Program: A New Foreign Policy

A New Foreign Policy: Ideas to shift the approach and implementation of U.S. foreign policy of peace, prosperity, and solidarity.

Congress Can Still Act To Prevent Atrocities in Sudan

Three years in, Sudan’s civil war remains one of the world’s most pressing humanitarian crises, killing an estimated 150,000 people and forcibly displacing more than 12 million more, according to the United Nations Human Rights Council. The conflict quickly escalated into a large-scale proxy war: the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) are backed financially and militarily by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, and Iran, while the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have transformed from a small militia into a potent military proxy of the United Arab Emirates. 

In June 2026, both chambers of Congress moved competing bills to confront the war, the Senate’s PEACE in Sudan Act and the House’s U.S. Engagement in Sudanese Peace Act, each advancing out of committee within days of the other. The two measures diverge sharply on the one question that matters most: whether to act against the war’s foreign sponsors. This split highlights how, despite prior diplomatic attempts, the provision of humanitarian aid, and significant sanctions efforts and legislative attention, in practice, the United States remains largely a bystander, allowing several of its allies to fight one another in a conflict with devastating impacts for civilians.

The U.S. maintains strong military relations with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, and the UAE, all of whom have grown in the last decade as exporters of military equipment. According to the State Department’s FY2025 arms transfers report, the U.S. supplied Saudi with air-to-air missiles amounting to $3.5 billion. The U.S. also extended military services to Egypt amounting to nearly $10 billion. The UAE has received over $2 billion in military deliveries since January 2025. While as recent as June 2026, the U.S. is pushing forward with a $700 million sale of jet engines to Turkey. This parallels Turkey’s growth in their production and exportation of arms, today supplying nearly 40 countries with military equipment, including the SAF. Like Turkey, the UAE has quickly expanded its military industry in the last decade, completely shifting from one of the world’s largest arms importers into a premier global defense manufacturer and exporter. This arms export competition between Turkey and the UAE is playing out in real time in Sudan. Moreover, despite sanctions barring the SAF and RSF from acquiring U.S. weapons, the arms race between Turkey and the UAE reveals an additional crack in the long-uncontested notion of U.S. military hegemony. The U.S. can’t simply end a war by restricting Sudan’s access to U.S. weapons because of an endless backline supply of weapons from other emerging military superpowers.

Failed interventions

The United States is not new to this conflict, and analyzing its record of failed intervention is significant for shaping future action. Within weeks of the war’s outbreak, Washington and Riyadh convened the warring parties in Jeddah, producing the Jeddah Declaration of Commitment to Protect the Civilians of Sudan on May 11, 2023, followed by a week-long ceasefire that entered into force on May 22. Both collapsed almost immediately, and on May 31 the SAF suspended its participation, accusing the RSF of occupying hospitals and civilian areas. 

When the talks resumed in late October 2023 with the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and the African Union added as co-facilitators, the mediators deliberately narrowed their ambitions, stating explicitly that the negotiations “will not address issues of a political nature” and would focus only on humanitarian access and confidence-building measures. That round, too, was suspended in early December amid continued hostilities and a failure to implement even basic confidence-building measures. 

The Jeddah Platform’s main flaw was that it confined itself to humanitarian access and ceasefire mechanics, expressly setting aside the political future of the country. It also treated the conflict as a simple power struggle between two Sudanese generals rather than a large-scale proxy contest sustained by foreign military aid. Subsequent efforts inherited the same weaknesses. A refreshed round in Geneva in August 2024, organized by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Switzerland with Egypt, the UAE, the African Union, and the United Nations as observers, failed because of SAF’s opposition to the UAE’s presence and subsequent boycotting.

The most serious attempt came in September 2025, when the Quad (made up by the U.S. and the three Arab powers closest to the war: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE) issued a roadmap to peace starting with a three-month humanitarian truce, to be followed by a permanent ceasefire and a nine-month transition toward an independent, civilian-led government. This was the first time that external powers met on a common framework, forming the Joint Operational Committee in October 2025. However, a month later, Al-Burhan of the SAF again argued that the UAE’s inclusion rendered it biased in favor of the RSF, who only accepted the humanitarian truce portion of the agreement. By the time U.S. envoy Massad Boulos announced in February 2026 that the Quad had reached a peace document acceptable to both sides, aiming for a truce by March, the RSF had already seized El Fasher, the last major city under government control in Darfur, amid mass killings and ethnic cleansing which the U.S. has deemed to be an ongoing genocide perpetrated by the RSF. As of mid-2026, fighting has migrated to surrounding areas with no truce ever materializing.

Reading the room

Read side by side, the American-backed efforts to end this war reveal a pattern of absence of clear and binding enforcement, with neither a monitoring regime nor a penalty for violation, which led to commitments being broken within days and at no cost. The sharpest contrast, and the one that matters most for how Washington should proceed, lies in who was seated at the table. Convening al-Burhan and Hemedti while their foreign sponsors continued to ship arms, money, and drones into the country left the actual engine of the war untouched, and no amount of confidence-building at the table could outpace the resupply flowing to it. The Quad corrected precisely this, bringing Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE into a shared framework for the first time, and that convergence among the external powers closest to the war was a real achievement. But the insistence on including the UAE in peace negotiations demonstrates a clear contradiction. While Al-Burhan’s objection is opportunistic, welcoming his own backers Egypt and Saudi Arabia, it is unacceptable to treat the UAE, the RSF’s principal documented backer of a genocide, as a co-equal broker at the negotiation table.

The problem, then, is not that the sponsors are in the room. It is that Washington keeps mistaking their presence for their cooperation. Seating the UAE among the mediators conferred on it the standing of a peacemaker while requiring nothing of it, and its weapons continued to reach the RSF throughout. The instrument capable of changing that conduct lies outside the negotiating room, in the arms relationship the United States maintains with the UAE, and to a lesser extent, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. The single variable that could break this pattern, real coercive pressure on the sponsors to stop arming their proxies, is the one Washington has consistently declined to apply in the past.

On June 9th, 2026, Senators Shaheen, Risch, Coons, and Cornyn introduced the PEACE in Sudan Act as a bipartisan measure intending to penalize parties pouring arms into the conflict. The bill also hoped to create semiannual reports on foreign governments arming the SAF and RSF, an assessment of whether any armed actor qualifies as a terrorist organization, an updated business-risk advisory, and an extension of the Special Envoy’s mandate from two years to five. At the June 17th Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Markup, Senator Chris Van Hollen offered an amendment barring U.S. military transfers to the UAE for as long as it continues supplying the RSF, but the committee voted it down fifteen to seven. Even Shaheen, the top Democratic lawmaker on the committee and a co-sponsor of the bill, likewise said she would “reluctantly oppose the amendment, even though I agree with everything [Senator Van Hollen] said,” in fear that this amendment would “kill the bill.” 

