The power to sway public opinion is an increasingly essential asset in any state’s toolkit. The war in Ukraine provides a clear example: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has successfully targeted his appeals at specific Western audiences to strengthen global support for his country.
Boris Johnson announced on Thursday that he would leave his post as prime minister of the United Kingdom as soon as a replacement from within the Conservative Party is selected, after a series of scandals resulted in a revolt from within his administration. So what happens now to the “Global Britain” that Johnson was trying to build? We reached out to our experts to gauge the reaction in foreign capitals to the drama in Westminster, and what the future might hold for the United Kingdom.
Why Regional Ties Win the Day
Aconstant and largely unquestioned refrain in foreign policy is that the world has globalized. Closets are full of clothes stitched in other countries; electronics and cars are often assembled far from where consumers live. U.S. investment flows into Asian markets, and Indians decamp to the United States for graduate school. The numbers show the magnitude of international exchange. Trade among all countries hovers around $20 trillion, a nearly tenfold increase from 1980. International capital flows also grew exponentially during that period, from $500 billion a year to well over $4 trillion. And nearly five times as many people are traveling across borders compared with four decades ago.
Why the Giant of Africa Needs to Start Over
Nigeria has always seemed like an impossibility. From the moment of its independence in 1960, observers questioned the country’s viability as a multiethnic, multireligious state. How could a country divided among two major religions and hundreds of different ethnic groups possibly stay together? When the devastating Nigerian civil war broke out in 1967, that skepticism appeared warranted. Perhaps, many concluded, Nigeria wasn’t meant to be.
What Happens If Putin Goes Nuclear?
As the war in Ukraine rages on, Russian President Vladimir Putin has engaged in nuclear saber rattling. “Whoever tries to impede us, let alone create threats for our country and its people, must know that the Russian response will be immediate and lead to the consequences you have never seen in history,” Putin declared in February in the first of many statements warning of a potential nuclear strike. For the most part, Western observers have dismissed this talk as idle chest-thumping. After all, whichever side fired nuclear weapons first would be taking a very risky gamble: betting that its opponent would not retaliate in an equal or more damaging way. That is why the odds are very low that sane leaders would actually start a process of trading blows that could end in the destruction of their own countries. When it comes to nuclear weapons, however, very low odds are not good enough.
Depuis l’inflexion du gouvernement de Pedro Sánchez sur la question du Sahara, la classe politique espagnole se divise sur la ligne à adopter envers Rabat. Les récents événements de Melilla ont encore aggravé cette fracture.
En Espagne, la tension est toujours palpable plus d’une semaine après les incidents survenus le 24 juin à Melilla, au cours desquels plusieurs milliers de migrants subsahariens, pour la plupart d’origine soudanaise, ont tenté de forcer la clôture afin de pénétrer dans l’enclave espagnole. Des heurts durant lesquels 37 d’entre eux ont trouvé la mort.
Selon plusieurs sources concordantes, l’ancien président, condamné à la prison à perpétuité dans l’affaire Sankara, doit arriver dans les prochaines heures à Ouagadougou pour y rencontrer le lieutenant-colonel Damiba.
In the aftermath of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, a great deal of attention has been given to the causes and consequences of the failed intra-Afghan peace process, the factors leading to the collapse of the Afghan military and the role played by pervasive corruption at the highest levels of the country’s internationally backed government.
Last week, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi completed a tour of Eritrea, Kenya and Comoros, continuing a tradition dating back three decades by which Chinese foreign ministers open the diplomatic year with a trip to Africa. The visit—which comes just over a month after the conclusion of the eighth Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, or FOCAC, held late last year in Dakar, Senegal—illustrates how China’s engagement with African countries is evolving. Beijing is apparently ready to play a bigger role in mediating some of the region’s conflicts. Whether those efforts will pay off is an open question for both China and its partners on the continent.
Not long after the commencement of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I wrote that for China, binding itself tightly to Moscow would do harm to Beijing’s long-term interests.
That is because, I wrote, an alliance between a superpower like China and a far less dynamic country like Russia, whose economy is a small fraction of the former’s size, is not much of an alliance. This would especially hold true if Beijing’s support for Russian President Vladimir Putin deepened European wariness of China and caused Europe and the United States to grow even closer, both of which now seem almost certain.