International Security & Defense

The summit between President Trump and North Korea's Kim Jong Un in Hanoi, Vietnam, ended Thursday without any deal. The two sides failed to reach an agreement due to a standoff over U.S. sanctions on the reclusive nation.

Michael Beckley explains how power can be measured more accurately by calculating a country’s net resources.

Early in Richard Rhodes’s new book, “Energy: A Human History,” we hear of a prominent citizen using colorful language to lament the state of his polluted city and urge his government to shut down industry or move it elsewhere: “If there be a resemblance of hell upon earth, it is in this volcano [on] a foggy day.” Though this could easily apply to modern-day Beijing, the speaker here is John Evelyn, a wealthy horticulturalist and one of the founders of the scientific Royal Society of London — and he’s complaining about London in 1659.

This paper is a background review representing part of the initial phase of the Financing the Urban Transition work program. The review builds on a growing body of research that highlights both the importance of national sustainable infrastructure and the need to develop more effective and efficient financing mechanisms for delivering compact, connected cities that meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. While progress has been made in both these areas over the last five years, there remains a policy gap between the international/national level and the municipal level.

Extreme weather events have tragically upended lives and damaged communities across the United States in the past two months. Climate change deniers are hard pressed to continue insisting that there is no connection between human activity and rising temperatures and stronger hurricanes: the American people are living with the evidence, from California wildfires to torrential storms and biblical-scale flooding in Texas, Florida and the Caribbean. September 2017 was the most intensive month for Atlantic hurricanes on record and more than a million acres have burned in California this year due to the most damaging wildfires on record.

The Homeland Security Project, an initiative of Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, has announced the appointment of Jeh Johnson, former Secretary of Homeland Security, as the Project’s new non-resident Senior Fellow.