What did pass in the committee, awaiting a full Senate floor vote, is entirely composed of discretionary and reversible tools. Its central sanctions provision, Section 8, authorizes the President to block property, freeze transactions, and deny visas to foreign persons who arm the belligerents, obstruct a ceasefire, traffic Sudanese gold, or commit atrocities, yet it does so permissively, leaving it all up to executive whim. 

Beyond that, the bill directs the State Department to develop a comprehensive strategy for securing a ceasefire and a civilian-led political settlement, instructs U.S. representatives to oppose international financial institution lending to the government of Sudan, and bars non-humanitarian assistance to the country, though each of those last two restrictions carries a national-security waiver the President can invoke at his own discretion. What survived markup, then, is a framework that catalogs the war’s sponsors in exhaustive detail, equips the President to punish them if he chooses, and obligates him to punish no one.

In parallel, the House introduced a markedly stronger bill that had been waiting more than a year for the chance. House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Gregory Meeks’s U.S. Engagement in Sudanese Peace Act, was introduced in March 2025 in coordination with Representative Sara Jacobs, but then denied a markup for fifteen months. Where the PEACE in Sudan Act says the President “may” sanction those who arm the belligerents, Section 103 of the House bill says he “shall impose 6 or more” of its enumerated penalties on any foreign person identified as perpetrating atrocities or blocking humanitarian aid. 

Critically, Section 206 of the House bill prohibits the sale, export, or transfer of major defense equipment to any country the President identifies as supporting the RSF or SAF, the same arms leverage the Senate rejected the following week. The House legislation even argues for American support for a United Nations, African Union, or multinational force to protect civilians and monitor a ceasefire, an option the Senate bill ruled out entirely. On June 9th, 2026, the House Foreign Affairs Committee adopted the bill by a vote of thirty-four to five, with broad bipartisan support. It now awaits a floor vote.

However, for either bill to become law, the House and Senate must converge on identical text, and unfortunately, the path of least resistance favors the weaker document from the Senate. A provision survives conference only if both chambers will accept it, which hands an effective veto to whichever side is most reluctant, and the Senate has already recorded its reluctance at fifteen to seven. The mandatory sanctions of Section 103 and the arms prohibition of Section 206, the provisions that give the House bill its force, are therefore the likeliest casualties of a negotiated text. The lopsided House vote is a genuine counterweight, evidence that binding measures can command bipartisan support, but Washington’s recent track record on Sudan suggests it usually settles for the lowest common denominator.

While these two bills are the most progress we have made since Jeddah, it also seems to be a way for Congress to act on Sudan without requiring anyone to spend the political capital that action would cost, and the markup showed how it works in practice: senators who agreed with Van Hollen on the merits voted his amendment down to protect a bill that asks nothing binding of anyone. The provisions that would sanction Sudan itself or bar the belligerents from U.S. weapons are the easiest to pass and the least useful, because the SAF and RSF never depended on American arms and the Sudanese state is not the party fueling the war. The provision that would reach the war’s actual engine, the arms relationship with the UAE, is the one the Senate stripped.

Process and pressure make praxis
Condition the arms relationship with the UAE. Enact the Stand Up for Sudan Act, suspending designated U.S. defense sales until the President certifies Abu Dhabi has ended material support for the RSF. Reconcile the two bills toward the House text. Keep the stronger House provisions, which require sanctions and bar weapons sales to countries arming the war, rather than leaving it to the President to decide. Put the political endgame on the table. Any future negotiations must center the political future of Sudan and its transition to a civilian-led government alongside ceasefire terms.

The House arms prohibition, if a President chose to invoke it, is precisely the leverage this war has always required, and the tools these measures contain are worth having on the books. But a tool is only as good as the will to use it. The failures traced throughout this conflict share one cause: every American effort has offered the sponsors pressure without a process or a process without pressure, and the war has outlasted both. Ending it requires the two at once. It requires immediately conditioning the arms relationship with the UAE and other perpetrators, and then spending that leverage inside a negotiation that puts the political future of Sudan on the table rather than walling it off. 

In practice, this would look like enacting Senator Van Hollen’s Stand Up for Sudan Act, suspending the sale and licensing of designated U.S. defense articles to the UAE until the President certifies that it is no longer providing material support to the RSF, and a reconciled bill should adopt the House’s mandatory arms prohibition on that model, replacing its open-ended national-security waiver with a certification standard. 

The UAE has spent years seeking American F-35 fighters, fields U.S.-supplied F-16s and missile-defense systems, and depends on Washington for the precision munitions and sustainment that keep its air force capable. Each of those transfers is also a pressure point, because Congress already holds a veto over them and needs no new authority to use it. The Arms Export Control Act of 1976 requires the executive branch to formally notify Congress before any major sale proceeds, and that notification opens a thirty-day window in which any senator can force a floor vote on a resolution to block it. 

Whatever the U.S. requires of the UAE in exchange for lifting such a hold should be specific and verifiable, anchored to evidence the government already possesses, including the Treasury designations of UAE-based entities arming the RSF issued in January 2025, and confirmed through the United Nations Panel of Experts that the Senate bill itself invokes. The United States has more influence over the external backers of this war than any other power, because it arms most of them. Whether it will use that influence to stop a genocide is the question its Sudan policy has yet to answer.

Michael Ishak holds a B.A. in History from Columbia University. His work focuses on conflict, displacement, and human rights accountability in the Middle East and North Africa.

Support the Iran Ceasefire; End the Disastrous War and a Decade of Failed Policy

June 15, 2026–In response to reports that the United States and Iran have reached a ceasefire agreement to be signed by the end of the week, the Center for International Policy’s Executive Vice President Matt Duss issued the following statement:

“With news of a ceasefire agreement to end the disastrous and unnecessary US-Israeli war on Iran, the tragic failure of Donald Trump’s Iran policy has now played out exactly as antiwar critics warned it would.

“Trump said that his war on Iran would be quick, decisive and force the regime to totally capitulate or collapse. We warned it would become a quagmire that would fail to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program, ignite a regional conflict that could threaten the global economy, further strengthen the Iranian regime’s hold on power and cost thousands of lives–including American servicemembers. We were right.

“This diplomatic agreement is critically needed to bring the disaster to an end, and must be fully and swiftly implemented. Nonetheless, the United States will be left in a weakened strategic position – not because of the contents of this agreement, but because of the utter failure of the reckless approach taken by Trump at the urging of pro-war groups in Washington, and a racist, corrupt Israeli Prime Minister.

“US lawmakers from both parties should support the agreement to end this historic and completely avoidable foreign policy disaster. Just as importantly, both Congress and the White House must end the definitively failed approach of ever-increasing sanctions and belligerence toward Iran, and seek to build on this new opening for diplomacy to address the full range of issues–as well as potential opportunities–in the US-Iran relationship.”

