Middle East & North Africa

Joseph Nye considers lessons from his own work on preventing the spread of nuclear technology in the 1970s.

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.

This year's G7 summit in Hiroshima sees nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation sitting high on the agenda, amid rising tensions between the nuclear states and an increasingly divided international order.  Six contributors offer their analyses, including the Belfer Center's Mayumi Fukushima.

According to the "Madman Theory" outlined by Daniel Ellsberg and Thomas C. Schelling, and embraced by Presidents Richard Nixon and Donald Trump, being perceived as mad can help make seemingly incredible threats—such as starting a nuclear war—more credible. However, recent research has largely concluded that the Madman Theory does not work. 

Stephen Walt explains the concept of the security dilemma and argues for leaders to consider whether a policy they believed was benign was unintentionally making others nervous, then to consider  whether the action in question could be modified in ways that alleviated (some of) those fears.

Commercial international port terminals owned and operated by Chinese firms provide dual-use capabilities to the People's Liberation Army during peacetime. They enable China to project power into critical regions worldwide by providing military logistics and intelligence networks.

White Southerners opposed to Reconstruction used violence to undermine Black political power and force uncommitted white Southerners to their side. Although structural factors made it harder for the U.S. government to suppress this violence, a series of policy failures prompted Reconstruction’s failure and generations of injustice.

The first 100 days are key to understanding where any presidency is going. Now more than a third of the way into that timeframe, how is President Joe Biden doing in the international policy arena? The World’s host Marco Werman speaks with Nicholas Burns, a former US under secretary of state for political affairs and a former ambassador to NATO.

David Kilcullen, a professor at the University of New South Wales, contributes to the debate of  whether contemporary great-power resurgence constitutes a second bi-polar competition by assessing resurging state and non-state competitors and the challenges they pose to the United States–led world order. While the emerging security environment might not be a new Cold War, Kilcullen contends it may be more dangerous than in the past.

Stephen M. Walt critiques to Francis Gavin's review of his 2018 book, The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy, and offers his view on how one should not evaluate U.S. grand strategy.