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Three years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the world now knows the exact price for American military support of Ukraine. During a recent interview with Fox News, United States President Donald Trump put a $500 billion price tag on American aid to the war-torn country.

But there was a catch: the exchange should be made in the form of Ukraine’s valuable natural resources, including rare earth minerals. “We have to get something. We can’t continue to pay this money,” Trump said in the interview.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has since told his aides to reject the proposal.

Given the dizzying pace of events that have unfolded since the Trump interview, it’s unclear now whether any deal with Ukraine on its rare earth minerals will ever come to pass. This is especially true given Trump’s subsequent surprise phone conversation with Russian leader Vladimir Putin and ongoing peace talks between the U.S. and Russia that have excluded Ukrainian and European Union officials.

But there’s little doubt Ukraine’s natural resources will be an important element in future diplomatic negotiations.

Always a strategic factor

Ukraine’s rich natural resources have always been a strategic factor in the war. To some extent, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was driven by the interest to capture and control these resources — including critical minerals, fertile farmland and energy reserves.

Ukraine’s previous attempts to develop its mineral deposits and energy reserves — such as oil and gas privatization in 2013 and later attracting investments for the development of its mineral resource extraction in 2021 — were cut short first by Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and then by the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022.

In 2021, the European Union signed a strategic partnership with Ukraine to include “activities along the entire value chain of both primary and secondary critical raw materials and batteries.”

The timing of the military campaign against Ukraine may not have been determined solely by the country’s attempts to develop its natural resources, but they have certainly been a factor. Most of these deposits, including oil and gas fields, are located in the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine, which are currently either under Russian occupation or near the front line.

Ukraine’s mineral wealth

Ukraine’s mineral wealth amounts to about 20,000 mineral deposits and 116 types of minerals. Most of these deposits are unexplored, with only 15 per cent of all the deposits active prior to the Russian invasion.

Rare earth minerals are among this mineral wealth as demand for them has skyrocketed in the past several years.

According to recent estimates, Ukraine has the largest titanium reserves in Europe and seven per cent of the world’s reserves, as well as the largest lithium reserves in Europe. It also has significant production capacity when it comes to rare earth minerals.

Miners extract ilmenite, a key element used to produce titanium, at an open pit mine in the central region of Kirovohrad, Ukraine, on Feb. 12, 2025.
(AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Ukraine also has confirmed deposits of beryllium, uranium and manganese. Before the war, Ukraine was the world’s fifth-largest producer of gallium and is a major producer of neon gas.

In addition, Ukraine also has large reserves of nonferrous metals, including copper, zinc, silver, lead, nickel, cobalt, as well as one of the largest global reserves of graphite.

Estimates vary, but Ukrainian critical mineral deposits could be worth trillions of dollars.

These resources are important from a geopolitical perspective: China has become the major supplier of rare earth minerals on the global market. Not only has China led in the extraction of these minerals, but it also has the largest production and refinement capacity.

As reliance on Chinese supply has increased, China used it as leverage during the U.S.-China trade dispute in 2019 and stopped rare earth exports to Japan in 2010.

China’s dominance in this sector means diversifying the supply of rare earth minerals has geopolitical importance, especially for the U.S. and the EU. They want to ensure the supply comes from a strategic partner — Ukraine.

Ukraine’s natural wealth

Ukraine’s natural riches go beyond critical minerals and include large deposits of hydrocarbons, particularly natural gas. Ukraine ranks second for natural gas reserves in Europe and fourth in terms of natural gas production.

Ukraine’s fertile soil — or chernozem, humus-rich grassland soils used extensively for growing cereals and raising livestock — is also economically and strategically important, making the country one of the largest exporters of food globally.

In 2021, Ukrainian wheat exports accounted for 12 per cent of the global wheat supply, 16 per cent of the global corn supply, 18 per cent of the global barley supply and almost half of the global supply of sunflower seeds, mainly to developing countries.

A mill worker shovels wheat at a granary in Sataniv in the Khmelnytskiy region of Ukraine in August 2024. The eastern and southern areas of Ukraine, where much of the country’s wheat production takes place, have been the targets of Russian bombardments.
(AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Last but not least, Ukraine’s biodiversity, landscapes and ecosystems — some of which have been severely damaged due to the war — are invaluable to the country’s natural environment and essential for the health and well-being of Ukrainians.

The country’s nuclear facilities and radioactive sites are also at risk of being compromised, which would result in severe environmental and health ramifications in the region. In fact, a recent Russian drone attack reportedly damaged part of the Chernobyl nuclear facility.

What’s next for Ukraine’s natural resources

The fate of Ukraine’s mineral riches will largely depend on how the conflict and post-conflict processes unfold.

But their existence has already proven to be of strategic importance in the war — first, to Russia, and now to the U.S. as well.

Ukraine’s natural wealth and how it features in current conversations about the future of the conflict reminds us about the central role resource politics can play in shaping war and peace. Läs mer…

It’s no longer speculative to ask how the post-Second World War world order, led by the United States, will end. It’s apparently already ended.

The U.S. has snubbed its NATO partners and Ukraine itself from purported “peace talks” to end the three-year-old war in Europe in favour of direct bilateral talks between American and Russian officials hosted by Saudi Arabia.

President Donald Trump has actually described Ukraine’s widely admired wartime President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “a dictator” and falsely claimed he started the war.

These lies came directly after Vice President JD Vance’s recent broadside against NATO partners at the Munich Security Conference in which he downplayed the threat of Russia and China to the western alliance and suggested instead that liberal centrism was the real threat.

His remarks were widely regarded as an intervention on behalf of the European far right, particularly far-right political parties in Germany ahead of upcoming elections in that country.

Dreaming of a Gaza takeover

Eighty years after the liberation of Auschwitz and 36 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we are in the midst of new crimes against humanity, new forms of ethnic cleansing and even, potentially, genocide.

In a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump mused about an American takeover of the Gaza Strip by removing its occupants to neighbouring countries and developing the region as a seaside resort. This would very likely constitute a war crime.

White House national security adviser Mike Walz and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles listen as President Donald Trump elaborates on his proposal for the U.S. to take over Gaza on Feb. 4, 2025, in Washington, D.C.
(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Snubbing international law

Trump’s return to the American presidency marks a normalization of this type of threat.

Instead of embracing the international rule of law in the post-Second World War spirit of avoiding another devastating global conflict, the U.S. is building new walls rather than tearing them down while at the same time threatening to annex other sovereign nations and amass new territory.

Trump is obviously unsentimental about America’s longtime allies, including the innermost circle of English-speaking democracies — the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Australian and New Zealand — that make up the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance.

A group of countries that wouldn’t normally be fussed about the transition from one American president to another is now very nervous about how far Trump is going to go.

