Category Archives: Foreign Affairs

Climate Change, Essays, Foreign Affairs, Politics

‘The Coming Age Of Territorial Expansion’

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FOREIGN AFFAIRS MAGAZINE (March 4, 2025):

ince the mid-twentieth century, the power dynamics and system of alliances that made up the postwar global order provided a strong check on campaigns to conquer and acquire territory—an otherwise enduring feature of human history. But rather than marking a definitive break from the aggression of the past, this era of relative restraint now seems to have been merely a brief deviation from the historical pattern. From Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to U.S. President Donald Trump’s avowed interest in acquiring Greenland, international land grabs are back on the table. Threats of territorial conquest are once again becoming a central part of geopolitics, driven by a new phase of great-power competition, growing population pressures, shifts in technology, and, perhaps most crucially, a changing climate.

International land grabs are back on the table.

The case of Greenland is emblematic of how climate change may spur a global contest for land. Trump first raised the prospect of the United States incorporating the Danish territory on the eve of his inauguration, and in the weeks since, he has reiterated that wish and refused to rule out the use of force to turn it into reality. Denmark is uninterested in selling Greenland, and the territory’s largely indigenous population is wary of outside powers—a legacy of the island’s brutal history under Danish rule. But that has not discouraged Trump’s overtures or threats. His interest in the territory stems ostensibly from its strategic position as a buffer between the United States and its great-power adversaries. “It has to do with the freedom of the world,” Trump said in January. But as the planet warms, retreating icecaps and thinning sea ice will make Greenland important for other reasons, as its vast tracts of once inhospitable land become newly alluring to outsiders.

Climate change will create problems for some countries and opportunities for others.

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International agreements and alliances, already fraying as great-power competition heats up, will struggle to contain these fights. In a world where might makes right, countries that find themselves seeking new territory may not hesitate to use force to get it. With the most dramatic effects of climate change still to come, the race for land is just getting started.

Michael Albertus is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and the author of Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies.

Essays, Foreign Affairs, Politics

Foreign Affairs Essay: ‘The Post-Neoliberal Delusion’

FOREIGN AFFAIRS MAGAZINE (February 10, 2025): Although there are many explanations for Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, voters’ views of the U.S. economy may have been decisive. In polling shortly before the election, more than 60 percent of voters in swing states agreed with the idea that the economy was on the wrong track, and even higher numbers registered concern about the cost of living. In exit polls, 75 percent of voters agreed that inflation was a “hardship.”

These views may seem surprising given various economic indicators at the time of the election. After all, unemployment was low, inflation had come down, GDP growth was strong, and wages were rising faster than prices. But these figures largely missed the lasting effects that dramatic price increases had on many Americans, which made it harder for them to pay for groceries, pay off credit cards, and buy homes. Not entirely unreasonably, they blamed that squarely on the Biden administration.

Biden arrived in office in 2021 with what he understood as an economic mandate to “Build Back Better.” The United States had not yet fully reopened after nearly a year of restrictions necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which had suppressed activity in the service sector. Biden set out to restructure the country’s post-pandemic economy based on a muscular new approach to governing. Since the 1990s, Democratic economic policy had largely been shaped by a technocratic approach, derided by its critics as “neoliberalism,” that included respect for markets, enthusiasm for trade liberalization and expanded social welfare protections, and an aversion to industrial policy. By contrast, the Biden team expressed much more ambition: to spend more, to do more to reshape particular industries, and to rely less on market mechanisms to deal with problems such as climate change. Thus, the administration set out to bring back vigorous government involvement across the economy, including in such areas as public investment, antitrust enforcement, and worker protections; revive large-scale industrial policy; and support enormous injections of direct economic stimulus, even if it entailed unprecedented deficits. The administration eventually came to dub this approach “Bidenomics.”

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JASON FURMAN is Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard University. He was Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017.

Essays, Foreign Affairs, Opinion, Politics

Foreign Policy: ‘DeepSeek’s Lesson – America Needs Smarter Export Controls’

THE WIRE CHINA (February 5, 2025): Last December, the Chinese AI firm DeepSeek reported training a GPT-4-level model for just $5.6 million, challenging assumptions about the resources needed for frontier AI development. This perceived cost reduction, and DeepSeek’s cut-rate pricing for its advanced reasoning model R1, have left tech stocks plunging and sparked a debate on the effectiveness of U.S. export controls on AI chips.

Select Committee Chairman Moolenaar and Ranking Member Krishnamoorthi’s letter to National Security Advisor Waltz on DeepSeek. Credit: Select Committee

Some argue that DeepSeek’s efficiency breakthroughs mean the controls have backfired and must be lifted. But this view overlooks the bigger picture: DeepSeek’s success in fact underscores the need for smarter export controls. DeepSeek exploited gaps in current controls, such as exports of chips to China that matched U.S. performance despite the initial October 2022 rules, chip smuggling, inadequate oversight on chip manufacturers like TSMC, and slow regulatory updates that enabled stockpiling. 

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Essays, Foreign Affairs, Politics

Foreign Affairs Essays: ‘China’s Trump Strategy’

FOREIGN AFFAIRS MAGAZINE (February 6, 2025): In the months since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election in November, policymakers in Beijing have been looking to the next four years of U.S.-Chinese relations with trepidation. Beijing has been expecting the Trump administration to pursue tough policies toward China, potentially escalating the two countries’ trade war, tech war, and confrontation over Taiwan. The prevailing wisdom is that China must prepare for storms ahead in its dealings with the United States. 

Trump’s imposition of ten percent tariffs on all Chinese goods this week seemed to justify those worries. China retaliated swiftly, announcing its own tariffs on certain U.S. goods, as well as restrictions on exports of critical minerals and an antimonopoly investigation into the U.S.-based company Google. But even though Beijing has such tools at its disposal, its ability to outmaneuver Washington in a tit-for-tat exchange is limited by the United States’ relative power and large trade deficit with China. Chinese policymakers, aware of the problem, have been planning more than trade war tactics. Since Trump’s first term, they have been adapting their approach to the United States, and they have spent the past three months further developing their strategy to anticipate, counter, and minimize the damage of Trump’s volatile policymaking. As a result of that planning, a broad effort to shore up China’s domestic economy and foreign relations has been quietly underway.

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