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What if the chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the committee that oversees legislation impacting war powers, treaties, troop deployments, and military aid, was illegally acting as a foreign agent of Egypt, one of the biggest recipients of U.S. aid and military sales?That scenario is exactly what the Department of Justice alleged last month when it accused Sen. Bob Menendez (D—NJ) of using his influence to increase U.S.-taxpayer funded aid to Egypt in exchange for gold bars, a Mercedes and stacks of cash.The Justice Department and Menendez are making history. This is the first time a sitting U.S. senator has been accused of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (or FARA), a law that prohibits Members of Congress from acting as an agent of a foreign principal.The Justice Department's FARA investigations into a high profile politician, think tank president and hip hop star sends a clear message that no one is above the law, says a new video by the Quincy Institute's Senior Video Producer Khody Akhavi and Democratizing Foreign Policy Program Director Ben Freeman.

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year galvanised the West against not only the Kremlin, but also other rivals, especially an increasingly assertive China. But last month, French President Emmanuel Macron headed to Beijing, where ...

Foreign aid to Somaliland has fostered authoritarian rule and contributed towards conflict in the eastern city of Las Anod. In recent months, the apparent miracle of democracy has fractured as conflict has led to hundreds of deaths, and hundreds of thousands displaced. Jethro Norman writes there is a clear international dimension to the crisis. Those in Washington, London and Brussels are oblivious to the problem right under their nose: the consequences of their own aid and investment strategies.
The post Foreign aid and conflict in Somaliland first appeared on ROAPE.
The post Foreign aid and conflict in Somaliland appeared first on ROAPE.

Sital Kalantry (Seattle University Law School) has posted Foreign Law in Dobbs: The Need for A Principled Framework (14 ConLawNOW 37 (2023)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This article critiques the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's...

and wages in food processing: Figure 1: Foreign born labor force (nsa) as share of civilian labor force over 16 (sa) (blue, left scale), and real wage in nondurables manufacturing – food, in 2022$ (tan, right log scale). Uses chained CPI seasonally adjusted using X13. NBER defined peak-to-trough recession dates shaded gray. Red dashed lines […]

Monty Python once - humourosly, you understand - suggested taxing foreigners living in foreign countries. Gordon Brown seems to have taken the show seriously:A $25bn global windfall levy on oil and gas profits, paid by the richest petrostates, would amount to less than 1% of global oil and gas revenues and only 3% of the export earnings of these major producers. Each of the richest petrostates can easily afford to pay. The UAE has seen its export earnings rise from $76bn to $119bn; it can afford to contribute $3bn without any impact on the energy prices paid by its domestic consumers. And it is not alone: with Qatar's export earnings, mainly from gas, rising from $53bn to $86bn it too could easily afford $3bn, as could Kuwait with its export earnings increasing from $63bn to $98bn.Of course all those foreigners would just live to hand over the cash for Gordon to spend. Just love to. One thing does occur to us, where is the contribution from Venezuela? Russia? You only have to give the money away if you're a relatively free and efficient producer? Socialist and authoritarian hellholes are let off the fine? Does wonders for incentives, that does.Rather more importantly, the people responsible for climate change are those who use fossil fuels, not those who produce them. It should be those who use fossil fuels coughing up therefore. But, you know, we still think it an idea worth laughing about. Yes, let's try to tax foreigners living in foreign to fund our spending. Why not? Farce becoming history, didn't someone say something about that? Could we suggest a negotiating line? Yes, yes, of course we'll respect you in the morning, after you've handed over the cash.

Jack Straw was Foreign Secretary in the Blair government from 2001 to 2006. His five years at the Foreign Office saw him grappling with every conflict zone from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, the accession of ten new states to the EU, the failed accession bid from Turkey, the bombing of the Twin Towers on 9/11, and the Allied invasion of Iraq, led by the United States. At this seminar he will reflect on the role of Foreign Secretary with Sir David Manning, foreign policy adviser to Tony Blair from 2001 to 2003, and at the time of the invasion of Iraq, British Ambassador to the US.