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Allies or enemies? Trump’s threats against Canada and Greenland put NATO in a tough spot

Anarchy, colonialism

During the first angry weeks of Trump’s second presidency, the U.S. appears to be signalling a return to an anarchic and explicitly colonial imagining of the world. In this regard, Trump’s disdain for the rule of law at home tracks a potentially even greater disdain for the international legal order, one that’s existed since 1945.

The only real connection between the past and contemporary times predates the American-led post-war order of the past eight decades and harkens further back to America’s imperialist and expansionist past and ideas like Manifest Destiny from more than a century ago.

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How the U.S. could in fact make Canada an American territory

Trump, not historically much of an imperialist in his rhetoric, has now doubled down on classical imperialist threats as he repeatedly proposes expanding the physical map of the U.S., musing in particular about Greenland, Panama, Canada and now Gaza.

Greenland holds a strategic interest for the U.S. — there’s already an American airbase on the island — since its location is increasingly important as the Arctic ice melts and amid greater competition from Russia and China.

Panama has been in America’s imperialistic sights more often than Greenland, and was even invaded by U.S. forces in 1989.

Protesters burn posters depicting U.S. President Donald Trump during a rally against Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to Panama City on Feb. 2, 2025.
(AP Photo/Matias Delacroix)

Canada as a 51st state

But Canada? At least Trump agreed at a news conference before taking office that military force was off the table. Instead, Canada only had to worry about “economic force” being used to annex it.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has told business leaders that Trump’s talk about annexing Canada is “the real thing,” aimed at obtaining Canada’s critical minerals.

Donald Trump’s threats about annexing Canada and Greenland are causing widespread alarm among NATO allies. This is an AI-generated image Trump posted to his Truth Social account.
(Donald Trump/Truth Social)

Trump’s interactions with Denmark, Canada and Panama all demonstrate a disdain for basic principles of the rule of law at the international level, which is underpinned by the sovereignty of states.

His musings on Gaza, which led United Nations Secretary General António Guterres to warn him specifically against endorsing ethnic cleansing, demonstrate a willingness to break completely with international legal norms.

He’s not only peacocking on the global stage, he is also telegraphing that he holds international legal norms in even lower esteem than the norms of his own country, where he is a convicted felon. This situation is as alarming as it unprecedented.

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America now a threat

Right now, cognitive dissonance in the form of status quo bias poses a real danger in terms of Trump’s dismissal of the rule of law. This means that folks are somehow convincing themselves that the undoing of the global rules-based order in real time is just a blip; things will somehow ramp down and return to normal.

But the evidence is glaringly to the contrary.

Trump is plainly communicating his wishes: a new age of American imperialism. At first few took him seriously. Now we all are. Canada, due to its proximity to and reliance on the U.S., must especially face a new reality in which an American president casually and repeatedly threatens its sovereignty.

Canada, America’s closest ally in terms of shared language, culture and geography, should be the first and not the last to start believing Trump’s threats to annex it.

Read more:
Allies or enemies? Trump’s threats against Canada and Greenland put NATO in a tough spot

Even when Trump is no longer in office, neither Canadians nor any of America’s other allies can be certain someone just like him will not be returned to power by the U.S. voters. That means America’s western allies, like Canada and Denmark, must learn the lessons Latin American and Middle Eastern countries learned along time ago: America is a threat.

The Democratic Party must also figure out how it’s going to effectively resist Trump over the next four years.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Martin Heinrich hold a news conference following President Donald Trump’s announcement he was freezing all federal grants and loans on Jan. 29, 2025 in Washington, D.C.
(AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Only an American concern?

Some might ask: Aren’t these American problems for the American people? As Canadians can attest, no. Trump poses grave dangers to the rest of the world due to the unique place the U.S. occupies in the geopolitical system.

Nothing about Trump’s second presidency bodes well for America’s allies and friends, including Canada.

A kleptocrat who regards friends and allies as transactional customers and for whom everything is “just business,” including national security, Trump poses an existential threat not only to America, but to the international world order. Läs mer…

It has been an eventful and, for Ukraine and its European allies, alarming past week or so. First they heard that the US president, Donald Trump, had spent 90 minutes on the phone with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. In one stroke, Trump upended three years in which his predecessor, Joe Biden, had sought to isolate Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

On the same day, February 12, Trump’s newly installed secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, told a gathering of senior defence officials in Brussels that Europe would no longer be the primary focus for US security policy, and that Ukraine could not hope to regain the territory Russia had illegally occupied since 2014, nor join Nato.

Hegseth added that not only would the US not contribute to any peacekeeping force in Ukraine in the event of a peace deal, but that any European peacekeeping operation would not be done under the protection of Nato’s Article 5.

This was soon followed by the US vice-president, J.D. Vance, telling the Munich Security Conference that it was Europe, not Russia or China, that was the main security threat – the “enemy within” that fostered anti-democratic practices and sought to curtail free speech.

This week, a US team led by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, sat down with their Russian opposite numbers led by the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, to discuss peace negotiations. Ukraine was not represented. Nor was Europe. Following that, and perhaps taking his cue from Hegseth, Lavrov declared that Russia would not accept any European peacekeepers in Ukraine – deal or no deal.

Meanwhile, Trump has taken to his TruthSocial media platform to repeat several favourite Kremlin talking points. Ukraine was responsible for the war, he said. Its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was a “dictator” who had cancelled elections, and whose popularity with his own people was now as low as 4% (it’s actually 57%, at least 10 points higher than Trump’s rating in the US).

Trump also mocked Zelensky’s concern at his country’s exclusion from the Riyadh talks, telling reporters: “Today I heard: ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years … You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”

This leads us back to the Istanbul communique, produced at the end of March 2022 after initial peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in Antalya, Turkey. Some US commentators have suggested Ukraine could now be better off had it signed this deal.

Istanbul communique

What happened in Istanbul, and how close Russia and Ukraine were to an agreement, has been hotly debated, with some arguing a deal was close and others refuting this.

Ukraine reportedly agreed to a range of concessions including future neutrality, as well as giving up its bid for membership of Nato. Russia, in turn, would apparently have accepted Ukraine’s membership of the EU. This concession, incidentally, is still on the table.

But there were sticking points, primarily over the size of Ukraine’s armed forces after a deal – Kyiv reportedly wanted 250,000 soldiers, the Kremlin just 85,000 – and the types of weaponry Ukraine could keep in its arsenal.

There were also issues about Ukraine’s Russian-occupied territory, particularly Crimea – this was projected to be resolved over 15 years with Russia occupying the peninsula on a lease in the meantime. Another Kremlin demand was for Zelensky to stand down as president, with the presidency being taken up by the pro-Russian politician Viktor Medvedchuk.

