World Politics Review

World Politics Review In-depth news and expert analysis on global affairs. interests. We are likewise unbeholden to any partisan affiliation or party allegiance.

OUR MISSION
World Politics Review publishes in-depth news and expert analysis on global affairs to help our readers identify and make sense of the events and trends shaping our world. Guided by a commitment to integrity, quality and intellectual honesty, we serve as a forum for creative ideas about how to tackle the world’s most important challenges. OUR APPROACH
WPR seeks to strike a balance between the two dominant schools of international relations, realism and liberal internationalism, combining an effort to see the world as it is with a preference for diplomacy and multilateralism in support of a rules- and norms-based global order. We pay particular attention to important but undercovered stories as well as underexamined aspects of the news making headlines, and cover often-ignored corners of the world independently of whether and how they affect U.S. OUR INDEPENDENCE
WPR is funded exclusively by its readers—foreign policy professionals, academics and general readers with an interest in international affairs—through individual and institutional subscription fees. We sell no advertising, and receive no funding from any outside investors, interest groups or foundations.

On Aug. 10, Russia’s Supreme Court disqualified a political party from parliamentary elections for the first time in the...
09/01/2026

On Aug. 10, Russia’s Supreme Court disqualified a political party from parliamentary elections for the first time in the country’s history. The grounds: Yabloko, a liberal anti-war party, had published a ChatGPT-generated image on its website, infringing OpenAI’s copyright.

Yabloko won 1.34 percent of the vote in 2021, has not formed a parliamentary group since 2003, and had been approved by the Kremlin to run just 12 days earlier. What changed was a sudden surge of support from young Russians.

Andrey Sapozhnikov examines what that decision reveals about the logic of Putinism in a new analysis for World Politics Review.

Read Andrey’s analysis at the link in the comments.

09/01/2026

The 1990s had the Golden Arches theory. The 2020s had the Trump Tower peace theory. Both are now dead. WPR columnist Paul Poast on why there is no weird trick for peace.

On Aug. 26, a high-altitude Himalayan glacier broke apart on the Nepal-China border, unleashing a torrent of water, ice,...
09/01/2026

On Aug. 26, a high-altitude Himalayan glacier broke apart on the Nepal-China border, unleashing a torrent of water, ice, rock and mud. More than 1,000 people have died in Nepal, according to the country’s disaster agency, with thousands still missing.

Among the losses was also Gyirong Port, the customs complex that until last week carried about 30 percent of all China-Nepal trade and served as the main entry point for Chinese electric vehicles into Nepal. It was a flagship Belt and Road project—and it had already been closed for nearly six months after a flood in July 2025.

The Himalayas are warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world. Can Beijing rebuild a crossing that nature has destroyed twice in 13 months, or does the strategy behind it need rethinking?

Read more in Mary Gallagher’s latest column for WPR at the link in the comments.

Nepal’s new prime minister has promised to double the country’s economy within five years, a goal the resource-strapped ...
08/31/2026

Nepal’s new prime minister has promised to double the country’s economy within five years, a goal the resource-strapped country cannot reach without foreign aid and investment. Reporting from Kathmandu, Deepak Adhikari examines what that ambition costs a small country wedged between India, China and the United States.

PM Balendra Shah’s government has embraced what it calls “economic and development diplomacy,” seeking support from all three powers without aligning exclusively with any of them.

But cooperation with one often arouses suspicion in another: India views Chinese investment close to its border as a potential security threat, Beijing monitors American contacts with the Nepali Army, and Washington’s priority is pushing back against Chinese influence in the region.

Deepak’s latest analysis for WPR traces how geography sets the limits on Nepal’s choices—and what a country with little leverage can realistically ask for in return.

Read Deepak’s analysis at the link in the comments.

U.S. President Donald Trump announced last week what he called “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY,” taking some form...
08/31/2026

U.S. President Donald Trump announced last week what he called “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY,” taking some form of direct ownership over an estimated 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s oil reserves.

The problem, WPR columnist James Bosworth writes, is that the deal doesn’t give oil companies the assurances they need to make long-term investments in Venezuela’s crumbling energy industry.

James argues the announcement reads more like a 100-day gambit than a 100-year lease, and that lingering questions over the deal’s legitimacy will hold back oil projects across the country.

