Daniel DePetris

Haiti has never been known as a beacon of stability and tranquility. Most of its politicians are feckless, in league with criminals, or too consumed with trying to stay alive themselves. America not so long ago intervened on the island twice in 10 years — the first time in 1994, when President Clinton’s threat of an invasion compelled the junta to reverse its coup three years earlier, and the second in 2004, when the Bush administration participated in an international stabilization force after Haiti’s president Jean-Bertrand Aristide resigned. But this year has been an especially tough one for the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation.

For the first time in two decades, and arguably for the first time since the late 1970s, there is a semblance of calm in Afghanistan’s countryside. The US troop withdrawal last August, ending Washington’s 20-year misadventure in the country, has ushered in a period when airstrikes, IEDs, and Taliban-orchestrated bombings are no longer daily facts of life. Afghans who haven’t seen their relatives for years are now able to travel the roads without worrying about getting menaced by Taliban gunmen or fleeced by corrupt Afghan army troops. At the same time, Afghanistan is at a perilous moment in its history.

When President Donald Trump in 2020 signed a trade deal with China after years of escalatory tariffs, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden blasted the agreement. 'China is the big winner of Trump’s "phase-one" trade deal with Beijing,' Biden said after the agreement was finalized. He wasn’t alone. Many trade experts at the time believed the purchasing targets Beijing was required to meet were highly unrealistic. Sure enough, China’s compliance has been less than ideal. According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, China is roughly 70 percent of the way there with two months left to go. Yet despite Biden’s past comments about the accord, not to mention the tariffs that set the stage for the deal, the White House isn’t fully breaking with the pact.

President Joe Biden walked into the grand UN General Assembly chamber this morning with a list of asks, an appeal for greater cooperation among the world’s great powers and a bit of controversy trailing behind him. Biden’s first UN address came at a difficult time in American diplomacy. The European Union, led by an irate France, is livid over a $60 billion US-Australian nuclear submarine deal that European leaders view as skeevy and duplicitous. And last month’s American troop exit from Afghanistan remains a sore point for contributing nations in the Nato coalition, some of which wanted more time to evacuate their own nationals. Biden, however, sidestepped all of these disputes.

When President Joe Biden tapped longtime aide Antony Blinken to be his secretary of state last November, Blinken landed his dream job. Here he was, a man widely respected in foreign policy circles, continuing the family business (his father and uncle were both ambassadors and his stepfather was an adviser to John F. Kennedy). What Blinken could have lived without, however, was the grandstanding, bravado and livid speeches from lawmakers responsible for overseeing his work. Unfortunately, fielding self-righteous questions is a part of the job description.

America’s allies in Europe understood months before President Joe Biden’s fateful April speech to the American people that a full and complete US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan was a very real possibility. Biden talked about the urgency of getting the United States out of what he termed ‘forever war’ conflicts which required tens of billions of dollars a year (not to mention thousands of US troops on the ground) to maintain.

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden promised to approach Russia and its irascible President Vladimir Putin with a new sense of toughness and purpose. Now calling the shots in the White House, President Biden appears to have made good on that promise — at least symbolically. On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced several sets of sanctions against Moscow for last summer's attempted assassination of the Russian activist Alexei Navalny, a plot that involved the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok. The sanctions, taken in concert with the European Union’s own measures, included asset freezes and travel bans on seven Russian officials deemed responsible for the poisoning, imprisonment, and prosecution of Navalny.

Today, after pressure from senior US lawmakers and staring at an impending statutory deadline, the Biden administration authorised the release of a declassified intelligence report on one of the most grisly state-sanctioned murders in recent history. The killing of Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi may have occurred 16 months ago, but the murder has hung around the US-Saudi relationship like a wet blanket. The US intelligence community’s assessment that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the heir to the throne, was intricately involved in Khashoggi’s death was a bombshell heard around the world. And yet media reactions notwithstanding, MbS’s role in Khashoggi’s demise was hardly a surprise. This was the worst-kept secret on the planet.

It’s official: the inauguration is over, the speeches have been given, and political power in the United States has been transferred to new hands. Joe Biden, a man who first entered the national spotlight in 1972 as a young senator from Delaware, is now the 46th president of the United States. Biden is the quintessential politician, someone who is an expert glad-hander and in many ways a creature of Washington. He knows how power is wielded, understands how to smooth the bloated egos of lawmakers, and is the one person his former boss, Barack Obama, felt comfortable taking the lead in negotiations with Republicans.