Asia & the Pacific

Stephen Walt writes that those who favor foreign policy restraint believe the United States should trade and invest in other countries, encourage other states to do the same, and be open to managed immigration instead of building walls in a fit of xenophobia.

Stephen Walt writes that the differences in foreign policy will be less significant than one may think. Consider how Trump and Biden would each likely deal with the three most important items on the current foreign-policy agenda: Ukraine, China, and the Middle East.

Stephen Walt argues that Henry Kissinger's concerns about the destabilizing impact of ideas made him hypersensitive to the smallest perturbations in strategically marginal countries and inclined him to overreact to them in ways that other realists opposed.

Joseph S. Nye writes that evaluating ethics in international relations is difficult, and Kissinger's legacy is particularly complex. Over his long tenure in government, he had many great successes, including with China and the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Kissinger also had major failures, including in how the Vietnam War ended. But on net, his legacy is positive. In a world haunted by the specter of nuclear war, his decisions made the international order more stable and safer.

The geopolitical implications of solar displacing oil as the world’s major source of energy are enormous. Why has the Middle East been a central arena in the “great game” for the past century? Because countries there have been the major suppliers of the oil and gas that powered 20th-century economies. If, over the next decade, photovoltaic cells that capture energy from the sun were to replace a substantial part of the demand for oil and gas, who will the biggest losers be? And even more consequentially: who will be the biggest winner?

Stephen Walt critiques Henry Kissinger's professional life by dividing it into three parts: as an academic at Harvard; as national security advisor and secretary of state; and as an author, pundit, and sage, much of it conducted as the head of Kissinger Associates, the consulting firm he founded after leaving government.

This year’s heads of state meeting for the Group of Seven (G7) summit in Hiroshima, Japan demonstrated the agility of this body. The G7 leaders represent the powerhouse industrial democracies who are pulling their resources to maintain global economic stability and prosperity—and, this time, global security. In the course of 72 hours, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and the invited delegations took significant steps on some of the most pressing issues facing the world—from delivering F-16 aircraft to Ukraine to bolstering relations between Seoul and Tokyo and countering China’s economic coercion.

Joseph Nye considers U.S. options for risk reductions as nuclear threats escalate and China-Taiwan tensions rise.

Stephen Walt outlines how Washington and Beijing could stop the war in Ukraine.

Stephen Walt explains why Putin understood that Ukraine's fate was more important to Russia than it was to the West.