Read James’s column at the link in the comments.

When torrential rains swept across West Africa in June, the flooding was particularly severe in Ghana, where at least 34...
08/28/2026

When torrential rains swept across West Africa in June, the flooding was particularly severe in Ghana, where at least 34 people were killed and 91,000 more displaced. The government announced roughly $27 million for flood relief and mitigation—a burden falling on a country still emerging from a yearslong debt restructuring.

Ghana’s predicament reflects a pattern across the continent: governments that cannot afford to prepare for climate disasters must borrow to fund recovery, leaving them with even less money to prepare for the next disaster.

Maurice Oniang’o reports for WPR on how negotiations with creditors, rather than pledges at U.N. climate summits, are setting the outer boundary of African climate policy.

Read Maurice’s briefing at the link in the comments.

How do you prevent wars? Enlightenment thinkers believed commerce would do it, and in the 1990s Thomas Friedman populari...
08/28/2026

How do you prevent wars? Enlightenment thinkers believed commerce would do it, and in the 1990s Thomas Friedman popularized a variant of that idea: the “Golden Arches theory,” which held that no two countries with a McDonald’s had gone to war with one another. It was empirically invalidated almost immediately, when NATO bombed Serbia in 1999.

A newer candidate emerged in 2017, when the scholar Philip Lipscy argued that because U.S. President Donald Trump had not divested his stake in his company’s global real estate holdings, his administration was likely to avoid armed conflict with countries hosting one of his properties.

In his latest column for WPR, Paul Poast revisits that “Trump Tower peace theory” and finds that Trump’s war against Iran—and his threat this month to bomb Oman, where a Trump-backed resort is under construction—have blown a hole in it.

Read Paul’s column at the link in the comments.

Volkswagen’s collapse in the Chinese market did not happen overnight. Kevin Zhang and Earl A. Carr Jr. call it the culmi...
08/27/2026

Volkswagen’s collapse in the Chinese market did not happen overnight. Kevin Zhang and Earl A. Carr Jr. call it the culmination of two decades of strategic failure, and in a new analysis for WPR they lay out what European automakers can still do about it.

Kevin and Earl trace a reversal already underway. European firms are absorbing Chinese EV technology through joint ventures and localized production, much as Chinese firms once absorbed theirs. But the terms have changed. Chinese companies are handing European firms the keys to the assembly line while keeping their intellectual property at home.

They argue that Europe’s world-class engineering talent remains a real asset, one that European automakers are now cutting away at home to fund their push into China.

Read Kevin and Earl’s analysis at the link in the comments.

In April, President Trump claimed Iran had undergone “Complete and Total Regime Change” and praised the new leadership i...
08/27/2026

In April, President Trump claimed Iran had undergone “Complete and Total Regime Change” and praised the new leadership in Tehran as “smarter and less radical.” The seven senior security appointments announced earlier this month suggest close to the opposite.

The competition inside Tehran today is not a contest between hard-liners and pragmatists, Frida Ghitis writes in her latest column for WPR. It is between rival power centers all dominated by varying stripes of hard-liners.

The changes suggest Tehran is planning to take an uncompromising stance at home while stiffening its resolve against Washington.

Read Frida’s column at the link in the comments.

Imdat Oner has spent years watching Venezuela’s political system up close, including as deputy chief of mission at the T...
08/26/2026

Imdat Oner has spent years watching Venezuela’s political system up close, including as deputy chief of mission at the Turkish Embassy in Caracas. In a new analysis for WPR, he assesses the first round of talks between Venezuela’s interim government and opposition since Maduro’s ouster in January.

The negotiators’ Aug. 12 agreement to begin reforming the Supreme Tribunal of Justice marks a real departure from two decades of talks that rarely touched the institutions underpinning Chavista power, Oner writes.

But the talks also left the electoral system untouched, and Washington’s willingness to press for a genuinely competitive election—rather than settle for economic stabilization—will determine whether the process amounts to democratic reform or merely a managed succession.

Read Imdat’s analysis at the link in the comments.

Address

New York, NY

Telephone

+19177409773

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when World Politics Review posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to World Politics Review:

Shortcuts

Share

Category