Negotiations continued through April 2022, only to break down when Russian atrocities were reported in Bucha, a town Ukrainian troops had retaken as part of their spring counter-offensive. But the fact is, an agreement was never really close.

The UK’s former prime minister, Boris Johnson, has taken much flack over reports that he urged Zelensky not to accept the deal. But there was never a realistic chance this deal would be acceptable to Ukraine. A neutral Ukraine with a reduced military capacity would have no way to defend itself against any future aggression.

Had Ukraine done a deal based on the Istanbul communique, it would have essentially led to the country becoming a virtual province of Russia – led by a pro-Russian government and banned from seeking alliances with western countries. As for joining the EU, it was the Kremlin’s opposition to Kyiv’s engagement with the EU in 2013 which provoked the Euromaidan protests and led to Russia’s initial annexation of Crimea the following year.

What next?

Kyiv signing the Istanbul communique may have quickly stopped the war and the killing. But the Kremlin has repeatedly shown it cannot be trusted to adhere to agreements – you only have to look at the way it repeatedly violated the Minsk accords of 2015, which attempted to end hostilities in eastern Ukraine.

Further, a deal that rewards Russian aggression by agreeing to its taking of territory and demanding the neutrality of the victim would undermine global security, and encourage other illegal foreign policy adventurism.

If the Trump administration has the blueprint of a fair peace deal, it’s hiding it well at this point. Instead, European leaders have been put in a position where they must face the prospect of having to fund Ukraine’s continued defence, while coping with a US retreat from its security guarantees for Europe as a whole.

Either that or, as my University of Bath colleague Patrick Bury wrote on X this week, accept some pretty dire consequences.

Europe is facing a crisis that it could have prepared for after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. With Trump back in power, the relationship between the US and Europe appears increasingly fractured. But Europe too is bitterly divided over how to approach this crisis.

Britain and France initially talked up the idea of providing troops as peacekeepers in Ukraine – but Germany adamantly refused to go along with that plan. Both Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer have since rethought the idea (although there is a report that the UK prime minister has considered a scheme for a 30,000-strong “monitoring force” away from the ceasefire line).

The Kremlin reacts to signals. While it was clearly preparing for the invasion in late 2021, Joe Biden’s statement that he would not send troops to defend Ukraine showed the limits to US involvement. A message that Europe is prepared to dispatch peacekeepers to Ukraine now would send a strong signal to Putin – and the Trump administration – that Europe is serious. Läs mer…

Captain Ibrahim Traoré is the interim leader of Burkina Faso, having taken over the position following a coup which he led against Lieutenant Colonel Paul Henri Damiba in September 2022. The 37-year-old captain had supported Damiba, his commanding officer, in a putsch earlier that year against former president Roch Marc Kaboré.

Since Traoré has been in power, Burkina Faso has played a key role in the withdrawal of three west African states from the regional body Ecowas. Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali have formed an alternative, the Alliance of Sahel States. The Conversation Africa asked researcher Daniel Eizenga where the country was headed under Traoré’s leadership.

Who is Ibrahim Traoré?

Traoré was born in 1988 in Bondokuy, a small town on the route connecting Burkina Faso’s second city – Bobo Dioulasso – and its fourth largest, Ouahigouya. He completed secondary school in Bobo Dioulasso, then moved to the nation’s capital, where he studied at the University of Ouagadougou.

After completing his undergraduate education, Traoré joined the army in 2010 at the age of 22. He undertook his officer training in Pô at the Georges Namoano Military Academy, an officer school for the Burkinabe armed forces. He graduated as a second lieutenant in 2012 and served as a peacekeeper in the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission to Mali (Minusma) after being promoted to lieutenant in 2014.

After his stint with Minusma, Traoré took part in missions in northern Burkina Faso as part of a special counterterrorism unit. He was promoted to captain in 2020 at the age of 32.

Damiba led a coup against Kaboré in January 2022. He then assigned Traoré as chief of an artillery regiment in the North Central region of Burkina Faso.

As it became clear that Damiba was losing popularity within the junta, Traoré and a group of junior officers organised a coup. They seized on public and military outrage around an ambush that left 11 soldiers and dozens of civilians dead.

What has been the response to his rule in Burkina Faso?

Some media reports suggest that the young captain and his junta enjoy popular support throughout the country. Some have even drawn comparisons between Traoré and Burkina Faso’s earlier leftist revolutionary military leader, Captain Thomas Sankara. It’s true that the two captains did take power at the age of 34. But the comparisons end at their rank and age.

During the 1980s and nearing the end of the cold war, Sankara came to power as ideological division split the Burkinabe armed forces. Officers supporting Sankara led a coup in 1983. Viewed as a Marxist revolutionary, Sankara attempted to enact political reforms. They included policies to boost public political participation, empower women, address environmental degradataion and reduce inequalities.

Traoré’s position is much more precarious. Most military officers did not participate in either his coup or the one led by Damiba, underscoring the fragmented state of Burkina Faso’s armed forces. Traoré’s junta has claimed there have been multiple attempts at destabilisation or coups. This highlights the arbitrary means by which power has changed hands and the inherent instability present under junta rule.

To shore up his position, Traoré has launched a restructuring drive. This has included redirecting revenues from taxes, the mining sector, and other sources of public revenues into defence coffers. He has also mobilised volunteers to fight violent extremists as part of the Volunteers for the Defence of the Homeland, a junta-sponsored civilian militia. There are reports that forced conscription has been used to send “volunteers” to the front lines of battle. The conflict data indicate that the strategy is not working.

Traoré may not be as popular among ordinary people as he is often portrayed. This is inferred from the violent repression of critics, multiple alleged coup attempts as well as the ongoing violence and humanitarian crisis. He has cracked down hard on independent voices. Journalists, civil society leaders, political party leaders and even judges have been targeted by the junta with its forced conscription tactics and other forms of violent repression.

What about external players?

The September 2022 coup d’état got the attention of Russian foreign information manipulation and interference campaigns. The campaigns were linked to the shadowy Russian mercenary outfit, the Wagner Group. Other Russian information campaigns employed fake social media accounts that pose as Africans with a genuine interest in Burkina Faso. These accounts promote divisive rhetoric that places blame on France and other western countries for local grievances such as ongoing insecurity.

Aiming to boost support for himself immediately following the coup, Traoré trained his sights on capturing the anti-French sentiment. He blamed the French for many of the country’s woes and cast Damiba as a close French ally. Within a few months, Traoré demanded the French withdraw its security presence from Burkina Faso altogether.

Since the French withdrawal, Russian mercenaries have been seen providing protection for Traoré and reportedly supporting operations near the border with Mali. However, only some 100-300 Russian forces have gone to Burkina Faso. This suggests that the focus is on regime security for Traoré and his junta.

