Tag Archives: Foreign Affairs

Essays, Foreign Affairs, Politics, Reviews

Palestine: The Case For A Two-State Solution

The Middle East is in crisis, with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict escalating dangerously. Reports of a postponed UN conference on Palestinian statehood, U.S.-involved wars, and intensifying violence in Gaza and the West Bank underscore this perilous reality. Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami’s analysis, “The Promise and Peril of Recognizing Palestine”, published July 15, 2025 in Foreign Affairs, and Ian Martin’s UN report on UNRWA ( United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), published on July 7, 2025, offer crucial insights, linking the two-state solution to global stability. This essay argues for Palestinian recognition, highlighting its moral imperative, strategic utility, and the critical dangers of a merely symbolic approach, advocating instead for a robust, conditional framework.

The Shifting Geopolitical Landscape

The current moment is defined by diplomatic paralysis and escalating violence. The postponement of a crucial UN conference on Palestinian statehood, due to regional war and a U.S.-involved conflict, symbolizes international impotence. This broader regional conflagration, impacting global energy and security, makes the Palestinian question a systemic global risk.

Within the Palestinian territories, violence is evolving into a systematic campaign of erasure. Gaza’s civilian infrastructure is being destroyed, its population displaced, and settler violence in the West Bank represents a calculated effort to fragment Palestinian society and undermine future statehood claims. Despite Israel’s current leadership showing no interest in a two-state framework, international momentum for recognition is building. French President Emmanuel Macron has pledged recognition, and Saudi Arabia is reconsidering the Arab Peace Initiative, seeking regional stability through renewed commitment to Palestinian rights. This impatience stems from a dawning realization that the status quo is not only morally indefensible but strategically unsustainable, threatening to unravel global security.

The Imperative for Recognition

Recognition of Palestine serves both profound moral and pragmatic strategic purposes. Morally, it powerfully rebukes Israel’s creeping annexation, characterized by relentless settlement expansion and legal fragmentation. Recognition asserts a competing legal claim, reaffirms international law, and symbolizes enduring global commitment to Palestinian self-determination and human rights. It represents a long-overdue acknowledgment of historical injustices, offering hope and dignity to a stateless people.

Crucially, Lynch and Telhami warn that recognition pursued in a vacuum—without meaningful changes on the ground—risks becoming a hollow, even counterproductive, gesture. If recognition is not tied to robust protections, enforceable sanctions, and transparent international oversight, it risks legitimizing a de facto apartheid. Symbolic recognition, devoid of tangible consequences, could inadvertently embolden hardliners and become a cynical exercise that relieves international moral pressure without altering the grim realities faced by Palestinians daily.

Strategically, recognition moves beyond altruism. Regional stability, a core U.S. and European interest, is increasingly jeopardized by the unresolved conflict. Formal recognition could provide a new framework for de-escalation, offering a diplomatic off-ramp from the cycle of violence. It could also bolster counter-terrorism efforts by addressing root causes of radicalization and enhance international actors’ credibility by aligning policies with international law. The two-state solution remains the only viable framework for a just and lasting peace. Recognition is not an abandonment of this framework, but a critical step in preserving it, reinforcing self-determination and the illegitimacy of territorial acquisition by force.

Arguments for recognition are built upon the harsh realities unfolding daily. Gaza’s destruction is catastrophic: over 70% of its buildings destroyed, displacing nearly 90% of its residents, leading to widespread famine and collapse of essential services. In the West Bank, settler violence has reached alarming levels, systematically displacing communities. The Israeli government appears increasingly untethered from international norms, openly defying UN resolutions and advocating for further annexation. Compounding this bleak picture is the sobering military assessment that Hamas cannot be destroyed solely through military means. If military victory is unattainable, a political solution becomes imperative.

Within this bleak context, the Trump administration’s transactional posture offers a peculiar, perhaps ironic, form of leverage. Trump’s frustration with the financial costs of Israel’s war, combined with concerns over regional instability, has pushed him toward a transactional realignment. Recognition of Palestine, framed not as a moral imperative but as a strategic concession, could become a powerful bargaining chip. It could unlock normalization deals with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, offering Israel integration into the region without requiring significant concessions to Palestinians. For Trump, this could be a signature foreign policy achievement, leveraging his unpredictability. This paradox suggests a recognition campaign driven by realpolitik might succeed where decades of traditional diplomacy have failed.

UNRWA: Locus of Crisis and Opportunity

For seventy-five years, the international community has skirted the urgency of Palestinian statehood. UNRWA, established in 1949 as a temporary relief effort, now stands as a permanent proxy for a state not allowed to exist. For generations of Palestinians, UNRWA has been the only semblance of state-like services, underscoring their unique statelessness. Now, as UNRWA teeters on the edge of collapse—under siege by Israeli legislation, military strikes, and a global funding crisis—the question of Palestine can no longer be deferred. Recognition, long symbolic, must become the cornerstone of a new international posture. To fail now is to betray the very possibility of a just peace and to formalize the erasure of Palestinian rights.

