Articles

During the Trump administration, the usual ways of conducting diplomacy have been upended. Many positions in the State Department have never been filled, and meetings with foreign leaders such as Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin have been undertaken with little advance planning. What effect are these changes having now, and how will they affect ongoing relationships between the United States and its allies and adversaries?

U.S counterinsurgency doctrine assumes that states must make liberalizing reforms that will defeat insurgencies by winning the “hearts and minds” of the population.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi traveled to Washington last week, making his fourth trip to the United States since taking office just two years ago. India and South Asia Program Fellow, Ronak Desai examines the strategic approach to India's relations with the United States.

Many international peacebuilders have suggested that integrating opposing combatants into a national military after civil war helps prevent conflict from recurring. Analysis of eleven cases of post–civil war military integration, however, reveals little evidence to support this claim. Underlying political conditions, not military integration, determine whether peace endures.

Critics of ethnofederalism—a political system in which federal subunits reflect ethnic groups’ territorial distribution—argue that it facilitates secession and state collapse. An examination of post-1945 ethnofederal states, however, shows that ethnofederalism has succeeded more often than not.

Obsession with the democratic changes sweeping Europe in the late 1980s and a concomitant desire to keep these changes from spreading may have played a critical role in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) decision to take violent action against the Tiananmen Square protestors in 1989. New sources, released during the 2009 to 2011 anniversaries of the events that ended the Cold War, cite the CCP’s determination to prevent the spread of democracy as one of its primary motivating factors. These sources also suggest that the CCP did not fear reprisals by the United States, which it predicted would take “no real countermeasures.”