The increasing arc of instability running across Africa today resembles less a series of isolated crises than a single, widening belt of state collapse, insurgency, proxy war, and foreign intervention stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea. From Mali and Niger to Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the same themes recur with grim consistency: weak post-colonial states, ethnic and religious fragmentation, weapons flows across porous borders, foreign meddling, and Washington repeatedly insisting it can manage extraordinarily complex societies with...

President Donald Trump’s recent two-day summit in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping concluded much as anticipated. In an article written ahead of the trip, I noted that expectations for substantive breakthroughs in the fraught Sino-American relationship were likely to be disappointed. The events of the visit bore this out. While the tone was notably, and welcomely, warmer than in recent years and both sides touted “fantastic trade deals,” the core structural tensions—trade imbalances, technology restrictions, Taiwan, and regional security—remain largely unaddressed. What emerged was...

When President Donald Trump arrived in Beijing yesterday for his summit with Xi Jinping, much of the American foreign policy establishment framed the meeting through the familiar lens of “great power competition.” Analysts will scrutinize every handshake, communiqué, and trade announcement for signs that Washington is either “standing up” to China or “conceding” ground to its principal rival. But the more important reality is that the summit will likely underscore just how much the balance of leverage has shifted over the past several years—and how little appetite Beijing has for rescuing...

In 2011, the world welcomed its newest country. Fifteen years later, South Sudan is less a symbol of self-determination than a case study in state failure. Its politics remain dominated by factional strongmen, its economy is almost entirely dependent on oil, and the threat of renewed large-scale violence never quite recedes. For most Americans, it barely registers—just another distant tragedy filed away under “Africa.” But South Sudan did not simply emerge from the mists of post-colonial history. It was, in no small part, a project of Washington. That fact alone should invite scrutiny,...