A New China Policy Requires An American Reality Check

In the 2026 elections and beyond, Democrats campaign on resetting the Trump Administration’s volatile foreign policy. Trump’s administration started Middle East Wars, sank ships in the Caribbean and imprisoned political dissenters using immigration enforcement. Liberal internationalists have some ideas planned for that Democrat-led reset. In a piece at Liberal Currents, Adam Gurri argues for a return to hawkishness towards China as a crucial part of that future, and a central pillar of any effective campaign.

It’s easy to see why liberals like the idea. China, for its part, has remained relatively unchanged in terms of human rights violations, aims of economic hegemony and other ambitions. In contrast to more fraught international issues like foreign aid or joining the international criminal court, opposing China is an easy bipartisan cause: commissions already exist on security, human rights, and a miscellany of Chinese Communist Party issues. 

Gurri writes: “A new Cold War is upon us, whether we want it or not. We can either retreat from it, and allow China to consolidate its international influence unopposed, or we can pursue a genuine reconstruction of the international system, one that creates a gravity well of liberal democracy into which regimes may be drawn.”

This mindset draws from liberal practices of foreign policy that characterized the Obama and Biden administrations. Also-ran candidates Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris pitched variations of this system, where hawkishness was complemented by bolstering a rules-based international order of alliances and influence. The electoral track record for smarter, more liberal hawkishness remains, at best, deeply mixed. At worst, liberal hawks enable damage that Trumpian foreign policy enacts while resolving none of the recovery efforts that foreign policy requires.

Setting aside the vague fearmongering related to China’s rapid rise at the center of his piece, Gurri’s arguments fall apart based on one crucial factor: the significantly fallen ideological and geopolitical clout of the United States. In a weakened Washington and in New York’s United Nations, America shed many of the tools needed to construct the infrastructure Gurri’s idea requires. Reconstruction of those tools is required before the US can attempt to execute any foreign policy competently, much less one that demands the world follow America’s lead as moral arbiter while overlooking repeated Trump administrations.

The damage that needs repair is deep. As eyewitness accounts from former USAID staff and other career victims of DOGE  emerge, the toothlessness of American bureaucracy only becomes more and more overt. Whatever was left of the foreign policy infrastructure built up since the last Cold War was dismantled. Under the guidance of Elon Musk and his lieutenants, they were, in Musk’s words,  “fed into the woodchipper.” 

The capacity to rebuild is under threat, too.  Scholarships promoting equity in foreign policy such as the Boren and Pickering Fellowships have been suspended, delayed, reduced in scale or canceled. Whatever destruction wasn’t modified or changed by DOGE was simply picked up by an equally eager leadership team led by Marco Rubio. 

A more equitable and effective platform on China should examine what was broken or dismantled and begin a rebuilding process with swiftness and efficiency. If Democrats want a diplomatic corps that bases decisions on knowledge and research, they must give that corps the resources to learn and utilize said knowledge and research. Without an accounting of what was lost in the Trump administration, the United States cannot construct anything resembling an international order worth pursuing. 

The rebuilding process should also center individuals and communities at the epicenter of both Chinese state harassment and American persecution, of which there are many. Guan Heng, an asylum seeker who photographed prison camps in Xinjiang, spent months in immigration detention before he was finally granted asylum. Even so, he was questioned  if his intention in filming the detention facilities and then releasing the video a few days before arriving in the US was to give him grounds to apply for asylum.” Chinese scholars are still reeling from the last Trump Administration’s China initiatives. In the tragic case of Jane Wu, a principal investigator at Northwestern University, institutional harassment pressured her into taking her own life.  

The crass logic of clumsily and brutally pursuing Chinese nationals as a means to an end has become the norm of Marco Rubio’s State Department. Even when Rubio himself departs, bureaucrats that he elevated and promoted will still be embedded within Foggy Bottom. If the Secretary of State himself is any indication, the causes he previously championed in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Taiwan are afterthoughts at best. These communities have not remained isolated from bigotry and mistreatment during the Trump Administration. Without specific attention to their concerns, a new Democratic White House would lose their vital voices in conversations on how to best protect family members and associates still in China. 

Finally, there is the question of whether or not hawkishness produces desired results for the United States. Hawkish competition by the United States has seldom yielded a meeker, more compliant China. Xi’s strongman persona thrives under hardline conditions and allows him to further cement his grip on power and staff up on America-hawks and ideologues. A Democratic President cannot undo the experiences of Guan Heng and Jane Wu, nor can it make amends to minorities targeted by both American immigration police and Chinese authorities. The very least it can do, however, is to audit and assess how to minimize harm to the Chinese diaspora community that calls the United States home. 

A more sensible solution for potential Democratic candidates would be to begin by repairing and refurbishing the pieces of diplomacy, cultural inclusivity and the American academy. Top foreign policy programs get cut from program funding, with the resources redirected towards Christian and Mormon institutions.  The State Department itself requires an overhaul, and safety to consular staff and mistreated contractors and locals are a top priority. They cannot risk a second wave of stranded diplomats and a police-shuttered USIP office building.

While these maintenance tasks aren’t the most rewarding electorally, they are essential to the survival of effective Asia policy and sound decision-making. Instead of satisfying hawkishness for its own sake, proactive recovery and the building of diplomatic institutions must come first.

Rui Zhong is a writer and researcher living in the Washington D.C. metro area. She studies China, censorship, and technology’s role in nationalism and foreign policy.

 

Escaping Europe’s oil straitjacket with decarbonization

The current global energy crisis reveals, once again, that Europe remains highly dependent on imported fossil-fuels. Experts argue that now, it is clear that the only way to secure Europe’s energy security is through rapid and ambitious decarbonisation. 

In Ireland, Norway, France, and the United Kingdom, protesters voice displeasure at the near-doubling of fuel prices following the ongoing energy price shock from the tolling and blocking of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. As people take to the streets and urge action to protect citizens against rapidly rising energy costs, Europe reels from the consequences of its dependency on fossil fuel imports.

If this sounds familiar, it should. 

The current energy crisis is only the latest revealing again how Europe’s energy dependency leaves it vulnerable to geopolitical instability. 

As Europe’s political leadership rushes to find solutions to protect citizens’ pocketbooks in the short term, analysts argue that temporary bandaid measures must not come in the place of more comprehensive policies to transform Europe’s energy system. 

The EU should suspend spending debt and deficit rules and rapidly expand funding for renewable energy projects. Oil windfall profits should be taxed while programs alleviating unemployment and high energy prices for workers will provide immediate relief. . EU member states should follow the examples of Spain, rapidly expanding its renewable capacity and decouple electricity prices from international fossil-fuel markets States should directly invest in public energy projects to ensure renewable power generation is built and held sovereign States must identify key industries to support and protect for economic and geopolitical security.

And yet, while the current shock has hallmarks of previous crises, analysts Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay of the Polycrisis argue that this time is different. It’s the first time that renewable alternatives are both cheap and accessible, saying that the current crisis is accelerating our transition towards an “electric world order.”

