CFR Blogs

I wrote on Tuesday that the Council on Foreign Relations released the results of a survey of members of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), the world’s foremost professional association dedicated to the study of the history of U.S. foreign relations, about the best and worst decisions in the history of U.S. foreign policy. Yesterday I participated in a panel discussion at the Council’s offices in New York on the results of the survey.

The United States marks the 250th anniversary of its founding this year. Since 1776, the country has grown from a fragile union of small, loosely connected states with a questionable future to a global superpower that wrote the rules for the world order. Throughout it all, the United States has had to navigate a challenging international environment. Looking back at that history, some U.S. policies have made Americans proud. Others have not.

What you don’t say can sometimes matter as much as what you do say. Secretary of State Dean Acheson learned that lesson when he spoke before the National Press Club on January 12, 1950. His failure to include South Korea within his description of the U.S. defensive perimeter in Asia came back to haunt him.

In a post earlier today, I mentioned that Sen. Arthur Vandenberg (R-MI), a leading isolationist voice on Capitol Hill in the years before World War II, dismissed the Ludlow Amendment as a terrible idea. Today also happens to be the anniversary of the major speech Vandenberg gave on the Senate floor in 1945  renouncing his isolationist views and urging the country to embrace an internationalist foreign policy.

American history is rife with examples of bad policy ideas capturing the public imagination. Prohibition is the poster child for this malady. Today marks the anniversary of a House vote on one such harebrained foreign policy idea—the Ludlow Amendment. Lessons Learned: The Ludlow Amendment 6 min Never heard of the Ludlow Amendment? It was a bill to amend the U.S. Constitution to require a national referendum to confirm any congressional declaration of war.

On December 28, Myanmar held the first of three phases of planned voting in a parliamentary election that a number of leading democracies and democratic groups—including the United Kingdom and the European Parliament—and international organizations such as the United Nations have decried as a sham. Those organizations are right: this is not a free and fair election.

The conventional wisdom among China watchers has long been that China will not allow a substantial appreciation of the yuan because its still hobbled domestic economy needs the boost from exports. George Magnus wrote on the site formerly known as Twitter: “[China’s post-Covid export boom] is not so much a source of pride or success, as reflection of weak domestic demand, and Beijing’s inability or unwillingness to address it" ...

Uganda’s upcoming January 15 election raises urgent questions about just what the whole process is intended to accomplish. Is an election an opportunity for citizens to express their preferences and hold incumbents accountable, or is it an opportunity for the state to remind citizens of its power and demand compliance? The two exercises could not be more different, and yet they go by the same name. If past is prologue, Uganda’s elections have a foregone conclusion.

President Donald Trump’s decision to attack Venezuela and capture president Nicolás Maduro ignited a flurry of commentary in the United States about what this would mean for China’s ambitions vis-à-vis Taiwan. Some worried that China could invoke Trump’s unilateral actions as a precedent to snatch Taiwan’s president, while others argued that the United States had lost its moral high ground to intervene on Taiwan’s behalf.

The new year presents the greatest opportunity for the expansion of freedom, and the demise of repressive and anti-American regimes, in the Caribbean that we have seen in decades. In an article in National Review magazine this week, I explained why. First, Venezuela. Last year the democratic forces there won a landslide victory in the presidential election — despite the fact that the regime tried desperately to fix the outcome.