasia and the Indo-Pacific. Gopal Nadadur, MPA/ID candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School moderated this conversation.

Annalena Baerbock was born the same year as Germany's Green Party, then a fringe mix of peace activists, environmentalists, equal rights campaigners and members of the anti-nuclear movement, skeptical of Western power.

Forty years later — espousing a foreign policy generally in sync with the Biden administration — she hopes to lead the much-transformed Greens to an election win in September as Germany begins a new political era without Angela Merkel at the helm.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is warning the West. In his State of the Union address, he announced that he would react swiftly and harshly if provoked by other countries. Relations between Russia, the US, and the EU are strained, and there are several points of contention: the conflict in Eastern Ukraine and Putin's actions against his imprisoned critic, Alexei Navalny. 

How can the so-called East-West conflict be defused? What hope is there for normalization of the US-Russia relationship under President Joe Biden? [translated from German; interview in German]

The controversial and costly Nord Stream 2 pipeline is intended to carry natural gas from Russia to Germany. As it nears completion, European countries and the U.S. continue to disagree over the advantages and disadvantages – and possible security threats – of the pipeline.

We asked some of our transatlantic, Russia, and energy-focused experts to share their thoughts on the implications of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline for Europe's security and energy supply, transatlantic relations, and policy toward Russia, as well as what actions the U.S. and European countries should take at this point.  

Former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns and former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes join Andrea Mitchell to talk about Biden's next steps on Iran and Russia. Burns says that Biden's "speech today at the Munich Security Conference has put the United States squarely back on center stage globally."

American officials in China, Cuba and Russia say U.S. agencies are concealing the true extent of the episodes, leaving colleagues vulnerable to hostile actions abroad.