UNRWA is not a mere charity; it is, as Ian Martin’s report makes clear, an institutional embodiment of international responsibility. It educates children, provides healthcare, and distributes aid to over three million refugees. Crucially, it preserves the legal and archival framework for the right of return—a foundational principle of international law. The ongoing Israeli campaign—military, legislative, and diplomatic—against UNRWA has reached an unprecedented scale. Since October 7, 2023, Israel’s response has killed over 54,000 Palestinians and devastated UNRWA infrastructure. This military onslaught, paired with legislation seeking to prohibit UNRWA’s operations and strip its personnel of immunities, is a coordinated campaign to dismantle the final institutional framework of Palestinian refugee rights, effectively attempting to erase the refugee issue.

Martin outlines four potential futures for UNRWA: full collapse; partial reduction; governance reform; or gradual transfer of services to the Palestinian Authority while maintaining the rights-based mandate. Each scenario carries immense political weight and profound humanitarian consequences. A full collapse would lead to an unimaginable humanitarian catastrophe, destabilizing host countries and fueling further radicalization. Failure to act decisively will deepen the humanitarian crisis and fuel regional instability.

A Path Forward: Recognition with Enforcement

Recognition of Palestine is a legal and moral imperative rooted in international law. The ICJ has declared Israel’s prolonged occupation unlawful, and the ICC has issued arrest warrants. These represent the slow, grinding machinery of international law, built to uphold justice and prevent impunity. Yet, without enforcement or accompanying political recognition, these legal pronouncements risk irrelevance. Recognition aims to bridge this gap. UNRWA’s potential collapse would not dissolve the legal claims of Palestinians; rather, it would leave them without institutional articulation. Recognition is essential to safeguard the principle that international law applies to all. Furthermore, recognition directly supports the principle of the right of return. Martin affirms this right, guaranteed under customary international law and UNGA Resolution 194. Without a sovereign Palestine or an institutional protector, the right becomes a legal fiction. Recognition reasserts that Israel’s statehood was never meant to negate Palestinian nationhood.

Amid escalating regional conflict, recognition of Palestine may seem both small and dangerously provocative. Yet, paradoxically, it may now serve as a stabilizing wedge. France and Saudi Arabia’s initiative and France’s unequivocal pledge reflect growing international impatience. Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, paired with aggressive settlement expansion, has laid bare its disregard for the two-state framework. Even hawkish Israeli leaders concede that Hamas cannot be fully defeated militarily, underscoring the futility of the current military-centric approach. Within this bleak context, the Trump administration’s transactional worldview offers a strange opening. Trump’s frustration with the financial costs of Israel’s war has pushed him toward realignment. Recognition of Palestine, framed as leverage to broker normalization deals or advance a new nuclear agreement, could become a signature foreign policy achievement. It may also be the only mechanism left to create political rupture inside Israel itself, potentially leading to a collapse of Netanyahu’s coalition and the redirection of international aid toward rebuilding Palestinian governance.

A recurring fear is the erasure of Palestine—not only as a state-in-waiting but as a people, a history, a legal subject. The obliteration of Gaza’s civic infrastructure, the delegitimization of its institutions, and the systematic dispossession of Palestinians in the West Bank all point to a deliberate campaign of erasure. Recognition offers an antidote—not a solution, but a stand. It grounds the conversation in international law, reinforces the permanence of Palestinian identity, and reasserts that statelessness is not a permanent condition. In affirming statehood, the world pushes back against the logic that only facts on the ground—not principles—shape sovereignty. Moreover, recognition helps immunize Palestinians from political abandonment. If donors can rally $3 billion annually for Israeli military aid, then the $1.5 billion needed to sustain Palestinian humanitarian systems is not an economic impossibility; it is a matter of moral and political will.

Still, recognition without enforcement is a trap. If the international community recognizes Palestine but does not impose consequences for annexation, does not restrict the transfer of arms to Israel, and does not enforce ICJ and ICC decisions, then recognition will be hollow. Recognition must be tied to concrete commitments—protection of civilians, restrictions on settlement activity, the rebuilding of Gaza, and robust international funding of Palestinian institutions. Otherwise, it becomes a way to relieve global moral pressure without changing the political dynamics on the ground, effectively “washing” the occupation with diplomatic niceties. Worse still, symbolic recognition can be weaponized. To be meaningful, recognition must be embedded in a broader diplomatic strategy. It must be paired with funding for reconstruction, robust support for Palestinian political reform, and new international monitoring bodies capable of enforcing agreements. It must, above all, signal to Israel that indefinite occupation and apartheid will carry real costs, not just rhetorical condemnation.

