Tag: foreign affairs
The GOP Has Crossed An Ominous Threshold on Foreign Policy
The long decline of the Republican Party’s internationalist wing may have reached a tipping point.
Since Donald Trump emerged as the GOP’s dominant figure in 2016, he has championed an isolationist and nationalist agenda that is dubious of international alliances, scornful of free trade, and hostile to not only illegal but also legal immigration. His four years in the White House marked a shift in the party’s internal balance of power away from the internationalist perspective that had dominated every
Xi Jinping Is Fighting a Culture War at Home
In October, a Communist Party–run television network in the province of Hunan aired a five-episode program called When Marx Met Confucius. In it, actors portraying the European revolutionary and the ancient Chinese sage pontificate on their doctrines and discover that their ideas are in perfect harmony.
“I am longing for a supreme and far-reaching ideal world, where everyone can do their best and get what they need,” Marx says. “I call it a communist society.”
“I also advocate the
Nine Books Overshadowed by the Pandemic
There are moments when one can dive into the sustained dream of a book and stay there for hours. The spring of 2020 was not one of those times. If you weren’t actively battling COVID-19 or grieving a loved one, your life was likely all of a sudden relentlessly logistical: the sudden evaporation of childcare, the Tetris of fitting multiple working adults inside one tiny apartment, the paranoid wiping down of groceries. Reading often felt impossible, even for those of
Should China Be at the Center of Biden’s Foreign-Policy Strategy?
It was catnip for policy analysts: Henceforth, the Biden administration signaled recently, the U.S. government would refer to its approach to China and other adversaries by a new name. Out was the Trump-era term, great-power competition. In was strategic competition. The assessments of what it all meant poured forth.
But lost in the debate was the fact that the U.S. government appeared to be tweaking the semantics of the organizing principle of its foreign policy and grand