What does the future hold?

Traoré’s actions have not improved the security situation in the country. There have been at least 3,059 violent events linked to militant Islamist groups since he came to power in October 2022. This is a 20% increase in comparison to two years preceding the coup. The number of fatalities linked to militant Islamist violence nearly doubled from 3,621 in 2022 to 6,389 in 2024.

The violence has also spread throughout the country to affect nearly every region and increased along Burkina Faso’s southern border. It’s likely that the data is under-reported.

The junta has claimed to have foiled several coup plots since Traoré’s power grab. A foiled plot came in September 2024 only a few weeks after the deadliest massacre the country has ever suffered. Violent extremists killed hundreds of civilians outside the town of Barsalogho. Civilian fatalities linked to militant Islamist groups have increased from 721 in 2022 to 1,151 deaths in 2024.

Perhaps more worrying are the civilian fatalities linked to the military or its sponsored militia.

The violence in Burkina Faso presents an alarming outlook in which the collapse of the country cannot be ruled out. The military has reemerged as the principal political actor. By some counts the military has been directly or indirectly in power for 45 of the 65 years since Burkina Faso became independent.

All the while, the militant Islamist insurgency embroils more and more of the countryside at great human cost. Some estimates place the number of people displaced by violence as high as 3 million, though the junta will not provide an official figure. That is more than 10% of the population of some 24 million people. Another million or more students may not be in school due to conflict and ongoing insecurity.

Despite the effort to present Traoré as a bold reformer and saviour, the political, security and economic ramifications from his junta rule will reverberate through Burkina Faso for decades to come. Läs mer…

Victims and survivors of gender-based violence have increasingly started naming perpetrators in public. This phenomenon has gained traction through movements such as #MeToo, the #RUReferenceList and #AmINext.

However, there has been a significant backlash. Men identified as perpetrators are turning to the courts to silence those who accuse them of rape and abuse, usually by bringing defamation cases.

In South Africa, in addition to defamation cases, men accused of rape are applying for protection orders under the Protection from Harassment Act.

In a recent paper I analyse a high court ruling which deals with whether publicly naming someone as a rapist constitutes harassment under the act. The court held that it did not amount to harassment.

Based on my experience as an academic as well as an advocate of the high court of South Africa, I argue that the judgment in LW v KA provides a road map for dealing with applications for protection orders against women who publicly name perpetrators. It points to a fundamental shift in the law around the Protection from Harassment Act.

This affects other cases involving the public naming of perpetrators. It makes it clear that identifying a person as a perpetrator is not unreasonable, and does not constitute harassment.

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I conclude from my analysis that the judgment is an important development in the case law around gender-based violence.

The law

South Africa’s Protection from Harassment Act was designed to address stalking and harassment. The act was part of a suite of legislation enacted to protect victims and survivors of gender-based violence, a vast proportion of whom are women facing abuse from men.

Among its provisions is that a court can issue a protection order. Protection orders are used to prohibit the accused person from engaging in harassment, enlisting another person to engage in harassment or any other conditions imposed by the court.

But recently the courts have been approached by a number of men who have been publicly named as perpetrators of gender-based violence. These men have asked for protection orders against the women who accused them.

In two cases that I have personally worked on, South Africa’s magistrates’ courts have granted protection orders to individuals seeking to silence women from speaking out against gender-based violence.

As I argue in my paper, this means that the law is being used to threaten and gag women. This is a perverse inversion of the purpose of the act.

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Magistrates’ courts are the place where most people in South Africa encounter the justice system. These courts deal with a majority of the country’s criminal and civil cases, but can only apply the law and not develop the law. Matters in the magistrate’s court can be sent on appeal to the high court and thereafter to the supreme court of appeal and finally the constitutional court.

Striking a balance

This is not to say that men should not be able to use the Protection from Harassment Act. This legislation is intended to provide relief to anyone who has faced harassment, regardless of their gender. Men accused of rape are not barred from applying for protection orders if they face harassment, and nor should they be.

However, it is crucial that courts approach these cases with a full understanding of the purpose of the act and the context in which these cases are being brought.

It is important to strike a balance in these matters. On the one hand, the interpretation of “harassment” must be flexible enough to allow anyone who has been the target of this harm to find relief under the act. On the other hand, courts must avoid the exploitation and appropriation of the legislation by men to threaten and silence their accusers.

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The answer to this lies in a proper analysis of what is meant by “harassment” in the act.

There is little guidance in the legislation itself. Nevertheless, the question came before the Gauteng high court in 2023 in LW v KCA. The court held that identifying someone as the perpetrator of gender-based violence was not in and of itself harassment. It ruled that:

If any provision of the {Protection from Harassment Act} can bear more than one constitutionally compliant interpretation, that which better allows victims to speak out is to be preferred.

In other words, if a judge is deciding between two different interpretations of the act, they should choose the interpretation that promotes victims’ rights to freedom of expression. In deciding whether some act constitutes harassment, they should favour the interpretation which allows victims to speak out about their experiences.

The importance of this finding cannot be overstated. It creates a fundamental shift in the law not only around the act, but also in respect of all cases involving the public naming of perpetrators of gender-based violence.

In the judgment, the high court provides a road map for dealing with applications for protection orders against women who publicly name their perpetrators. The court:

underscored the importance of taking a balanced and reasoned approach to a situation where men use the Protection from Harassment Act to silence those who accuse them of rape
found that it is not enough to ask whether the conduct constitutes harassment; one must also ask whether the conduct was reasonable in the context of gender-based violence in South Africa
made it clear that the most constitutionally compliant interpretation of the act is the one which allows victims to speak about their experiences.

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Importantly, this finding by the high court has set a precedent which all magistrates and high court judges must take into consideration when hearing matters involving harassment. This matter has not been appealed to a higher court. Läs mer…

Urban parks in Kumasi, the capital city of Ghana’s Ashanti region, are fast disappearing or in decline. Kumasi was designed 60 years ago as a “garden city”, with green belts, parks and urban green spaces. These have been encroached on by developments and are in a poor condition.

Like other cities in Ghana, Kumasi has been growing. According to the latest population data from Ghana’s Statistical Service, the population of Kumasi in 1950 and 2024 was 99,479 and 3,903,480 respectively. The city’s current annual population growth rate is 3.59%.
This growth is a challenge for city authorities.

Adding to the challenge is the fact that in Ghana, political authorities and traditional leadership exist together. It’s the capital of the Ashanti Region and the capital of the ancient Ashanti Kingdom. Most of the land is owned by the traditional authority. This makes it difficult sometimes for city authorities to enforce planning regulations.

We are urban planners who have conducted research on environmental planning, urban informality and inclusive city development. We studied the extent to which areas demarcated as urban parks in the Kumasi Metropolis have been rezoned, and why there’s been encroachment into urban parks.

