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When U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in April at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, one topic was not on the agenda: the environment. Perhaps they couldn’t find enough common ground. Xi, a chemical engineer by training, has often spoken publicly about his concerns over the effects of climate change on China, where almost 20 percent of the land is desert, an area expanding at a rate of more than 1,300 square miles per year.

President Trump is now considering steps that would unilaterally remove at least some of the sanctions that the United States imposed on Russia in the wake of its 2014 annexation of Crimea. To Russia, this would signal that the United States will let it get away with conquest in its neighborhood, and that violating international law carries no penalty.

According to Ian Morris, the author of a sweeping history of conflict from prehistoric times to the present, war can sometimes produce safety. But his account runs into difficulties as it approaches the present.

In today's dollar-dominated financial system, changes in U.S. monetary policy can have immediate and significant global effects, wrecking economies and toppling regimes. As a result, for many countries monetary sovereignty is nothing but a dream.

Even if a military intervention began well, U.S. forces would likely find themselves bogged down in the messy work of keeping the peace for years to come.

Brexit has exposed the contradictions between the unionist and nationalist gambles in Northern Ireland.

Just a few years ago, Latin America was on a roll. Its economies, riding on the back of the Chinese juggernaut, were flourishing. Today the picture looks very different. Latin America’s economies are grinding to a halt. Yet on one count at least, the lands south of the Rio Grande are faring better than ever: Latin Americans are denouncing corruption as never before. In decades past, residents of the region seemed resigned to the problem, treating it as an ordinary, if lamentable, part of everyday life.

Russian leaders often claim the United States reneged on a promise not to expand NATO after the Cold War. They aren't lying: Although Washington never put a pledge in writing, U.S. officials worked hard to convince Moscow that NATO wouldn't move east. And in international politics, informal commitments count.

The populism that Trump espouses is rooted in the thought and culture of Andrew Jackson. Jacksonians are skeptical about the value of liberal order building, so the challenge for international politics in the days ahead is to find a way to stop the liberal order’s erosion.

Venezuela is in the throes of its most tumultuous political and economic period in decades. The collapse of global energy prices has wreaked havoc on the country’s economy. Estimates vary, but oil production has fallen from a peak of around 3.2 million barrels per day in 1997 to somewhere between 2.2 million and 2.5 million barrels per day today. Oil and gas account for more than 95 percent of Venezuela’s revenues from exports, and the country produces few other goods.

Gandhi’s alienation of British India's Muslim elite means that he is at least partially responsible for the 1947 partition.

Conventional wisdom about the 1953 coup in Iran rests on the myth that the CIA toppled the country's democratically elected prime minister. In reality, the coup was primarily a domestic Iranian affair, and the CIA's impact was ultimately insignificant.

With US hegemony waning and no successor waiting to pick up the baton, the current international system will likely give way to a larger number of power centers acting with increasing autonomy. The post-Cold War order is unraveling, and it will be missed.

One of the most fruitful ideas to emerge from twentieth-century social theory is Max Weber’s notion of the “iron cage” of purposive rationality. Weber argued that once some principle of organization - market competition, say, or ideological orthodoxy - has achieved dominance in the spheres of production and governance, the rest of a society’s institutions find themselves gradually but inexorably adopting the same principle. In an ideology-dominant society, everything fluid turns to stone; in a market-dominant society, everything solid melts into air.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s unprecedented repression of peaceful and nonviolent opposition has created a fertile environment for extremists and radical ideologies. The longer Egypt’s government maintains its repressive policies, the more radicalized and violent its Islamists will become.

Assessments of how governments and international organizations have dealt with global challenges often feature a familiar refrain: when it comes to funding, there was too little, too late. The costs of economic, social, and environmental problems compound over time, whether it’s an Ebola outbreak that escalates to an epidemic, a flood of refugees that tests the strength of the EU, or the rise of social inequalities that reinforce poverty. And yet governments and aid groups rarely prove able to act before such costs explode.

Republicans have long panned the U.S. tax system; now they have a plan to change it. In fact, two plans. The first comes from Congress, the second from the White House. The congressional “Better Way” plan, championed by Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, and Kevin Brady, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, would create a business tax system that has never existed anywhere in the world. The White House plan would enact a massive tax cut, mostly for the wealthy.

After Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014, the Obama administration responded with what has become the go-to foreign policy tool these days: targeted sanctions. The United States placed asset freezes and travel bans on more than one hundred people, mostly cronies of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the EU targeted almost a hundred more.

Getting smallholders connected.

ISIS is on the retreat in Iraq and Syria. But if the group's skill for developing inventive tactics is not destroyed, it will continue to replicate itself elsewhere, inspiring and directing terror attacks globally.