The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2021

18 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Site of the Month Our World in Data: ourworldindata.org F rom poverty and disease to climate change and inequality, making progress against the world’s largest problems is the focus of Our World in Data. Operated by researchers at the United Kingdom’s University of Oxford and the Global Change Data Lab, the website features 3,100 charts across nearly 300 topics. All are free and open source. The site covers trends in health, food provision, income growth and distribution, violence, rights, wars, energy use, education and environ- mental changes, among others. Our World in Data created a data- base on testing for COVID-19 that is used by the United Nations, the World Health Organization and the White House. The site features 207 country profiles featuring coronavirus statis- tics that are updated every day. “We believe that a key reason why we fail to achieve the progress we are capable of is that we do not make enough use of this existing research and data: the important knowledge is often stored in inaccessible databases, locked away behind paywalls and bur- ied under jargon in academic papers,” according to the team behind the web- site. “The goal of our work is to make the knowledge on the big problems accessible and understandable.” given that Trump’s trenchant nationalist views clearly have strong support among Americans.” “What led to the election of Donald Trump four years ago remains,” French Minister of State for European Affairs Clément Beaune said Nov. 13 at the Paris Peace Forum, a virtual meeting of world leaders and diplomats. “This kind of discomfort of globalization, this fear of China, this concern about multilater- alism, remain.” Borrell told Time he believes that divisions between the United States and Europe “could come to a head” over Iran and China early in the Biden presidency. While President-elect Biden has said he will rejoin the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, Borrell said that will be a challenge, in part because signatories will be wary of a future U.S. administration leaving the pact again. Further, a political risk consultancy firm, the Eurasia Group, said in a note to investors on Nov. 17 that the Biden administration will find it difficult to abandon the stiff sanctions President Trump imposed on Iran. The U.S. and Asia O n Nov. 20, the State Department Office of Policy Planning released “The Elements of the China Challenge, ” a 74-page report on China. “The Trump administration achieved a fundamental break with the con- ventional wisdom,” the paper’s intro- duction states. “It concluded that the CCP’s [Chinese Communist Party’s] resolute conduct and self-professed goals require the United States and other countries to revise assumptions and develop a new strategic doctrine to address the primacy and magnitude of the China challenge.” The report consists of three sections analyzing China’s conduct, the intel- lectual sources of China’s conduct and China’s vulnerabilities, as well as a short concluding section, “Securing Freedom,” which outlines 10 steps the United States should take to meet the challenge. “Meeting the China challenge requires the United States to return to the fundamentals,” the paper argues, including rejuvenation of U.S. constitu- tional democracy, strong alliances and development of “sturdy policies that stand above bureaucratic squabbles and interagency turf battles and transcend short-term election cycles. The United States’ overarching aim should be to secure freedom.” Meanwhile, President Trump snubbed Asian counterparts by failing to participate in two key Asia-related virtual summits in mid-November. Neither Trump nor any Cabinet- level officials participated in the recent Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) or the East Asian Summit. China signed a trade pact with 14 other Asian countries that same weekend. Derek Mitchell, former U.S. ambas- sador to Myanmar, told Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin: “It’s really a trav- esty, and it undermines all the Trump administration’s pretensions of having a thoughtful and strategic approach to the China challenge. If you are seeking to demonstrate you are a resident power in Asia in competition with China, you need to act like it.” n This edition of Talking Points was compiled by Cameron Woodworth and Shawn Dorman.