Analysis & Opinions

The war in Ukraine affects regions around the world in a variety of ways. Belfer Center experts reflect on how the conflict is impacting the countries and regions they study.

Kennedy’s statecraft in the missile crisis provides a rich source of clues that can help illuminate the challenge the United States now faces, and the choices President Joe Biden is making.

As the best documented major crisis in history, in substantial part because Kennedy secretly taped the deliberations in which he and his closest advisers were weighing choices they knew could lead to a catastrophic war, the Cuban missile crisis has become the canonical case study in nuclear statecraft. Over the decades since, key lessons from the crisis have been adapted and applied by the successors of Kennedy and Khrushchev to inform fateful choices.

Companies that rely on certain countries in Asia for their supply lines will face continued challenges as geopolitical stresses, let alone global pandemics, cause supply shortages. Beyond causing economic harm, these shortages pose a direct threat to U.S. national security interests.

Kelly Sims Gallagher asserts that politicians' pledges of dramatic long-term reductions should not let them off the hook for their failure to achieve more modest progress in the short term.

Cryptocurrencies are a baffling entity but adopting it as legal tender is the strangest, most worrying aspect of all.

Jacqueline Hazelton writes that regimes battling a counterinsurgency often depend on corruption to stay in power.

Jacqueline L. Hazelton analyzes why the United States fails at counterinsurgency in light of its withdrawal from Afghanistan. She asserts that the belief that democracy is necessary for long-term stability and can flow from the barrel of a gun is rooted in misleading accounts of past counterinsurgency campaigns, such as the Malayan Emergency and the 1948–1954 insurgency in the Philippines.

Joseph Nye offers four reasons why Americans would benefit from a Marshall Plan–like effort to immunize poor countries.

In order to fully appreciate the global climate-change challenge that the Biden administration will face, Robert Stavins reflects on the history of international negotiations that brought us to this point.