COVID-19 Pandemic

President Joe Biden’s China policy is coming into focus. As some of us predicted before his inauguration, he appears to be continuing the previous administration’s hard-line stance with Beijing—suggesting that the COVID-19 crisis marks a turning point akin to how the communist bloc’s attempt to seize West Berlin and South Korea solidified bipartisan commitment to waging the Cold War.

In this Advent Special of the Foreign Policy ProvCast, Mark Melton speaks with Walter Russell Mead about his annual Yule Blog series, which begins on Christmas Eve and runs through Epiphany on January 6.

Chinese Communist Party propagandists are mocking the American election and deriding it as inferior to the Chinese system. They’re wrong.

Taiwan and the US should develop a policy for if, and when, tensions with the People’s Republic of China escalate. For Taiwan, the opportunities of COVID-19 present the perfect time to do so.

The pandemic has only confirmed the importance of states.

Pandemics have historically been catalysts for political, economic, and social change. From Thucydides, Prokopios, and Ibn Khaldun, historians of the past who lived through the great pandemics of their day charted the ghastly toll of these invisible killers.

With Myanmar’s military still controlling 25 percent of its parliament and a history of brutal crackdowns—not to mention the recent Rohingya crisis—COVID-19 is exacerbating the precarious balance between the military and civilians in power.

In the past few weeks, Pakistan has attempted to mitigate COVID-19’s effect on its economy and people. However, these efforts have largely ignored the needs of Pakistan’s minorities. The result is an increase in human rights violations.

Our world is broken and bending toward chaos, as it was in 1968, as it has been since the Fall, as it will be until Christ returns to make all things new.