Probably like most people I’d got a bit tired of the foreign buyers’ tax revenue estimates issue. At best I can tell, something like the estimates we produced seem more plausible than National’s numbers. In the grand macroeconomic scheme of things, the differences are fairly second order (0.1 per cent of GDP vs the 2.7 … Continue reading Foreign house buyers in Australia: some data

Bing prompt: "Draw a businessman leaving China".Hot on the heels of the previous post about how Chinese are showing at the United States' southern border seeking asylum from increasingly dire economic conditions in the PRC, we get more news of this sort. Just as people are leaving China, so is capital: For the first time its records, the PRC has seen a net outflow of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). On balance, more FDI is leaving than entering China, once the world's most notable destination for investment. From the Nikkei Asia Review: Outflows of foreign direct investment in China have exceeded inflows
for the first time as tensions with the U.S. over semiconductor
technology and concerns about increased anti-spying activity heighten
risks. The shift was reflected in balance-of-payments data for the
July-September quarter released Friday by the State Administration of
Foreign Exchange.FDI came to minus $11.8 billion, with more
withdrawals and downsizing than new investments for factory construction
and other purposes. This marked the first negative figure in data going
back to 1998.To be sure, there are overseas precursors for this shift. The US is keen on banning cutting-edge knowledge on semiconductors and artificial intelligence from leaking to China:Escalating tensions with the U.S. are one reason for the decline in
foreign investment. In a survey taken last fall by the American Chamber
of Commerce in the People's Republic of China, 66% of member respondents
cited rising bilateral tensions as a business challenge in China. In August, the U.S. announced tighter restrictions on chip
and artificial intelligence investment in China. Washington is
coordinating with Beijing ahead of a summit meeting between Presidents
Joe Biden and Xi Jinping in November, but the U.S. remains committed to
technology restrictions in the name of economic security.Looking
at foreign investment in the semiconductor field by destination, China's
share has already shrunk from 48% in 2018 to 1% in 2022, according to
U.S. research firm Rhodium Group. In contrast, the U.S. share rose from zero to 37%. The combined share of India, Singapore and Malaysia grew from 10% to 38%.However, American chip and AI concerns obviously do not make up all potential sources of FDI to China. It is here where a decidedly unfriendly foreign investment policy climate factors in. You name it: from corporate espionage to various forms of harassment of overseas businesses under dubious pretenses... today's PRC leadership does not think much of how others perceive these actions meant to promote domestic industry at the expense of foreign concerns. Europeans, for instance, cite only cosmetic efforts to improve prospects for FDI:Beijing has been seeking to reverse capital outflows in the face of mounting economic challenges. But such efforts appear to have failed to assure investors. The China International Import Expo (CIIE), an annual event
launched by President Xi Jinping in 2018 to portray China as an open
market and improve its trade ties, kicked off on Sunday. But the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China criticized the event last week as a "showcase."



"European businesses are becoming disillusioned as symbolic
gestures take the place of tangible results needed to restore business
confidence," the chamber said in a Friday statement. "The CIIE was originally intended as a showcase of China's opening
up and reform agenda, but it has proven to be largely smoke and mirrors
so far," Carlo D'Andrea, vice president of the chamber, said in the
statement. Having done nearly everything possible to discourage FDI, is it any wonder it's leaving China?

Theme After widespread relief in capitals around the world about Bolsonaro's failed re-election bid in October 2022, Lula has normalised Brazil's ties to the rest of the world. Yet at the same time, friction between Brazil and the West vis-à-vis the war in Ukraine, as well as Lula's controversial views regarding Venezuela, reveal more fundamental […]
La entrada Lula's foreign policy: normalisation and friction se publicó primero en Elcano Royal Institute.

I read Jorge Castañeda's America through Foreign Eyes, and since I was asked to review it, I will keep this brief and let you click on that when it's ready for clicking. Castañeda knows the U.S. very well, and is in a good position to tell us something about ourselves. And he clearly likes the U.S. a lot.The one point that the average American would do well to take from this book is the dangerous absurdity of exceptionalism. We think we're exceptional when we're not, often creating our beliefs by conveniently leaving out key facts. I mean, don't talk about democracy and equality unless you explicitly say you mean only whites. Castañeda, like so many others, is frustrated by these beliefs and sees them as an obstacle to Americans themselves.I will also say that Castañeda is optimistic about how we can change. He often seemed more optimistic than me. So I hope the outsider view is getting something I am missing. Subscribe in a reader

