Donald Trump

Campaigning on a nationalist vision of the United States as a country being misused by other countries, Donald Trump promised to bring upon significant changes to the international order. His primary tool for achieving this has been an abandonment of multilateral arrangements. Under Trump’s leadership, the US withdrew from the Universal Postal Union, the UNESCO, and has effectively blocked the dispute resolution mechanism of the World Trade Organization (WTO).

At last, the big day of the Bahrain workshop on the Palestinian economy is coming. After two years of negotiations and secret plans, the Trump administration should soon propose a US framework of guidelines for resolving the oldest struggle in the Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The location of this event will be Manama (June 25-26), the capital of Bahrain and focal point of some important Middle Eastern dynamics. The conference will bring together government and business leaders from Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

As the first Democratic presidential primary debates rapidly approach, observers of American politics both domestically and around the world are increasingly focused on one key question: Will Donald Trump be re-elected president in 2020?  Many of the academic models that historians and political scientists use to predict presidential elections are favorable for a Trump re-election, and most of the global betting markets have him as close to an even-money proposition.  On some level, this makes sense; incumbent presidents typically win re-election barring economic recession, an unpopular maj

President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address last week was, according to the overnight polling, generally well received by the American public (or at least by those who watched). His acknowledgements of various individuals in the gallery were poignant and moving. He invoked proud, unifying achievements from the nation’s past, like the liberation of Dachau and the Moon landing. There were even moments of bipartisan celebration, as when Trump acknowledged the record-setting number of women serving in Congress.

The escalating trade war between the United States and China will be one of the hot issues during the Buenos Aires G20 meeting. This trade conflict, probably the most important since the second world war, started last January with the US introducing safeguard tariffs on imports from the world of solar panels and tariff rate-quotas on imports from the world of washing machines. These tariffs have been introduced in response to requests by US manufacturers.

In President Donald Trump’s first year in office, U.S. policy relating to supporting democracy abroad became starkly divided. At the level of “high policy”—direct engagement and messaging by President Trump and his principal foreign policy advisers—the United States sharply downgraded its global pro-democratic posture. Trump’s praise of dictators, criticism of democratic allies, and anti-democratic actions at home recast the United States as at best an ambivalent actor on the global democratic stage. Yet at the same time, pro-democratic “low policy”—quiet but serious engagement by U.S.

Many European politicians see the ascending trajectory of quarrels between the USA and Russia as worrisome and unhelpful for upholding security and stability in Europe. At the same time, they keep asking for a firm US leadership in countering and containing Russia’s military pressure and unconventional aggressiveness.