Our study showed that 88% of the 16 parks studied in the Kumasi Metropolis had either been rezoned or encroached upon by other land uses. This was done in an unplanned way. Zoning regulations have not been enforced and urban sprawl has not been controlled. Part of the reason is that land scarcity drives up its value and customary authorities have an incentive to allow other uses. As a result, the city has lost green spaces that are important for their environmental, traditional and recreational functions.

Decline of urban parks in Kumasi Metropolis

To understand why Kumasi has been losing its green spaces, our study looked at 16 parks across six communities within the Kumasi Metropolis.

The World Health Organization recommends there should be 9m² of green space per city dweller. We calculated that Kumasi currently has only 0.17m² of green space per city dweller.

We also noted significant changes in land zoned for parks. This was mainly due to the politics of land ownership and administration. Other social factors played a part too. The results of the research showed that out of the 16 existing parks studied, 14 (88%) had been rezoned to residential or commercial use or encroached upon by other uses.

The rezoning of parks was gradual, unapproved by local planning authorities, and unplanned. Existing land tenure arrangements and laxity in the enforcement of laws are some of the barriers affecting park development and management in the city.

An official of the city’s Physical Planning Department indicated that places zoned as parks were supposed to be owned, controlled, managed and protected by the state. But this was not the case, because of the complex land tenure arrangement of the city, where most land is customarily owned.

Though Ghana’s land tenure system recognises customary ownership, the determination of land use remains the responsibility of local planning authorities. Land sold for physical developments must conform to an approved scheme prepared by the Physical Planning Department. In most cases, the parks rezoned by the customary owners were in contravention with spatial planning laws (such as the Land Use and Spatial Planning Act, 2016).

The representative of the planning department noted that even though it prepared layouts that made provision for parks and open spaces, it was often helpless when it came to enforcement and other land use regulations. We were told that information about the land ownership and transfer process between government agencies and customary landowners was not made available to the department.

Due to poor coordination and increased demand for land for development, about 88% of land demarcated for park development across the study communities had been leased or sold to private developers by the customary landowners.

Our study also revealed a lack of funding for parks development and management. All the agency officials confirmed that parks were planned for but the funds to support their development and management were inadequate. They explained that property values rose as a result of urban development, leading to intense competition among various land uses. We were told that landowners were willing to sell any land available in their community at a higher value without considering its use in the community.

Bringing back the green

The once green city of Kumasi has lost much of its foliage. We suggest that this decline can and should be stopped.

City authorities can incorporate cultural elements that highlight the identity of neighbourhoods to promote ownership and a sense of place in the design of parks. Local planning institutions, custodians of land and residents should collaborate so that plans meet everyone’s needs.

Traditional authorities, together with relevant city authorities, should consciously ensure that parks are developed, protected, managed and sustained. Laws and regulations which guide park use and protection should be enforced strictly.

Finally, parks and green spaces can only survive if there is sustainable funding. City authorities could consider green taxation and charges. For example, they can fine residents whose activities threaten the environment, and use the money to fund parks and green spaces. A percentage of property tax can be dedicated to the protection and development of green spaces in the city. Läs mer…

Indigenous people make up only 6% of the world’s population but manage over a quarter of the world’s land surface. These groups, descended from original occupants of a geographical place and identifying as culturally distinct, possess knowledge about adapting to social and environmental change. Yet their perspectives are rarely included when it comes to planning for a future affected by climate change or biodiversity loss. Researcher Julia van Velden was part of a team of scholars who looked at how Indigenous knowledge could create a shared understanding of a better future for our planet. The Conversation Africa spoke to her and her co-authors about Indigenous futures thinking.

What is Indigenous futures thinking and who does it?

Futures thinking involves imagining and describing different possible futures. It asks us to consider what we want society, the environment and the world to look like in 50 or even 500 years from now. The future we think up can then be used as the basis for strategies to achieve those visions.

Futures thinking has helped people from diverse backgrounds to reach a common understanding of important issues and their underlying causes. It helps people find ways to work towards a future they prefer.

An important emerging area within this field is Indigenous futures thinking. This brings unique Indigenous perspectives into how people view the future. Indigenous perspectives emphasise the need to look after the land for the well-being of future generations.

Indigenous people consistently express their responsibilities for the past, present, and future of their societies and their traditional lands, built on centuries, sometimes millennia, of knowledge.

How does Indigenous futures thinking work?

Our new research reviewed academic articles and technical reports to identify four main approaches to Indigenous futures thinking.

Adaptation oriented: This approach uses scenarios in planning and modelling to help communities understand and manage future environmental and social changes. We find that these scenarios are best when designed in partnership with Indigenous people, and not imposed.

Participatory: This is where diverse stakeholders collaborate to develop visions of the future together. This approach helps to ensure decisions about the future are democratic. Creative and interactive methods such as role-playing and storytelling are often combined with environmental and socioeconomic modelling to achieve this.

Read more:
Telling stories of our climate futures is essential to thinking through the net-zero choices of today

Culturally grounded: This approach grounds futures thinking in Indigenous traditions, knowledge systems, and cultural practices. It aims to prioritise the right of Indigenous people to self-determination and sovereignty.

Culturally grounded futures thinking encourages solutions that are rooted in traditional values and practices. Indigenous connections, arts, lore, rights, knowledge systems, worldviews, cultural renewal, spirituality, and different understandings of time are all included in this approach.

For example, researchers used methods such as eco-cultural mapping and calendars with communities in Benin, Kenya and Ethiopia. Doing so helped these communities revitalise customary ways of governing using agroecology, sacred natural sites, and community rituals.

Indigenising: This approach aims to decolonise thinking about the future. To do this, indigenising highlights the need to challenge and overturn colonial frameworks. The Sámi Márkomeannu festival in Norway is an example. At this festival, the Indigenous Sámi people present their hopes and fears for the next 100 years through seminars, drama, and art installations. These show a future where they’ve succeeded in adapting to a degraded environment and climate change.

How can Indigenous futures thinking help people explore alternative futures?

With a focus on long-term thinking, Indigenous futures thinking envisions sustainable and thriving futures for generations to come. Creative methodologies such as storytelling are key in creating these future visions. Storytelling confirms lived experiences and transmits knowledge across generations.

Indigenous understandings of time also help society to reimagine thinking in relation to past and future generations. For example, in the Australian Indigenous notion of “Everywhen”, past, present, and future exist at the same time. It obliges us to consider our actions across the whole circle of time.

Read more:
African ubuntu can deepen how research is done

In the African philosophy of Ubuntu, humans are viewed as situated within a complex intergenerational web of relationships. Human existence is seen as occurring in three dimensions. These are the living, the departed or ancestors (those who have lived before), and those yet to be born, all of whom are present today.