Alex Chapman, senior economist at the New Economics Foundation (NEF), says that if there is one lesson to be taken from the current crisis it is “that we need to have an economy that is less dependent on fossil fuels and more self-reliant on domestic renewable energy sources.” 

Leaders may seize the opportunity and frustration caused by the latest crisis to steer their economies away from fossil fuel dependency. But first, they will have to minimize the pain felt by workers from the price hikes. 

Polycrisis Management

In the immediate response to the current crisis, Europe must implement measures to protect workers and purchasing power in the short-term, says Judith Kirton-Darling, General Secretary of IndustriALL-Europe, the trade union federation representing Europe’s industrial workers.

The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) estimates that the average annual energy bill for European consumers will rise by around €1800 Euros ($2100) unless immediate actions are taken. The ETUC also notes that EU consumer spending is plummeting, putting even greater pressure on the continent’s economy. 

Kirton-Darling calls for the EU to implement a “SURE 2.0” employment protection program that was used during the COVID pandemic that would provide financial support to prevent layoffs in the short-term.

She also calls for the taxing of windfall profits for fossil-fuel companies – a measure that was taken during the outbreak of the invasion of Ukraine when fossil-fuel companies made record-breaking profits. Oil giants are already expected to make enormous windfall profits by the end of the year. 

Policies that would protect the most vulnerable consumers from energy costs are important, argues Chapman, noting that the most impactful intervention during the energy hikes resulting from the invasion of Ukraine was a scheme that gave all households a specific amount of subsidised energy at a lower rate. 

These policies will offer short-term relief. To escape the cycle of crisis and temporary relief, experts argue that Europe must wean itself from its reliance on imported fossil fuels and address the systemic vulnerabilities it results in. 

Europe’s energy woes are longstanding and systematic

Europe’s energy prices have long been significantly higher than other countries like the United States and China. This contributes to a profound crisis in Europe’s key energy-intensive sectors, such as steel and chemicals, since international competitors can produce with far-lower energy costs. 

“We have an essentially existential crisis in our foundation industries because of energy prices. We’ve already lost something like 100,000 jobs in European steel in recent years. We’ve lost something like 30,000 jobs in the chemical sector”, says Kirton-Darling. 

These high prices are impacted by Europe’s dependency on fossil-fuel imports for its energy. According to Eurostat, the EU’s energy dependency rate is around 60% for all sources of energy; with the shares rising to 85% for natural gas and 97% for oil and petroleum products. 

While much of this energy came from Russia before the invasion of Ukraine, the bloc shifted towards other countries for energy, increasing reliance on the United States and Qatar. Just four years after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Trump’s voluntary war against Iran jeopardizes this reliance, as the Trump administration willingly weaponizes Europe’s energy dependence. Switching suppliers likely prolonged, rather than resolved, Europe’s state of dependency. 

The price that Europeans pay for energy is exposed to international gas market volatility in other ways as well. 

European hourly wholesale electricity prices operate in a way where the price is set by the most expensive source of power in the energy mix at that time. This system of marginal pricing means that when renewables don’t produce enough electricity to meet demand, the market price often gets set by international gas and coal market prices. 

Coupling the price of electricity to the most expensive source means that when international gas prices are volatile and rise sharply, and when renewables are insufficient to meet demand, wholesale electricity prices can rise dramatically. 

A rapid uptake of renewables would mitigate this phenomenon, ensuring that they provide the bloc’s electricity for as much time as possible. An analysis by the policy thinktank Breugel argues that “scaling up non-fossil generation and thereby reducing the share of hours when gas sets the electricity price is the only structural approach to decouple Europe’s electricity prices from fossil prices and future shocks.”

We already see benefits for countries that have gone the furthest in terms of renewable energy capacity. Spain has doubled its renewable capacity since 2019 and as a result, the amount of time that electricity prices were set by fossil fuel prices has dropped by 75%. 

As evidence mounts that greater investment in renewables can offer lower prices and protection against global instability, significant challenges remain stalling Europe’s capacity to install new capacity and expand investments. 

Europe’s homegrown constraints

In the EU, rules dictating the amount of debt and deficit that countries can run in their public budgets mean that governments can be blocked by the EU from increasing public spending, potentially presenting a barrier that prevents governments from raising their investments in transforming their energy systems. 

“At the moment, we have our hands tied behind our backs because we have 7 member states who are subject to fiscal restraints processes”, says Kirton-Darling, who calls for a suspension of these rules given the scale of the emergency at hand. 

Chapman from the NEF also calls for greater coordination between central banks and governments: “central banks are inclined to act to reduce inflation by increasing interest rates, but increasing interest rates makes it harder to invest in the technologies that we need for our own security.”

He also argues for greater state-led initiatives that do not just depend on providing incentives for private capital investments: “we argue that states should be more confident to directly invest and own levers of production and to take some risks on developing new supply chains rather than paying exorbitant amounts of money to de-risk for the private sector.”

Beyond just increasing the amount of renewable capacity in Europe, the continent will have to invest in the infrastructure supporting it. Europe’s underinvested electricity grid is already struggling to handle new capacity. Moreover, the overall electrification of the EU economy has stalled at just over 20%. This means that much of the EU continues to be nearly as dependent on non-electric sources for final energy consumption, like gasoline for transportation, as nearly 20 years ago. 

Nevertheless, we are already seeing decisions from Europe’s political leaders to move quickly to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. The UK government has recently mandated that all new homes be built with heat pumps and new plug-in solar capacity; France has doubled its public aid for electrification. 

Whether or not Europe’s leadership can meet the demands of the current moment, it serves as a potent reminder that a rapid energy transition towards domestically produced renewable energy is not only driven by ecological concerns, but also a pathway towards security in the face of repeated geopolitical tumult. 

Nevertheless, this drive also reflects a newfound geopolitical terrain on which Europe will have to find its footing. 

Castell de Savallà (Savallà del Comtat) MARIA ROSA FERRE ((CC BY-SA 2.0))

New geopolitical terrain and China as the rising victor

The sharp rise in fossil fuel prices and repeated energy price shocks in recent years has already ignited action in countries beyond the EU, most notably within China. 

Sahay and Mackenzie write in the Polycrisis that China is rapidly emerging as an “electrostate”, positioning itself as an alternative global hegemon to the US petrostate model. Through massive investments in the technologies necessary for decarbonization (Electrical Vehicles, Batteries, and Solar), it has made rapid progress in reducing its reliance on fossil fuels while developing cheaper and better technologies at a blistering pace. 

Already, China produces four-fifths of the world’s solar panels and batteries and has considerable control over the supply chains necessary to produce renewables. China’s investments have resulted in the price of new renewable capacity installations falling sharply: now, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimates that new renewable installations are cheaper than new fossil-fuel power alternatives in 91% of cases. 

Pakistan has emerged as an unlikely victor as it has shifted a meaningful share of its energy production to renewables in recent years and is estimated to have saved billions by replacing Liquid Natural Gas imports. 

