Beijing’s wait-and-see approach to the war and unwillingness to use its leverage over Tehran to contain the conflict have disabused Gulf Arab states of any lingering expectation that China could ...

When hostile central governments threaten cities directly, municipal leaders can contest the worst overreaches. Mayors can use municipal resources to restrict or defy the predatory actions of a ...

At no point during its history did Pakistan meet these criteria. It was a nuclear-armed country on the fringes of the Western order, associated more often with regional instability than with conflict ...

Although the Iranian people and armed forces have defended their country against two nuclear-armed powers, they still see the conflict as one imposed on them, a clash that they were never eager to ...

A collection of articles from the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, including in-depth analysis, commentary, and book reviews from experts in domestic and foreign policy.

War transforms countries. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, launched in 2022, has not only killed tens of thousands, displaced millions, shattered cities and communities, and crippled the ...

But the episode—together with Trump’s repeated talk of incorporating Canada as “the 51st state”—has spurred NATO allies in the Arctic region to step up their security activities. Canada pledged $28 ...

The United States dramatically escalated its participation in the Vietnam War in the 1960s, expanding its military presence from a few hundred advisers to hundreds of thousands of soldiers. “We no ...

Following the back-to-back state visits to China in May by U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, many U.S. and European commentators noted that the summit meetings yielded ...

The Pentagon is broken, but Congress can fix it.

In 2025, Chinese leader Xi Jinping tried to capitalize on U.S. belligerence toward Europe by promoting China as the responsible great-power alternative. In a message sent to mark the 50th anniversary ...

Trump is exceptionally dedicated to coercion as a core foreign policy tool yet is one of its least effective practitioners. The problem lies in Trump’s conflation of coercion—a nuanced foreign policy ...