International Relations

President Trump’s grand plan to invite Kosovo’s President Hashim Thaci and Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic to meet at the White House on June 27 may be falling apart before it begins, after the Kosovo Specialist Chambers announced on Wednesday indictments against Thaci and others on war crimes charges.

Polls in the United States and nine allied countries in Europe and Asia show that public support for a nuclear test is very low. If the Trump administration conducts a test, then it shouldn't expect backing from Americans or its closest U.S. partners.

The authors argue that more determined efforts to globalize renewable energy transmission can confer significantly higher economic and environmental benefits from renewables on billions of people. This can be done by exploiting spatial differences between electricity loads and net renewable generation across time zones (temporal arbitrage) and latitude (seasonal arbitrage). Using very long distance, ultra-high voltage (UHV) transmission infrastructure, temporal and spatial arbitrage can move low-cost clean electricity from areas with excess capacity to high demand zones in other countries and even continents.

Ambassador Nicholas Burns, Professor at Harvard University and an advisor to Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden, spoke with “The Arena” on the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus crisis (“a failure that has cost over 110,000 Americans lives”), rising U.S.-China tensions (“deeply hurt global recovery efforts from both the coronavirus and the economic crises”), the upcoming presidential election (“Trump has chosen China as his demon”), and Israel’s annexation plans (“the issue that could most harm the U.S.-Israel relationship”).

Ambassador Nicholas Burns in conversation with Andrea Mitchell about John Bolton's book.

Stephen Walt writes that political institutions are not permanent phenomena: they are artificial human creations and only as enduring, adaptive, and effective as people make them. He hopes for a serious and sustained process of democratic change, one that respects the nobler features of the U.S. constitutional order yet addresses all the ways in which The United States has failed to live up to its own professed ideals. The alternative, he fears, will be something much more dangerous. 

When we emerge finally from the grip of the coronavirus, Americans will need to account for a public-health disaster that has killed well over 100,000 people to date and shuttered nearly every institution in our society (including Harvard) for much of the spring and into the summer.

As relations between the United States and China worsen over the months ahead, could Beijing decide to try to make Taiwan the solution to its advanced semiconductor problem?

Nicholas Burns spoke to former President of the Congress Party in India, Rahul Gandhi, about COVID-19, U.S.-India Relations, and the George Floyd protests in the United States.