The Biden administration's foreign policy record in 2023 won't give the president much to boast about in next year's election. The U.S. is even more overstretched at the end of 2023 than it was at the beginning, and the president has had very few policy successes. For most of the year, there weren't any major debacles, but that changed over the last two months as the president gave the Israeli government a blank check to wage a brutal war in Gaza. The president committed Washington to support another foreign war in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel while the conflict in Ukraine settled into a stalemate. Even though the U.S. was under no obligation to support this war, the president made a point of turning it into one of his signature policies and linked it closely with support for Ukraine in his public rhetoric. Biden did not, and has not made a compelling case that unconditional support for Israel's campaign is in the best interests of the United States, and the costs of that support have been rising ever since. Furthermore, backing the war exposed U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria to renewed attacks from local militias, and it has also led to increasing risks for U.S. ships in the Red Sea as the Houthis have been launching attacks on commercial shipping to protest the war. The risks that the conflict could escalate and spread into other parts of the region have been growing, and so has the risk that the U.S. could become directly involved in a multi-front war. The president's instinct to back Israel to the hilt has made a wider war more likely and it has put U.S. forces in greater danger.U.S. support for Israel in Gaza has not only overshadowed the rest of Biden's foreign policy agenda, but it has also tied the U.S. to an indiscriminate bombing campaign and a punishing siege that is driving hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians into famine conditions. The Biden administration has not only torched whatever remained of Washington's credibility on human rights and international law, but it has closely associated the U.S. with the war crimes committed against Palestinian civilians.The damage to America's reputation has already been considerable, and the damage to American interests in the Middle East and beyond over the longer term will likely be significant.The setback for Biden's own agenda has been undeniable. The administration's biggest diplomatic initiative of 2023 — the ill-advised pursuit of Saudi-Israeli normalization — stalled when the war in Gaza showed the administration's understanding of the region to be fundamentally flawed. Having bought into the false assumption that U.S.-facilitated normalization agreements between Israel and Arab clients would stabilize the region, the administration failed to recognize how bad things were getting in occupied Palestine. Like their predecessors, the Biden administration did nothing to keep Netanyahu's coalition government in check as it pursued its creeping annexation of the West Bank. Believing that the Palestinians could be safely sidelined and that their grievances could be ignored, the administration was trying to find out what inducements it would take to get Mohammed bin Salman to endorse normalization. If they had been successful, it would have meant another security commitment and more costs for the United States, so it was just as well that this policy was derailed.It isn't clear how much of a factor the push for Saudi normalization was in contributing to Hamas' decision to attack, but it clearly wasn't helpful for the U.S. to waste so much effort on trying to entice the Saudis into a deal while tensions between Israel and the Palestinians was about to explode. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan's infamous line uttered shortly before the start of the war about how the region was quieter than it had been in decades reflected how much the administration had come to believe its own press releases. Support for the war has cost the U.S. a lot of goodwill in countries of the Global South, and the administration's stubborn opposition to a ceasefire has left the U.S. as deeply isolated at the United Nations as it has ever been on a major issue. The administration had earlier emphasized the importance of competing for influence with other major powers in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, but with its hardline position on Gaza it seems to have frittered away most of whatever gains it has made. Especially for an administration that constantly talks about the importance of America's leadership role, it has outdone itself in alienating and driving the rest of the world away from the U.S. on this issue.U.S. support for the war in Ukraine has been undermined by backing for the war in Gaza in two ways. First, it has diverted U.S. attention and resources away from Ukraine as the U.S. has turned its focus once again to the Middle East. It has also made a mockery of the administration's rhetoric in support of Ukraine. The U.S. spent the better part of two years extolling the importance of international law to rally support for Ukraine, and then demonstrated that the U.S. doesn't hold its own clients and partners to the same standard that it expects from other states. The Biden record this year wasn't all bad. On the plus side, the U.S. made some modest progress in stabilizing relations with China near the end of the year after months of deteriorating ties in the wake of the spy balloon incident in February. There was a small diplomatic breakthrough with Iran in the summer that led to the release of five Americans that had been wrongfully detained by the Iranian government. Unfortunately, the administration then reneged on releasing Iranian funds that had been frozen under "maximum pressure" sanctions because they didn't want to be seen as "rewarding" Iran following Hamas' attack.The administration also recently secured another prisoner release agreement with the Venezuelan government. While these were positive results, they were also hardly earth-shattering.The Biden administration had more success in working with established allies. They further developed the technology-sharing AUKUS arrangement with Australia and Britain, and they took advantage of a temporary improvement in relations between South Korea and Japan to strengthen ties with both. In both cases, the administration was pushing on an open door, and it is questionable whether either arrangement will endure, but they can at least point to these things as examples of advancing Biden's agenda. Even more than in previous years, the Biden administration's foreign policy in 2023 has been defined by too much reliance on military tools and too little effort put into diplomatic engagement. That may be one of the reasons why the public now broadly disapproves of Biden's handling of foreign policy. Both for his own sake and for the sake of U.S. interests, the president needs to make some major course changes in 2024 in Gaza and in his overall approach to the world.

After the list was published in September, at least one NGO was singled out for extra financial scrutiny.

Evidence has emerged demonstrating that foreign fighters are operating in Lebanon against Israel.
The post Foreign fighters are operating in Lebanon against Israel first appeared on FDD's Long War Journal.

The EU has not changed enough in response to Russia's war on Ukraine. To be effective, the bloc needs a strategic foreign and security policy.*