The latest content from the Council on Foreign Relations including articles, backgrounders, reports, books, and podcast episodes.
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Nuclear energy is gaining momentum as countries seek reliable, low-emission power sources to meet increasing electricity demand and climate goals amid uncertainty in fossil fuel markets. Its revival renews long-standing debates over safety and nuclear proliferation.
Sowing doubt about the U.S. commitment to alliances in East Asia could upend the military and strategic balance in the region and undermine U.S. interests in the process.
Actions by advanced economies to limit rising government bond yields are unlikely to be durable without additional policy change or a material economic slowdown—but the first is unlikely and the second is unwanted.
The war against Iran has shown that Pentagon’s reliance on hard-to-produce hi-tech weapons creates a vulnerability in a world in which quantity may overwhelm quality.
Trump’s abrupt rollback of joint military exercises with South Korea is the latest in a series of actions draining Asian allies’ confidence in U.S. security commitments—and hands China another opening to exploit.
What to make of Zambia’s 2026 general elections?
The CIA’s Operation Ajax helped push Iran toward autocracy and encouraged U.S. presidents to approve other covert efforts to oust governments they disliked.
CFR’s press fellow explains how he went from chasing stories across Asia at age twenty-two to writing one of Washington’s top foreign affairs newsletters—and now pens his own column for The New Yorker.
We Discuss: Mentioned on the Episode: Rush Doshi, Erin D. Dumbacher, William Henagan, Michael C. Horowitz, and Samuel Lazarus, “Out of Ammo: A Two-Year Sprint to Rebuild the American Arsenal and Deter China,” Council on Foreign Relations “One Big Beautiful Bill Act (H.R.1),” U.S. Congress Michael C. Horowitz, “Battles of Precise Mass: Technology Is Remaking […]
Debt crises in Senegal, Indonesia, and the United Kingdom offer warnings and lessons for the U.S.’ fiscal challenges.
Despite undeniable progress, insecurity in Nigeria remains by and large intractable.
Executive Summary The United States is increasingly ill-equipped to deter or defeat Chinese aggression in the Western Pacific, particularly a potential invasion or blockade of Taiwan. The U.S. military no longer possesses the requisite quantity of warfighting systems—nor the industrial capacity to produce them at scale—needed to counter the People’s Liberation Army’s burgeoning arsenal. To […]
This week on The Spillover, Rebecca Patterson and Sebastian Mallaby weigh the competitors in the global artificial intelligence race, drawing on Patterson’s new chapter for the book Geopolitics of AI. Patterson opens with a deliberately provocative stance: “I think it’s premature to assume that the U.S. will be the world’s AI economic winner. I also […]
New reporting indicates that Trump’s boat strike program could be more secretive, larger, and more resistant to oversight than previously known.
The order reduces the number of childhood vaccines recommendations and separates measles, mumps, and rubella into different shots.
A defense pact between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey shows how far U.S. influence in the Middle East has eroded—and how regional powers are now shaping their own security order.
Long, mysterious absences promote the idea that unaccountable forces are at the levers of power.
Sadanand Dhume has both sprinted as a foreign correspondent and endured the marathon of writing two books. The new senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia sat down with CFR to share insights from his experiences covering the economy, extremism, and international relations in both South and Southeast Asia.
The CFR Global Imbalances Tracker can be used to gauge, through time, the vulnerability of individual countries and the global economy to the buildup of imbalances in the current account (of which trade deficits or surpluses are the largest component). Below, the Global Imbalances Index shows the total size of global current account deficits and surpluses […]
This week Rebecca Patterson and Sebastian Mallaby, with guest Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, discuss the ongoing economic spillovers of the Iran war, from energy markets to maritime shipping. Five months into the Iran war, energy prices are climbing once more. Brent crude is “getting close to $90 again,” Patterson notes, while U.S. retail gasoline holds above […]
Trump’s desire to end the confrontation with Iran quickly, so oil flows and prices drop, has left him with no real bargaining position. That has emboldened Iran to demand a deal that would let it monetize the Strait of Hormuz and reassert the dominance the region has spent two years fighting to unwind.
Did the United States act too hastily in dropping a second atomic bomb on Japan?
Congress endorsed President Lyndon B. Johnson’s determination to confront North Vietnam without investigating whether the facts justified that decision.
An unprecedented surge of migrants into Spanish territory in North Africa marked the first test of the European Union’s new migration pact and has reignited the bloc’s debate over immigration.
The decision to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima continues to stir debate today.
Measured in Big Macs, the dollar is too strong. Measured in iPad minis, it’s a modest bargain.
Margaret Brennan spent her career covering everything from geopolitics to economics, before becoming the second woman ever to moderate Face the Nation. She spoke to CFR about the connection between finance and foreign policy reporting, her advice for young journalists, and an unforgettable assignment in Syria.
CFR’s Global Monetary Policy Tracker compiles data from 54 countries around the world to highlight significant global trends in monetary policy. Who is tightening policy? Who is loosening policy? And what is the policy stance of the world as a whole?
The joint U.S.-Japan intervention to prop up the yen has as much to do with protecting U.S. Treasury markets as with helping an ally manage currency volatility.
In this episode of The Spillover, Rebecca Patterson and Sebastian Mallaby make the case for their favorite summer reads. Patterson opens with Today Then by Dave Walter, a 1992 collection of 1890s essays forecasting the twentieth century. Her verdict on the quality of their predictions? “Pretty bad.” Columnist Bill Nye (not the Science Guy) guessed […]
At the July meeting of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) foreign ministers, most of whom were already furious at the United States, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio did little to lower the temperature. But ASEAN also continued its trend of saying much while doing almost nothing.
The United States and Japan carried out their first coordinated currency intervention in more than a decade: buying yen to arrest its slide to a forty-year low. CFR’s Brad W. Setser explains what is behind the move—and why it could be more about U.S. Treasury bonds than the yen itself.
The Fed’s published inflation forecasts are not only poor relative to the private sector’s, but meaningless out beyond a year—as they simply converge to the Fed’s inflation target.
Rush Doshi’s testimony to the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging analyzes how the United States had developed a “rare earths” problem in medicine, largely self-inflicted by letting its pharmaceutical supply chain and innovation ecosystem migrate offshore.
The attack on a U.S. destroyer off the coast of North Vietnam that deepened U.S. involvement in Vietnam never happened and opened up a credibility gap in U.S. foreign policy.
Asylum has been a cornerstone of U.S. law for decades, but the Trump administration’s latest immigration crackdown is challenging the long-standing practice. Here’s what to know about the U.S. asylum system.
A new Gallup polls shows that Americans are worried that they will not see free-and-fair elections in November.