The war in Iran is accelerating China’s sale of renewable technologies and the Chinese electrical vehicle manufacturer BYD has seen a doubling of their orders in some Asian showrooms since the war began, presenting a significant risk to Europe’s historically important car manufacturing sector. 

Concerns persist within Europe on whether these developments mean yet another shift of its energy dependencies on a new international partner. The EU manufacturers a shrinkingly small share of new global renewable capacity and will undoubtedly have to rely extensively on China for new capacity supplies. 

Nevertheless, Alex Chapman says that this reflects a different kind of dependency than that on fossil fuels: “it isn’t necessarily the same kind of reliance. It isn’t an indefinite, permanent relationship the way that our reliance on fossil fuels is.” 

In other words, geopolitical shocks like the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz would not result in suddenly wiping off already installed renewable capacity and doesn’t create a kind of persistent dependency the way that fossil fuels do. Fossil fuel extraction is geographically concentrated and prone to disruption; once a solar array is installed, no one can blockade the sun.

Nevertheless, these changing relations reflect a rapid reconfiguration of international geopolitical relations where we may be witnessing more profound transformations. Sahay and Mackenzie write that “increasingly, the US is not so much the gatekeeper of the world’s only energy system, but the paranoid guardian of an ailing oil order that is rapidly losing primacy. Clean energy alternatives are becoming more attractive, cheaper, and—most importantly—more reliable.”

Europe’s roots in the old order are deep, and the continent has shown itself reluctant to make significant moves that can adapt to new realities. Nevertheless, the European Union is working to boost its own investments in clean tech, partially through the Industrial Accelerator Act, which seeks to invest in modernizing and decarbonizing Europe’s ailing industries. 

Kirton-Darlin says that IndustriALL-Europe is a “proponent of the act and measures to to boost European domestic production of key technologies”, while Chapman adds that countries will need to establish framework of the industries that are fundamentally essential to sustaining quality of life” and take the necessary steps to protect them.

At the same time, however, there continues to be a rising and persistent internal threat: that of the far-right political parties that continue to have steadfast presences in the European political arena and place anti-decarbonisation policies at the centre of their visions of the future. 

Moreover, there is evidence that the perception of worsening economic conditions can drive voters to far-right parties, meaning that the current energy crisis may in fact further push Europe’s voters to parties that would implement the exact parties that may exacerbate the likelihood of crises in the future. 

Chapman notes “this [crisis] is happening against the backdrop of a drive from the right wing across Europe to roll back on green progress, which, in the light of the way our reliance on fossil fuels has been exposed, seems just unfathomable, but that is the reality of where we are.”

While the fears of a revanchist fossil-fuel right are real, European leaders can put decarbonization in the driver’s seat by mitigating price shocks in the short term, and then actively pursuing a policy of renewable power generation and electrification. Twice already this decade, right-wing leaders have launched wars of choice that disrupted European access to fossil fuel energy and plunged the continent into crisis. Freedom from the whim of autocrats comes through lessening their power over power.

Wouter van de Klippe is a freelance journalist focused on labor and politics. He is committed to revitalizing Europe’s labor beat and writes on labor, economic, social, and environmental justice, and social welfare states.

Congress and Other US Officials Must Act to Counter Trump’s Genocidal Threats against the Iranian People

April 7, 2026 – Center for International Policy President & CEO Nancy Okail issued the following statement in response to President Trump’s escalating threats against the Iranian people:

“President Trump’s genocidal threats against Iran, including that “a whole civilization may die tonight,” shows he has lost control of an illegal and unnecessary war that he recklessly started. His pledge to launch a major assault specifically targeting civilian infrastructure across Iran is an announcement of an intent to commit wholesale war crimes.

“Partner countries, cabinet officials and Congress must do everything in their power to prevent this slaughter and further civilian deaths, regional escalation and global economic turmoil.

“U.S. allies who have not already done so should immediately prohibit the U.S. military from using their territory, including their airspace, in connection with further attacks on Iran. Trump administration officials, as well as commanders in the U.S. Armed Forces, should uphold their oaths by refusing to carry out unlawful orders issued by the president or others on his behalf.

“Congress should immediately reconvene to pass a War Powers Resolution disengaging U.S. Armed Forces from hostilities against Iran. Lawmakers should also make clear that they will not support any supplemental appropriation whatsoever to fund this unauthorized war.

“It should also be made clear that there must be accountability for those who started this illegal war of choice and committed war crimes in its prosecution. The failure to hold decisionmakers accountable for the U.S. invasion of Iraq and enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza has led to this extremely dangerous moment in which a lawless president is threatening an entire people with destruction. Upholding the rule of law and basic decency requires that this illegal war end and those responsible for it face justice.”


Energy Finance Is Making The Fuel Crisis Worse

In November 2025, Mauritius Commercial Bank closed a $400 million financing facility to expand floating power plant operations across Africa. Four months later, in response to attacks by the United States and Israel, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, drastically curtailing oil supply and spiking oil prices globally.The countries now absorbing the worst of that price shock did not become vulnerable when the first missile struck. Their economic vulnerability was written into contracts signed years earlier.

Growing energy demands, immediate need, and planning for the future are often framed as in-tension for countries plotting out their energy futures. Unfortunately, thanks to current structuring of debt and financing for energy infrastructure projects, these tensions are often manifest in contracts, when they don’t have to be. Clearer up-front information on vulnerability to oil shocks, as well as a better rebalancing towards renewable infrastructure that takes into account their resilience to price shocks, would go a long way towards lessening the acute financial strain placed on infrastructure by an energy crisis.

Create a renewable infrastructure carve-out in the LIC Debt Sustainability Framework, assessing clean energy loans on long-term fiscal impact rather than upfront cost. Build oil price shock scenarios into every debt sustainability assessment for fuel-dependent countries as a primary scenario, not a footnote. Distinguish between debt that creates price-exposure risk and debt that eliminates it, treating them differently in debt ceiling calculations. Introduce a climate shock carve-out allowing temporary suspension of debt ceiling rules when fiscal distress stems from an externally generated energy price spike. Require disclosure of contingent fiscal liabilities in long-term energy contracts as a condition of debt sustainability assessments.

Floating Power Prices

The standard floating power plant contract is a take-or-pay agreement: governments pay whether they use the electricity or not, at a fuel cost tied directly to global oil prices. There is no price ceiling. Contract terms run ten to twenty years. Every design feature transfers risk downward, from the company onto the government, and from the government onto the population least able to absorb it.

Ghana signed one of these agreements in 2014 with Karpowership, a Turkish floating power plant operator, in response to a genuine electricity crisis. By 2024, Ghana had accumulated $3 billion in total energy sector debt, with $379 million owed to Karpowership alone. In 2025 — before Hormuz closed, before oil reached $100 per barrel — Ghana required a $1.47 billion emergency bailout just to stabilize its energy finances. The war did not create Ghana’s crisis. It arrived on top of one already in progress.

