The Best of Print 2018

by Annette Gordon-Reed

Slavery’s legacy in the United States stems not only from the institution itself, but also from the system of white supremacy it established. The country is only now undergoing a long-overdue reckoning with that system.

by Barry Posen

Worries that Trump is an isolationist are out of place against the backdrop of the administration’s actions. In fact, Trump has ushered in an entirely new U.S. grand strategy: illiberal hegemony.

by Kurt M. Campbell and Ely Ratner

Building a stronger and more sustainable approach to, and relationship with, Beijing requires honesty about how many of the U.S. foreign policy community's fundamental assumptions about China have turned out wrong.

by Yuen Yuen Ang

Since opening its markets in 1978, China has reformed its vast bureaucracy to realize many of the benefits of democratization without giving up single-party control. But bureaucratic reforms cannot substitute for political reforms forever. And under Xi, the limits of this approach are beginning to loom large.

by Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa

The future promises two realistic scenarios: either some of the most powerful autocratic countries in the world will transition to liberal democracy, or the period of democratic dominance that was expected to last forever will prove no more than an interlude before a new era of struggle between mutually hostile political systems. 

by Graham Allison

Rather than seeking to return to an imagined past in which the United States molded the world in its image, Washington should limit its efforts to ensuring sufficient order abroad and concentrate on reconstructing a viable liberal democracy at home.

by Adam Segal

China is set to remake cyberspace in its own image. That will make the Internet less open and allow Beijing to reap vast economic, diplomatic, and security benefits that once flowed to Washington.

by Marc Lynch

The 2011 Arab uprisings may not have created new democracies across the Middle East as many hoped they would, but they did fundamentally reshape regional relations. In today's Middle East, the new order is fundamentally one of disorder.

by Moisés Naím and Francisco Toro

Socialism and declining oil prices are often blamed for Venezuela’s catastrophe. In reality, it was decades of destructive leadership under Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, that transformed Venezuela into a poor country and criminalized state beholden to a foreign power. 

by Robert Jervis and Mira Rapp-Hooper

To have any chance of success, U.S. strategy toward North Korea must be guided by an accurate sense of how Kim’s regime thinks and what it knows about Washington. Failure to do so could lead the United States to stumble into the worst conflict since World War II.