Conclusion

In this, the analyses by Lynch and Telhami and Ian Martin’s UNRWA report agree: the world is reaching a moment of reckoning. Either it affirms the legitimacy of Palestinian nationhood in action as well as word—or it formalizes their erasure. Recognition alone is not justice, but it is a beginning. The dream of a two-state solution has been steadily undermined. The Israeli state now controls all territory west of the Jordan River. It governs two unequal populations under radically different legal regimes: one with voting rights, passports, and mobility; the other with curfews, checkpoints, and drone surveillance. This is not a temporary security measure; it is the scaffolding of a permanent apartheid. And it will not be dismantled by silence. The recognition of Palestine is not a panacea. But it is the clearest way for the international community to say: we have not given up. That justice is still possible. That erasure will not be the final word. Anything less is complicity. The credibility of international law in the 21st century, and indeed the very prospect of a just and stable Middle East, hinges on this pivotal decision.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN BY AI AND EDITED BY INTELLICUREAN

Economics, Essays, Foreign Affairs, Politics

Foreign Affairs Essay: ‘Underestimating China’

FOREIGN AFFAIRS MAGAZINE (April 11, 2025):

Success in great-power competition requires rigorous and unsentimental net assessment. Yet the American estimation of China has lurched from one extreme to the other. For decades, Americans registered blistering economic growth, dominance of international trade, and growing geopolitical ambition, and anticipated the day when China might overtake a strategically distracted and politically paralyzed United States; after the 2008 financial crisis, and then especially at the height of the COVID pandemic, many observers believed that day had come. But the pendulum swung to the other extreme only a few years later as China’s abandonment of “zero COVID” failed to restore growth. Beijing was beset by ominous demographics, once unthinkable youth unemployment, and deepening stagnation while the United States was strengthening alliances, boasting breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and other technologies, and enjoying a booming economy with record low unemployment and record high stock markets.

The rise and fall of great powers often begins with flawed self-diagnosis.

A new consensus took hold: that an aging, slowing, and increasingly less nimble China would not overtake an ascendant United States. Washington shifted from pessimism to overconfidence. Yet just as past bouts of defeatism were misguided, so is today’s triumphalism, which risks dangerously underestimating both the latent and actual power of the only competitor in a century whose GDP has surpassed 70 percent of that of the United States. On critical metrics, China has already outmatched the United States. Economically, it boasts twice the manufacturing capacity. Technologically, it dominates everything from electric vehicles to fourth-generation nuclear reactors and now produces more active patents and top-cited scientific publications annually. Militarily, it features the world’s largest navy, bolstered by shipbuilding capacity 200 times as large as that of the United States; vastly greater missile stocks; and the world’s most advanced hypersonic capabilities—all results of the fastest military modernization in history. Even if China’s growth slows and its system falters, it will remain formidable strategically.

Such a commitment is not just a policy, but a signal of the capabilities of the United States, its allies, and partners. The Chinese Communist Party is inordinately focused on perceptions of American power, and a critical input in that equation is its estimation of Washington’s ability to pull in the allies and partners that even Beijing openly admits are the United States’ greatest advantage. Accordingly, the most effective U.S. strategy—the one that has most unsettled Beijing in recent years and can deter its adventurism in the future—is to build new, enduring, and robust capacities with these states. A sustained, bipartisan commitment to an upgraded alliance network, coupled with strategic cooperation in emerging fields, offers the best path forward to finding scale against the most formidable competitor the United States has ever encountered.

READ MORE

KURT M. CAMPBELL is Chairman and Cofounder of The Asia Group. He served as Deputy Secretary of State and Indo-Pacific Coordinator at the National Security Council during the Biden administration.

RUSH DOSHI is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University and Director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served as Deputy Senior Director for China and Taiwan Affairs at the National Security Council during the Biden administration.

Essays, Foreign Affairs, Immigration, Society

‘Sweden Has A Big Problem’

THE NEW YORK TIMES OPINION (March 28, 2025):

This essay is part of The Great Migration, a series by Lydia Polgreen exploring how people are moving around the world today.

On Aug. 12, 2004, celebratory headlines festooned the pages of Swedish newspapers, hailing a huge milestone: On that day a baby would be born as the nine millionth Swede. After years of fretting over declining birthrates, a modest increase in babies born and, crucially, robust migration had pushed that sprawling but lightly populated nation over a longed-for threshold.

In a survey last month, 73 percent of Swedish respondents said migration levels over the past decade were too high. But that’s of a piece with a society ill at ease with itself. Beset by metastasizing gang violence, stubborn unemployment and strain on its vaunted social welfare system, the country is rife with discontent — a distemper shared by foreign- and native-born alike. The problem with Sweden, it seems, is not migrants. It’s Sweden itself.

Twenty years later, almost exactly to the day, the Swedish government trumpeted a very different achievement: More people were leaving Sweden than were migrating to it. By the end of the year, a country that had long celebrated its status as a refuge for people fleeing war and repression was touting the fact that fewer people had been granted asylum in Sweden than in any year since comparable records have been kept. To the government, led by the center-right Moderate Party and backed by the hard-line anti-migrant Sweden Democrats, this retrenchment was nothing but a good thing.

———————————-

In opening itself up to these questions, Sweden is taking a big gamble. It’s also saying something about itself. “Migration is a bellwether phenomenon,” the sociologist Hein de Haas, a leading scholar of migration, told me. “If you look at the bigger picture, isn’t this growing fear of immigrants showing the lack of confidence of Western societies?”

READ MORE

Lydia Polgreen is an Opinion columnist at The New York Times.

Climate Change, Essays, Foreign Affairs, Politics

‘The Coming Age Of Territorial Expansion’

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.

—————————————

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.”

READ MORE

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. 

READ MORE

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.

READ MORE