Sierra Leone paid $90 million to Karpowership in 2025 alone and still faces daily blackouts. Across the Caribbean, over 90 percent of electricity generation runs on imported fossil fuels. Fossil fuel imports in the Eastern Caribbean averaged $444 million per year between 2016 and 2021 — more than 17 percent of the entire trade balance. Guyana is paying $0.32 per kilowatt-hour for powership electricity. Solar costs $0.09. That gap, compounded across every hour of every day, is the fiscal cost of the emergency decision. It is being paid right now, on top of an oil shock that nobody modeled into the original contract.

The institutions responsible for overseeing these countries’ fiscal health are not ignorant of the risk. Demetrios Papathanasiou,Global Director of Energy and Extractives at the World Bank, stated in May 2023 that “poorer countries are stuck in a vicious cycle where they pay more for electricity, cannot afford the high upfront cost of clean energy, and are locked into fossil fuel projects.” The World Bank coined the term “fuel trap.” Its Caribbean research identified fossil fuel dependency as a “major fiscal vulnerability” years before Hormuz closed.

Mixing In Renewables

At the January 2025 Mission 300 Africa Energy Summit — ten months before the war started — the World Bank committed $40 billion and the African Development Bank committed $18 billion to African electrification, with half of the funding aimed at renewable energy projects. Several country plans embedded in that commitment include natural gas investments as part of a more traditional mix of energy infrastructure. Some of that power capacity is being floated, literally, through offshore ship-based power generation.  Karpowership’s chief commercial officer stated in October 2025 that “almost every day a new country approaches us.” These floating power plants can rapidly offer energy generation, reacting capacity within two weeks of a deployment, but they run on liquid fuel initially, before transitioning to natural gas in months. While immediate, their reliance on fossil fuels makes that expanded capacity particularly vulnerable to price shock. Funds meant to steer countries towards energy independence and renewables can end up committing governments to the vulnerable and volatile fossil fuel markets.

The mechanism connecting these failures is the IMF-World Bank Debt Sustainability Framework for low-income countries. The framework governs how much countries can borrow before lenders flag fiscal distress. In practice, it treats a solar infrastructure loan and a powership contract as equivalent — assessing both against the same debt ceiling without distinguishing between debt that creates long-term fiscal fragility and debt that eliminates it. A solar farm carries high upfront cost and near-zero operating cost. A powership contract carries low upfront cost and permanently variable operating cost tied to global oil prices. Under the current framework, the solar loan looks riskier. The Iran war has demonstrated which one actually is.

Economists and the Carnegie Endowment have proposed a specific reform: create a carve-out for renewable infrastructure investment, assessed on long-term fiscal impact rather than upfront cost. Build oil price shock scenarios into every debt assessment for fuel-dependent countries as a primary scenario, not a footnote.The UK government made exactly this call at the 2025 IMF-World Bank Annual Meetings, urging “full integration of climate and nature risks and the benefits of adaptation investments.” The Iran war has now provided the empirical data that makes that argument unanswerable.

Solutions, Distilled

The IMF should act on it. Specifically:

  1. Create a renewable infrastructure carve-out in the LIC Debt Sustainability Framework, assessing clean energy loans on long-term fiscal impact rather than upfront cost.
  2. Build oil price shock scenarios into every debt sustainability assessment for fuel-dependent countries as a primary scenario, not a footnote.
  3. Distinguish between debt that creates price-exposure risk and debt that eliminates it, treating them differently in debt ceiling calculations.
  4. Introduce a climate shock carve-out allowing temporary suspension of debt ceiling rules when fiscal distress stems from an externally generated energy price spike.
  5. Require disclosure of contingent fiscal liabilities in long-term energy contracts as a condition of debt sustainability assessments.

If those reforms had been in place in 2014 when Ghana signed its Karpowership contract, the official debt assessment would have modeled what that contract costs when oil hits $100 per barrel. It would have assessed the renewable alternative on its long-term fiscal benefit rather than penalizing it as debt. Ghana might still have signed, the emergency was real. But the decision would have been made with accurate information, visible to every creditor and development partner at the table.

The $400 million Karpowership expansion facility is live. The company is in active negotiations with new countries. The next Ghana is being contracted now, by governments with no better options, assessed by a framework that cannot see the risk it is underwriting. The Iran war did not reveal a hidden vulnerability. It confirmed a prediction that the institutions’ own researchers had already published. The question is whether the people writing the next round of checks have read what their analysts wrote, and whether, this time, they will act on it.

Amber Dembnicki is an independent policy analyst and writer covering geopolitics and international policy.

Congress Must Stop Trump’s Illegal War on Iran

February 28, 2026 – In response to the launch of major U.S. and Israeli hostilities against Iran, Center for International Policy Executive Vice President Matt Duss issued the following statement:

“The U.S. and Israeli launch of a regime change war in Iran is a crime of aggression, one of gravest possible violations of international law. This illegal and unnecessary war of choice endangers millions of people across the Middle East, including tens of thousands of US service members. In seeking to topple the government of a country nearly four times the size of Iraq and with more than twice the population, President Trump has undertaken one of the most reckless military assaults in U.S. history.

Congress has neither declared war on Iran, nor authorized the president to engage the U.S. Armed Forces against it. There is no evidence of an imminent threat to the United States by Iran that warrants bypassing Congress and violating the Constitution. Trump himself confirmed the lack of an immediate danger with his statement that “we’re doing this, not for now. We’re doing this for the future.”

Congress must act urgently to restrain the president. Votes on measures to disengage U.S. Armed Forces from hostilities with Iran are expected next week in both chambers. Lawmakers should understand that these will be among the most consequential votes of their careers. 

Americans and their representatives must also be ready to hold the president and his administration accountable for this breach of U.S. and international law. The failure to hold past presidents liable for war crimes and related violations of our own laws has helped lead to this dangerous moment, with a seemingly unrestrained president endangering millions of lives with impunity. The forever wars and the imperial presidency must finally come to an end.”

Bringing Democratic Accountability To Remote Weapons

Warfare is increasingly conducted through sensors, networks, and remote platforms that keep their human operators far from danger. This distance has strategic, political, and ethical consequences that are only beginning to be understood. Erik Lin-Greenberg’s The Remote Revolution offers the clearest account to date of how uninhabited systems reshape leader behavior, crisis dynamics, and modern statecraft. His findings invite a second question. How should democracies design institutions that prevent unnecessary harm before it occurs and preserve accountability when conflict becomes remote?

