News and views from the Blavatnik School of Government community 
Donald Trump’s pledge to withdraw US ground troops from Syria and Afghanistan has become one of the most controversial foreign policy decisions of his presidency. The political backlash following Trump’s abrupt announcement to immediately remove all 2,000 troops from Syria last December has caused a series of partial reversals, with […]
Earlier this month the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights hosted a conference entitled Confronting Illiberalism to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The day prior to the conference, Mansfield College erected a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt, the highly political US First Lady who, following her […]
It is often said that the US and China – superpowers at economic, geopolitical, and ideological loggerheads – are heading toward a new cold war. And the rhetoric – at least from one side – has come to resemble that of Winston Churchill’s 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech, one of the inaugural events of […]
Given the escalating trade war between the United States and China, countries around the world are rushing to consolidate their trade relations and preserve existing supply chains. Not so the UK, which is now in the final stages of negotiations to withdraw from the European Union – a move that […]
Between escalating trade disputes and the divisions at the G7’s summit this month, the breakdown of global governance has become starkly apparent. The United States can no longer be counted on to uphold, much less enforce, existing rules, and countries more broadly cannot be assumed to agree on, much less […]
The United States must increase infrastructure investments and improve infrastructure quality and efficiency in order to best serve its citizens. Ranked ninth out of 137 in infrastructure quality on the Global Competitiveness Index of the World Economic Forum, the U.S. may seem to be excelling in the area of infrastructure. […]
On March 23, a U.S. representative raised concerns at the World Trade Organization, claiming that “China’s import restrictions on recycled commodities have caused a fundamental disruption in global supply chains for scrap materials.” His concern related to China’s decision in mid-2017 to impose a ban on the importation of 24 […]
“Don’t get mad, get even.” That aphorism needs to become the new norm in democratic politics across Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Rather than complaining about populist successes, established political parties should take a page from the populist playbook. Three lessons, in particular, cry out for attention. The first […]