Our research finds that Indigenous communities are not often included fully and equitably in research processes. As the field of Indigenous futures thinking grows, ethical and inclusive research practices are very important. Indigenous people must be included as equal partners in designing and carrying out research.

How will Indigenous futures thinking help address climate change?

Indigenous Woppaburra leaders in Australia map their future vision of their customary land and sea country areas. From left to right: Valmai Smith, Harry Van Issum, Earl Gibson, Julie-Anne Rogers.
Supplied

Indigenous-managed ecosystems like forests, grasslands, and wetlands are vital for carbon sequestration (the process where carbon is removed from the atmosphere and captured in plants and soil). Preserving the world’s biodiversity also depends on the land managed by Indigenous people.

Indigenous understandings are also relational – where environmental, social, and cultural systems relate to and depend on one another. This is an important way of thinking to understand our world.

Finally, Indigenous peoples’ experiences of colonisation provide knowledge of how to survive catastrophes and navigate environmental changes. This knowledge must be included in the world’s strategies to adapt to climate change and protect biodiversity. It should also be brought into local climate adaptation plans to make sure they align with traditions and values.

For example, the Arctic Council encourages countries to co-operate in protecting the Arctic. It places Indigenous knowledge and governance at the centre of its work. This organisation uses Indigenous ecological knowledge in developing plans to adapt to climate change, and includes Indigenous people equitably when making policy and monitoring changes in the environment.

There is joy and creativity in Indigenous futures thinking, through storytelling, art, and participatory design. But imagining better worlds is just the first step. Ensuring that Indigenous communities have the power and agency to lead their own paths forward is what will bring the better worlds to life. Läs mer…

Make Canada angry. Make Mexico angry. Make the members of NATO angry.

During the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said a lot of things about longtime allies that caused frustration and outright friction among the leaders of those countries.

Trump and Vance indeed appear to disdain close alliances, favoring an America First approach to the world. A New York Times headline characterized the relationship between the U.S. and Europe now as “A Strained Alliance.”

As a former diplomat, I’m aware that how the U.S. treats its allies has been a crucial question in every presidency, since George Washington became the country’s first chief executive. On his way out of that job, Washington said something that Trump, Vance and their fellow America First advocates would probably embrace.

In what’s known as his “Farewell Address,” Washington warned Americans against “entangling alliances.” Washington wanted America to treat all nations fairly, and warned against both permanent friendships and permanent enemies.

The irony is that Washington would never have become president without the assistance of the not-yet-United-States’ first ally, France.

In 1778, after two years of brilliant diplomacy by Benjamin Franklin, the not-yet-United States and the Kingdom of France signed a treaty of alliance as the American Colonies struggled to win their war for independence from Britain.

France sent soldiers, money and ships to the American revolutionaries. Within three years, after a major intervention by the French fleet, the battle of Yorktown in 1781 effectively ended the war and America was independent.

Isolationism, then war

American political leaders largely heeded Washington’s warning against alliances throughout the 1800s. The Atlantic Ocean shielded the young nation from Europe’s problems and many conflicts, and America’s closest neighbors had smaller populations and less military might.

Aside from the War of 1812, in which the U.S. fought the British, America largely found itself protected from the outside world’s problems.

That began to change when Europe descended into the brutal trench warfare of World War I.

Initially, American politicians avoided becoming involved. What would today be called an isolationist movement was strong, and its supporters felt that the war in Europe was being waged for the benefit of big business.

But it was hard for the U.S.to maintain neutrality. German submarines sank ships crossing the Atlantic carrying American passengers. The economies of some of America’s biggest trading partners were in shreds; the democracies of Britain, France and other European countries were at risk.

A Boston newspaper headline in 1915 blares the news of a British ocean liner sunk by a German torpedo.
Serial and Government Publications Division, Library of Congress

President Woodrow Wilson led the United States into the war in 1917 as an ally of the Western European nations. When he asked Congress for a declaration of war, Wilson touted the value of like-minded allies, saying, “A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations.” The war was over within 16 months.

Immediately after the war, the Allies – led by the U.S., France and Britain – stayed together to craft the peace agreements, feed the war-ravaged parts of Europe and intervene in Russia after the Communist Revolution there.

Prosperity came along with the peace, helping the U.S. quickly develop into a global economic power.

However, within a few years, American politicians returned to traditional isolationism in political and military matters and continued this attitude well into the 1930s. The worldwide Great Depression that began in 1929 was blamed on vulnerabilities in the global economy, and there was a strong sentiment among Americans that the U.S. should fix its internal problems rather than assist Europe with its problems.

Alliance counters fascism

As both Hitler and the Japanese Empire began to attack their neighbors in the late 1930s, it became clear to President Franklin Roosevelt and other American military and political leaders that the U.S. would get caught up in World War II. If nothing else, airplanes had erased America’s ability to hide behind the Atlantic Ocean.

Though public opinion was divided, the U.S. began sending arms and other assistance to Britain and quietly began military planning with London. This was despite the fact that the U.S. was formally neutral, as the Roosevelt administration was pushing the limits of what a neutral nation can do for friendly nations without becoming a warring party.

In January of 1941, Roosevelt gave his annual State of the Union speech to Congress. He appeared to prepare the country for possible intervention – both on behalf of allies abroad and for the preservation of American democracy:

“The future and the safety of our country and of our democracy are overwhelmingly involved in events far beyond our borders. Armed defense of democratic existence is now being gallantly waged in four continents. If that defense fails, all the population and all the resources of Europe, and Asia, and Africa and Australasia will be dominated by conquerors. In times like these it is immature – and incidentally, untrue – for anybody to brag that an unprepared America, single-handed, and with one hand tied behind its back, can hold off the whole world.”

When the Japanese attacked Hawaii in 1941 and Hitler declared war on the United States, America quickly entered World War II in an alliance with Britain, the Free French and others.Throughout the war, the Allies worked as a team on matters large and small. They defeated Germany in three and half years and Japan in less than four.

As World War II ended, the wartime alliance produced two longer-term partnerships built on the understanding that working together had produced a powerful and effective counter to fascism.

A ‘news bulletin’ from August 1945 issued by a predecessor of the United Nations.
Foreign Policy In Focus

Postwar alliances

The first of these alliances is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. The original members were the U.S., Canada, Britain, France and others of the wartime Allies. There are now 32 members, including Poland, Hungary and Turkey.

The aims of NATO were to keep the peace in Europe and contain the growing Communist threat from the Soviet Union. NATO’s supporters feel that, given that the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and in the Ukraine today are the only major conflicts in Europe in 80 years, the alliance has met its goals well. And NATO troops went to Afghanistan along with the U.S. military after 9/11.

