China
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Poor man wanna be rich Rich man wanna be King And a King ain’t satisfied ‘till he rules everything. While these lyrics from Bruce Springsteen’s 1978 hit Badlands were not penned as an overt political statement, they resonate loudly today with the growing number of entrenched autocrats across the globe. From the shores of the…
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Praise in public, criticize in private has been a core precept of good management practices for years. Based on the scene in the White House Oval Office on 28 February, it is clear that neither President Trump nor Vice President Vance subscribe to that theory. Instead, they metaphorically body slammed — a la World Wrestling…
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An incoming U.S. presidential administration is traditionally afforded one hundred days to plot the trajectory of its policies. With Trump 2.0, that conventional timeline has been shattered. In his first three weeks in office, the new president has careened from crisis to crisis like an energy drink-addled adolescent in a turbo-charged bumper car, stopping only…
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Listening to the recent comments of Donald Trump, one could assume that America’s most pressing foreign policy challenges reside in our geographic neighborhood. Canada as our 51st state, the “Gulf of America”, taking over Greenland, and China’s designs on the Panama Canal have been repeatedly highlighted by the incoming commander in chief. While the president-elect…
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There are certain events in the foreign policy realm that simply take the breath away. The scenes from Damascus, Syria on the 8th of December, signalling the fitting end to a half century of brutal familial dictatorship in the heart of the Middle East, fall into the breathtaking category. Fourteen years after the start of…
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Now that the dust has settled from the general elections with the Glover Cleveland-like return of former President Trump to the White House, we can step back and ponder what this dramatic shift in America’s leadership means for our place in the world. While much will be written in the coming two months about border…
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This is the sixth, and penultimate, in a series of articles on key foreign policy challenges for the next U.S. president. The articles will continue between now and the general election on 5 November 2024. The focus of this series of articles has been on specific foreign policy challenges – China, Russia, the Middle East,…
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This is the fourth in a series of articles on key foreign policy challenges for the next U.S. president. The articles will continue between now and the general election on 5 November 2024. In a 2023 essay in the journal Foreign Affairs, Jake Sullivan, the U.S. National Security Advisor, described America’s current relationship with China…
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Fifty years ago this month Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace as President of the United States, before likely being impeached in the wake of the Watergate scandal. The corruption at the highest level of the American government contributed to a nascent loss of trust by a significant portion of the populace in their elected leaders,…
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This is the third article in a series on key foreign policy challenges for the next U.S. president. The series will continue between now and the elections on 5 November. In his influential 1992 work – The End of History and the Last Man, on the logical progression of social and governmental structures to the…
Bob Beck's Foreign Policy Blog 