Lin-Greenberg’s central insight is that remote systems introduce a predictable shift in how states initiate and manage the use of force. When leaders can act without risking their own personnel, their behavior changes. He writes that reduced risks “can lower the threshold for dispatching forces, creating a moral hazard that enables decision makers to launch military operations during interstate disputes when their state arsenals include drones.”1 His evidence spans wargames, surveys, and archival case studies. Participants accepted higher escalatory risk when uninhabited assets were involved. During the Cold War, both superpowers relied on remote reconnaissance for missions that would have been politically untenable with crews aboard. When Iran shot down a US Global Hawk drone in 2019, the absence of American casualties made it politically easier to absorb the loss and step back from escalation. These examples illustrate how distance alters strategic judgment, reducing both the barriers to initiation and, at times, the pressure to retaliate.

Lower risk expands what Lin-Greenberg calls the “menu of options.”2 Remote systems enable actions that fall between inaction and major escalation, including reconnaissance, limited strikes, and coercive signals that impose costs without creating public alarm. Azerbaijan’s reliance on drones in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war illustrates how remote tools expand operational choice while managing political exposure. Israel’s routine use of drones in cross-border operations against regional adversaries demonstrates how leaders create intermediate space between symbolic warning and high-intensity response. In episodes involving Syria and Hezbollah, remote systems have enabled calibrated signaling without the immediate risks associated with crewed aircraft.

Clankers and Casualties

One of Lin-Greenberg’s most distinctive findings concerns how states respond to attacks on uninhabited systems. Rivals often treat drone shootdowns differently from incidents involving inhabited aircraft. These losses rarely generate public pressure for retaliation. Decision-makers frequently see shooting down a drone as a low-risk signal of dissatisfaction.3 Cold War episodes show that remote-platform losses were treated as manageable setbacks rather than triggers for escalation.4 Israeli cases confirm similar restraint. These dynamics produce what Lin-Greenberg describes as “more but milder conflicts.”5 Remote systems do not eliminate escalation. They change its form, making crises more frequent but less likely to cross into major interstate war.

Public opinion plays a central role in this transformation. Lin-Greenberg notes that reduced risk “mitigates the political obstacles often associated with sending troops into harm’s way.”6 When political costs fall, strategic discretion expands. Drone campaigns in US counterterrorism operations illustrate this pattern. Casualty aversion remains a constant in democratic politics. Remote technology changes how leaders weigh those incentives.

For policymakers grappling with the expanding role of autonomous and remote systems, The Remote Revolution provides a rigorous and indispensable foundation.

Lin-Greenberg’s contribution is descriptive and theoretical. He explains how remote systems alter incentives and behavior. The next task is institutional. Democracies must translate this knowledge into preventive design. Recent analysis in the International Policy Journal has argued that compliance with the laws of war should be engineered directly into autonomous and remote systems. Embedding discrimination and proportionality requirements is a start. But engineering norms into code is insufficient without reforming the institutions that authorize and oversee lethal force.

Oversight and Operations

Oversight becomes more complex when remote operations move across statutory authorities. Military operations conducted under Title 10 are subject to armed services oversight and reporting requirements. Covert actions conducted under Title 50 are reported to intelligence committees and often operate under tighter secrecy. The migration of drone strikes between these frameworks during the post-9/11 era demonstrated how lethal authority can shift between oversight regimes with different transparency standards. Designing for prevention requires harmonizing expectations across authorities so that distance cannot exploit jurisdictional gaps.

Recent allegations of unlawful airstrikes against civilian vessels underscore the institutional stakes. When force is projected at distance against targets that are difficult for the public to visualize or verify, the risk is not only civilian harm but erosion of democratic accountability. The problem is structural rather than partisan. Any administration operating with remote tools faces incentives to lower political friction. The question is whether institutions are strong enough to resist that pressure.

A durable institutional response requires at least four changes:

  • Congress should require sunset provisions for semiautonomous lethal authorities, mandating explicit reauthorization every two years. This would prevent normalization of delegated force.
  • Agencies conducting lethal operations should submit public civilian harm prevention certifications before deploying new remote or AI-enabled systems, reviewed by an independent inspector general.
  • Lawmakers should codify a named human decision authority requirement for every lethal action conducted through remote or autonomous systems, with documented reasoning preserved for review.
  • Congress should establish automatic reporting triggers for the use of force against civilian vessels or non-state maritime actors, requiring public disclosure within a fixed timeframe.

These reforms do not prohibit remote warfare. They restore friction where political cost has diminished.

Designing for prevention also requires cultural change. Officers and analysts should be rewarded for surfacing uncertainty and slowing operations when civilian risk is ambiguous. Near-miss reporting should be protected from reprisal. Restraint must be treated as competence rather than hesitation.

Remote technologies are diffusing rapidly across state and non-state actors, normalizing distance in both surveillance and strike capabilities.7 The incentives Lin-Greenberg identifies are unlikely to remain confined to major powers. That makes institutional design more urgent, not less.

Distance changes what leaders see and what the public feels. Without institutional reform, it will erode the accountability that gives democratic uses of force their legitimacy. Democracies must build systems that prevent unnecessary harm, maintain human judgment at the center of lethal authority, and preserve moral clarity even when conflict unfolds beyond the horizon of public view. Remote systems may change the character of war. Deliberate design must determine how democracies respond.

Lucas F. Schleusener is a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. You can follow him on Bluesky at @lfschleusener.bsky.social.

1 Erik Lin-Greenberg, The Remote Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2025), 5.
2 Lin-Greenberg, The Remote Revolution, 25.
3 Ibid., 33.
4 Ibid., 108.
5  Lin-Greenberg, The Remote Revolution, 5.
6 Ibid.
7  See, for example, Faine Greenwood’s reporting and analysis on the global diffusion of drone technologies and the regulatory lag surrounding remote systems.

Congress Must Prevent Trump’s March to an Illegal War on Iran

February 23, 2026 – In response to the massive U.S. military building in the Middle East and Presidents Trump’s threats of the use of force against Iran, Center for International Policy Executive Vice President Matt Duss issued the following statement:

“President Trump has neither congressional authorization nor any basis in international law to attack Iran. He has provided no evidence that Iran poses an urgent threat to the United States. Like the June 2025 bombings that failed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, another U.S. strike would be an illegal act of war. As with his false claims that last year’s attack had ‘completely and totally obliterated’ Iran’s nuclear capacity, the president has now dropped the pretense that military intervention would be aimed at protecting Iranian protestors who bravely faced a deadly crackdown to demonstrate against the regime’s many human rights violations. 

The American people overwhelmingly do not support launching another costly and bloody war in the Middle East. Polling this month shows that only about one in five U.S. voters favor military action against Iran, while 74 percent of Democrats and a majority of independents oppose it. Even 60 percent of Republicans either oppose or do not know if they would support an attack.

Concerns over Iran’s nuclear program, as well as the regime’s ballistic missile program and grave abuses of Iran’s own people, should be addressed through diplomacy. The fact that current U.S.-Iran talks are reportedly proceeding toward a potential deal which shares key features with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that Trump broke in 2018 is a positive sign amid the rumblings of imminent war – and further validation that important security objectives are often best achieved at the negotiating table.