The other institution created by the wartime Allies is the United Nations.

The U.N. is many things – a humanitarian aid organization, a forum for countries to raise their issues and a source of international law.

However, it is also an alliance. The U.N. Security Council on several occasions authorized the use of force by members, such as in the first Gulf War against Iraq. And it has the power to send peacekeeping troops to conflict areas under the U.N. flag.

Other U.S. allies with treaties or designations by Congress include Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Israel, three South American countries and six in the Middle East.

In addition to these formal alliances, many of the same countries created institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Organization of American States and the European Union. The U.S. belongs to all of these except the European Union. During my 35-year diplomatic career, I worked with all of these institutions, particularly in efforts to stabilize Africa. They keep the peace and support development efforts with loans and grants.

Admirers of this postwar liberal international order point to the limited number of major armed conflicts during the past 80 years, the globalized economy and international cooperation on important matters such as disease control and fighting terrorism.Detractors point to this system’s inability to stop some very deadly conflicts, such as Vietnam or Ukraine, and the large populations that haven’t done well under globalization as evidence of its flaws.

The world would look dramatically different without the Allies’ victories in the two World Wars, the stable worldwide economic system and NATO’s and the U.N.’s keeping the world relatively peaceful.

But the value of allies to Americans, even when they benefit from alliances, appears to have shifted between George Washington’s attitude – avoid them – and that of Franklin D. Roosevelt – go all in … eventually. Läs mer…

The United States’ steadfast allegiance to Ukraine during that country’s three-year war against Russia appears to be quickly disintegrating under the Trump administration. President Donald Trump on Feb. 19, 2025, called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “a dictator” and falsely blamed him for the war that Russia initiated as part of a land grab in the countries’ border regions.

Zelenskyy, meanwhile, said on Feb. 19 that Trump is trapped in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “disinformation space.”

The intensifying bitterness comes as the U.S. and Russia started talks in Saudi Arabia, without including Ukraine, on how to end the conflict.

The U.S. and Russia have long been adversaries, and the U.S., to date, has given Ukraine more than US$183 billion to help fight against Russia. But that funding came when Joe Biden was president. Trump does not appear to be similarly inclined toward Ukraine.

Amy Lieberman, a politics editor at The Conversation U.S., spoke with Tatsiana Kulakevich, a scholar of Eastern European politics and international relations, to understand the implications of this sudden shift in U.S.-Russia policy under Trump.

Kulakevich sees Trump’s moves that could be perceived as self-interested as instead part of a calculated strategy in preliminary discussions.

An airplane passenger reads a Financial Times article about U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Feb. 19, 2025.
Horacio Villalobos Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images

Can you explain the current dynamic between the U.S., Ukraine and Russia?

People should not panic because the U.S. and Russia are only holding exploratory talks. We should not call them peace talks, per se, at least not yet. It was to be expected that Ukraine was not invited to the talks in Saudi Arabia because there is nothing to talk about yet. We don’t know what the U.S. and Russia are actually discussing besides agreeing to restore the normal functioning of each other’s diplomatic missions.

People are perceiving the U.S. and Russia as being in love. However, Trump’s Russia policy has been more hawkish than often portrayed in the media. Looking at the record from the previous Trump administration, we can see that if something is not in the interests of the U.S., that is not going to be done. Trump does not do favors.

He approved anti-tank missile sales to Ukraine in 2019. That same year, Trump withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, an agreement with Russia that limited what weapons each country could purchase, over Russian violations.

In 2019, Trump also issued economic sanctions against a Russian ship involved in building the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. These sanctions tried to block Russia’s direct gas exports to Germany – this connection between Russia and Germany was seen by Ukraine as an economic threat.

Based on Trump’s talks with Russia and remarks against Ukraine, it could seem like the U.S. and Russia are no longer adversaries. How do you perceive this?

There are no clear indications that Russia and the U.S. have ceased to be adversaries. Despite Trump’s occasional use of terms like “friends” in diplomacy, his rhetoric often serves as a tactical maneuver rather than a genuine shift in alliances. A key example is his engagement with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, where Trump alternated between flattery and threats to extract concessions.

Even if the U.S. is meeting with Russia and the public narrative seems to say otherwise, strategically, abandoning Ukraine is not in the United States’ best interests. One reason why is because the U.S. turning away from Ukraine would make Russia happy and China happy. Trump has treated China as a primary threat to the U.S., and China has supported Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is also still saying that everyone, including Ukraine, will be at the table for eventual peace talks.

The allegations that Russia was holding some information over Trump and blackmailing him started long before this presidential term and did not stop Trump from imposing countermeasures on Russia during his first term. The first Trump administration took more than 50 policy actions to counter Moscow, primarily in the form of public statements and sanctions.

What does the U.S. gain from developing a diplomatic relationship with Russia?

Trump is a transactional politician. American companies could profit from the U.S. aligning with Russia and Russian companies, as some Russian officials have said during the recent Saudi Arabia talks with the Trump administration. But the U.S. could also benefit economically from the Trump’s administration’s proposed deal with Ukraine to give the U.S. half of Ukraine’s estimated $11.5 trillion in rare earth minerals.

Zelenskyy rejected that proposal this week, saying it does not come with the promise that the U.S. will continue to give security guarantees to Ukraine.

Historically, since the Cold War, there has been a diplomatic triangle between the Soviet Union – later Russia – China and the U.S. And there has always been one side fighting against the two other sides. Trump trying to develop a better diplomatic relationship with Russia might mean he is trying to distance Russia from China.

A similar dynamic is playing out between the U.S. and Belarus’ authoritarian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, a co-aggressor in the war in Ukraine. Lukashenko is close with both Russia and China. The U.S. administration is looking to relax sanctions on Belarusian banks and exports of potash, a key ingredient in fertilizer, in exchange for the release of Belarusian political opposition members who are imprisoned. There are over 1,200 political prisoners in Belarus. This U.S. foreign policy strategy is aimed at providing Lukashenko with room to grow less economically dependent on Russia and China.

A worker clears snow from a cemetery in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, on Feb. 17, 2025. More than 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died in combat since Russia launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Pierre Crom/Getty Images

Is this level of collaboration between the U.S. and Russia unprecedented?

While U.S.-Russia relations are often defined by rivalry, history shows that pragmatic cooperation has occurred when both nations saw mutual benefits – whether this relates to arms control, space, counterterrorism, Arctic affairs or health.

Moreover, the U.S. has always prioritized its own interests in its relationship with Russia. For example, the U.S. and its allies imposed sanctions on Russia’s uranium and nickel industries only in May 2024, over two years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. This was due to the United States’ strategic economic dependencies and concerns about market stability if it sanctioned uranium and nickel.

