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The COVID-19 outbreak is the most serious test of the international system since the 2008 global financial crisis. Rather than cooperate to contain and respond to a common threat, the world's leading powers--the United States and China--have increasingly blamed each other through wildly speculative theories about the origins of the virus. The World Health Organization sought to coordinate a global response, but it has been hamstrung and has come under attack. Given past cooperation between major powers to mobilize and eradicate smallpox and previous US leadership to fight HIV/AIDS and the 2014 West African Ebola crisis, the limited cooperation and lack of leadership are puzzling. What explains the anemic global response to date? This article draws from structural international relations theory to suggest a partial but somewhat dissatisfying answer. International organizations are inherently weak and now face opposition by major powers. The international system simultaneously incentivizes states to cooperate and address common threats, but it also encourages countries to take care of themselves, potentially at the expense of others. Which of these motives dominates cannot be explained by structural theory, thus requiring us to look to other factors such as the attributes of states and leaders themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors discusses the foreign policy attitudes of what they term elites of the U.S. Republican Party in the latter 20th century and early 21st century. They examine the public policy preferences of the U.S. citizenry as recorded by the American National Election Studies (ANES) survey and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA), once known as the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. It compares and contrasts the emphasis upon domestic policy and foreign policy of the American people, the impact that the September 11, 2011, terrorist attacks on the U.S. had on policy priorities, and debate within the Republican Party on foreign policy.

Do states and decision-makers ever act for moral reasons? And if they do, is it only when it is convenient or relatively costless for them to do so? A number of advocacy movements—on developing country debt relief, climate change, landmines, and other issues—emerged in the 1990s to ask decision-makers to make foreign policy decisions on that basis. The primary advocates were motivated not by their own material interests but broader notions of right and wrong. What contributes to the domestic acceptance of these moral commitments? Why do some advocacy efforts succeed where others fail? Through a case study of the Jubilee 2000 campaign for developing country debt relief, this article offers an account of persuasion based on strategic framing by advocates to get the attention of decision-makers. Such strategic but not narrowly self-interested activity allows weak actors to leverage existing value and/or ideational traditions to build broader political coalitions. This article, through case studies of debt relief in the United States and Japan, also links the emerging literature on strategic framing to the domestic institutional context and the ways veto players or “policy gatekeepers” evaluate trade-offs between costs and values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the issues attributing to the division between the U.S. and Europe. Dispute about climate change; Conflict of government policy on global warming; War of the U.S. against terrorism.