With Trump sending mixed signals over the timing and scope of possible strikes — and given his record of attacking even when active diplomacy is taking place – Congress must act swiftly to make clear that the president does not have its authorization for the use of the U.S. Armed Forces against Iran. Relevant measures introduced under the War Powers Resolution in both the House of Representatives and Senate should be brought to a vote and passed as soon as possible. Individual lawmakers should vocally indicate their support for these resolutions and make clear their opposition to another reckless war of choice.”

From the Sahel to Saint Paul, Curtailing Security Force Abuse Prevents Violence

In January, Americans became immediately and tragically familiar with the spectacle of masked and armed agents of Federal security forces shooting civilians in broad daylight. The horrific violence from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) against people in Minnesota, particularly the killings of protestors Renee Good and Alex Pretti, match the threat to everyday society seen in places abroad where security forces operate with reckless impunity. Immediate deescalation is necessary in Minneapolis, along with a commitment to avoid similar violence in other cities, but we must acknowledge that it is unlikely this administration will end their campaign to remove undocumented immigrants through seemingly any means. The systemic security force abuse that is accompanying ICE’s presence across American cities and hidden in detention centers will have lasting damage, particularly on already vulnerable immigrant communities and requires comprehensive prevention efforts by civil society and local government. 

This kind of violence is not new, even in the United States where police abuse has resulted in numerous deaths, though its deliberate provocation by a Presidency against the people of a US state is unique. In the past protecting civilians from such violence was seen as a crucial part of US foreign policy, as part of a holistic effort to combat the conditions that foster violent extremism.

I have spent my career designing and managing conflict prevention, counterterrorism and security assistance policy and programs in Africa. I am not the first to remark on the striking similarities occurring on American streets with what I witnessed in multiple authoritarian African countries. I’ve sat in traffic, protected by diplomatic plates, eyes down and afraid to truly look, as police officers beat a man who was refusing, or couldn’t pay a bribe. I’ve designed security assistance programs across the Sahel that have been canceled due to massive military attacks against unarmed civilians in the name of counterterrorism. I’ve interviewed young people who defected from Boko Haram to learn why they joined, and personal or family abuse by security officials was often a primary reason. 

Strengthen hyper-local resilience networks Rebuild trust in security forces through community-engaged policing at the state and local level Ensure a gender-sensitive approach Provide psychosocial support and counseling to those that have suffered or witnessed security force abuses

I live in Washington DC, one of the first cities to be targeted by the Trump administration’s campaign to round up immigrants without regard for accepted standards of engagement. Like many in the community who pulled together through a patchwork system of signal chats, I drove kids to school who no longer felt comfortable walking or taking the metro. On our drives, we frequently witnessed masked agents pulling people, mostly men, from their cars and violently pressing them against the doors or shoving them to the ground, instantly handcuffed behind their back. Sometimes we drove past in silence, avoiding eye contact because it was too difficult. Other times they chatted in Spanish, identifying friends who lived in nearby buildings and texting them to make sure they knew to stay home. One day, the dreaded news came through: one of their fathers had been abducted on the street on his way to work. After being transferred from one detention facility to another, he told his family that the conditions were so terrible that he felt he had no choice but to self deport. 

Although media attention is focused intently on Minneapolis now, ICE is still present in Washington and many other cities around the country, and their violent tactics have become emboldened and sanctioned by political officials. In fact, rather than simply being a tactic, ICE violence has become a policy, and a means to promote and enforce power. 

Decades of research in Africa has shown that lack of trust in government, security force impunity, and general perception of marginalization are factors that can lead to recruitment by violent extremist organizations, especially when triggered by a “tipping point” event such as violent abuse by security forces. While there is no indication of increased violence among communities targeted by ICE, American civil society, and eventually the American government, should be attentive to these risks and take steps to prevent increased marginalization and risk of violent non-state groups forming in response to the abuses they have faced. 

As the large-scale public response in Minneapolis and micro-level networks to protect and support neighbors across the country have shown, communities are resilient in the face of state sponsored violence. I’ve seen this personally through hundreds of community-based organizations I’ve worked with across Africa that have developed with limited resources to protect their people who face violence from both the government and non-state armed groups. 

Federally sanctioned security force violence has harmed a sacred social contract between Americans and the government, but there are ways to prevent longer term damage. Although the context between the African countries where I have worked and the United States is very different, international experience and evidence suggest that states, cities and civil society could focus on the following actions to mitigate the risks of continued state violence and repression:

  1. Strengthen hyper-local resilience networks: Protection and support that occurs closest to home such as Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs), neighborhood committees, or churches/houses of worship can provide a sense of belonging that reduces real or perceived marginalization. These frontline groups may be able to help develop strategies and capacities to resist violence. Many of these networks exist organically but can be strengthened with external financial or organizational support, however it’s important not to overwhelm their authenticity. 
  2. Rebuild trust in security forces through community-engaged policing at the state and local level: This approach is not new to the American context where some law enforcement entities have spent decades building relationships and trust within immigrant communities. Rebuilding or developing positive relationships that effectively address non-immigration related crime will require redoubling these efforts and focusing on transparency and independence from immigration enforcement. Lessons can be drawn from Kenya, for example, where there has been significant challenges of police misconduct and political interference. 
  3. Ensure a gender-sensitive approach: Although many of the people impacted directly by ICE’s violence are adult men, women’s lives are also changed particularly if they must take on additional roles to support their family financially to compensate for the loss of one income if a spouse is detained or deported. A gender sensitive approach should also consider the impact on boys and young men, whose role in the family and society may also be shifting. 
  4. Provide psychosocial support and counseling to those that have suffered or witnessed security force abuses: Given the risk that security force abuses can be a tipping point towards violence, it is critical to address this trauma early and provide ongoing counseling particularly for youth. Psychosocial support has been identified as a critical aspect of peacebuilding, reintegration of former fighters, and post conflict reconstruction following many types of violent conflict in Africa.

In the near term, these actions will fall to civil society, state and local government, and private citizens. The Trump administration has decimated many federal government services that address community violence prevention and detection domestically and abroad in the Departments of Homeland Security (DHS) Justice, and State, as well as the FBI, including funding for NGOs. But beyond that, as was the case in many other countries I have worked in, the use of sanctioned state sponsored violence is intentional. As opposed to many countries, where political leadership acknowledges the need to address systemic security force abuses but fails to control it in practice, in the United States, such abuse continues to be promoted as acceptable. The tragic deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, as well as the deaths of at least 53 people held in detention by DHS, are a direct result of the consistent sanctioned violence by security forces. This violence continues around the country, in neighborhoods where national media has gathered to witness it and in others where the harm is documented only by bystanders, and it is causing both short- and long-term damage to this country, and requires a holistic response. 

Margot Shorey is an expert on counterterrorism and conflict prevention and previously served in the Department of State Bureaus of African Affairs and Conflict and Stabilization Operations.