Even after Russia invaded Crimea – an area of Ukraine that Russia claims as its own – in 2014 and provided support for Russian separatists in Ukraine’s Donbass region, the U.S. and other Western countries imposed largely symbolic sanctions. This included freezing assets of Russian individuals, restricting some financial transactions and limiting Russia’s access to Western technology.

We should also notice that Trump in January 2025 promised to sanction Russia if it does not end the Ukraine war. The U.S. still has not removed any existing sanctions, which signals its commitment to a tough stance on Russia, despite perceptions of a close relationship between Trump and Putin.

Given Trump’s transactional approach to foreign policy, his tough rhetoric on Zelenskyy could be a deliberate negotiation strategy aimed at pressuring Ukraine into making greater concessions in potential peace talks, rather than signaling abandonment. Läs mer…

Imperialist rhetoric is becoming a mark of President Donald Trump’s second term. From asserting that the U.S. will “take over” the Gaza Strip, Greenland and the Panama Canal to apparently siding with Russia in its war on Ukraine, Trump’s comments suggest a return to an old imperialist style of forcing foreign lands under American control.

Imperialism is when a nation extends its power through territorial acquisition, economic dominance or political influence. Historically, imperialist leaders have used military conquest, economic coercion or diplomatic pressure to expand their dominions, and justified their foreign incursions as civilizing missions, economic opportunities or national security imperatives.

The term “empire” often evokes the Romans, the Mughals or the British, but the U.S. is an imperial power, too. In the 19th and early 20th century, American presidents expanded U.S. territory westward across the continent and, later, overseas, acquiring Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands, Guam and the Philippines.

After that, outright territorial conquest mostly ceased, but the U.S. did not give up imperialism. As I trace in my 2023 book, “Dying by the Sword,” the country instead embraced a subtler, more strategic kind of expansionism. In this veiled imperialism, the U.S. exerted its global influence through economic, political and threatened military means, not direct confrontation.

Embracing traditional U.S. imperialism would upend the rules that have kept the globe relatively stable since World War II. As an expert on U.S. foreign policy, I fear that would unleash fear, chaos – and possibly nuclear war.

No redrawing borders

One of the most fundamental principles of this post-war international system is the concept of sovereignty – the idea that a nation’s borders should remain intact.

The United Nations Charter, signed in San Francisco in 1945, explicitly bars countries from obtaining territory through force. Outright annexation or territorial takeover is considered a direct violation of international law.

Work by the late political scientist Mark Zacher outlines how, since World War II, the international community – including the U.S. – has largely upheld this standard.

But imperialism still shapes world politics.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is a blatant instance of imperial ambition justified by alleged historical grievances and national security concerns. Russia’s invasion set a dangerous precedent by undermining the principle that borders can’t be changed by force and that countries shouldn’t resort to aggression.

Putin’s precedent, in turn, has raised concerns that another great power may attempt to forcibly redraw international borders.

Take China, for example. President Xi Jinping has become increasingly aggressive toward Taiwan since 2019. If Putin’s invasion culminates with Russia successfully annexing parts of Ukraine – which the Trump administration has agreed with Russia should be part of any settlement – Xi may follow through on his threats to invade Taiwan.

A destroyed Russian tank in Kyiv, Ukraine, Feb. 23, 2023. Territorial invasions like Russia’s ongoing effort to annex parts of Ukraine have been relatively rare since World War II.
Roman Pilipey/Getty Images

Respect for national sovereignty has made the world more stable and less violent.

The decline of traditional imperialism after World War II led to a flourishing of independent nation-states. As former colonial powers gradually relinquished control of their holdings in the second half of the 20th century – voluntarily or after losing wars of independence – the number of sovereign countries increased dramatically. The U.N. had 51 member countries in 1945 and over 150 by 1970.

The U.N. was founded on the idea that people of all countries should have a say in how they build their own futures. Today, 197 countries try to work together through the U.N. on a wide range of global issues, including defending human rights and reducing global poverty.

When a major power like the U.S. openly embraces imperialist rhetoric, it further weakens the already fragile rules that keep this delicate collaboration working.

Nonviolent imperialism

Imperialism does not require military force. Great powers still exert influence over weaker nations, shaping their behavior through economic might and wealth, diplomacy and strategic alliances.

The U.S. has long engaged in this form of influence. It has often pursued its imperialist agenda in what I would call a more “gentlemanly manner” than historical empires with their bloody physical conquests.

During the Cold War, for example, the U.S. established extensive dominance over much of the globe. In Latin America and the Middle East, it used economic aid, military alliances and ideological persuasion rather than outright territorial expansion to exert its control. Russia did the same in Eastern Europe and its other spheres of influence.

Demonstrators in Panama City insist ‘Panama Canal is Not For Sale’ following Donald Trump’s threats to seize the canal, Jan. 20, 2025.
Arnulfo Franco/AFP via Getty Images

Today, China excels at nonviolent imperialism. Its Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure construction project launched in 2013, has created deep economic dependencies among partner nations in Africa, South Asia and Latin America. Trade and diplomatic ties between China and those regions are much closer today as a result.

Nuclear era

A critical distinction between imperialism past and present is the presence of nuclear weapons.

In previous eras, great powers frequently fought wars to expand their influence and settle disputes. Countries could attempt to seize territory with little risk to their survival, even in defeat.

The sheer destructive potential of nuclear arsenals has changed this calculus. The Cold War doctrine of mutually assured destruction guarantees that if one country launches a nuclear weapon, it will quickly become the target of nuclear counterattack: annihilation for all sides.

Any major war between nuclear-armed nations now carries the risk of massive, potentially planetary, destruction. This makes direct conquest an irrational, even suicidal strategy rather than a calculated political maneuver.

And it makes Trump’s old-school imperial rhetoric particularly dangerous.

If the U.S. tried to annex foreign territory, it would almost certainly provoke serious international conflict. That’s especially true of the most strategic places Trump has threatened to “take over,” like the Panama Canal, which links 1,920 ports across 170 countries.

These imperialist threats, even if they’re not intended as serious policy proposals, are already ratcheting up global tensions.

Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino — a pro-American ally — has flatly ruled out negotiating with the U.S. over control of the Panama Canal. Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, says its territory of Greenland is “not for sale.” And Palestinians in Gaza, for their part, fiercely reject Trump’s plan to move all of them out and turn their homeland into a “Middle East Riviera,” as have neighboring Arab countries, which could be expected to absorb millions of displaced Palestinians.

Rhetoric shapes perception, and perception influences behavior. When an American president floats acquiring foreign territories as a viable policy option, it signals to both allies and enemies that the U.S. is no longer committed to the international order that has achieved relative global stability for the past 75 years.

With wars raging in the Middle East and Europe, this is a risky time for reckless rhetoric. Läs mer…