Benjamin Haddad, a Research Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington D.C., reviews Mike Pompeo's appointment as the new U.S. Secretary of State and John Bolton's recent nomination as National Security Advisor. According to Haddad, U.S. President Donald Trump has appointed two lawyers known for their hawkish and interventionist stands on foreign policy and security matters. He thus explains what official policies are to be expected on Iran, North Korea and Russia.

As 2017 drew to close, China officially approved plans for its long-awaited national Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) and the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) outlined some of the implementation details[1]. Though it will be limited to the power sector (and combined heat and power, or CHP) at first, it will nevertheless be the world’s largest carbon market. It is expected to cover 1,700 companies representing approximately 30% of China’s total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. China’s CO₂ emissions from fuel combustion amounted to approximately 8,796 metric tonnes of CO₂ equivalent (MtCO₂Eq.) in 2016, and seem to remain stable since 2014, though they appear to increase again in 2017[2]. Shanghai should host the national market exchange, which will be jointly owned by the governments of other provinces while Hubei should host the registry[3].

Since 2015 and the refugee crisis, the dialogue between the European Union (EU) and African countries on migration issues has assumed a new intensity. 

The energy sector is one where the break between the Trump and Obama administrations is the most pronounced. The three officials in charge, Rick Perry at the Department of Energy (DoE), Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Ryan Zinke at the head of the Department of the Interior (DoI), share the same indifference to the issue of climate change, the same will to encourage oil and gas production in the USA in order to bring an era of American “energy dominance”, the same desire to promote the extraction of “beautiful, clean coal”, to paraphrase President Trumps’s State of the Union address, and the same deep mistrust of renewable energies such as wind and solar.

The United States has developed a vast body of legal regulations with extraterritorial application in order to tackle corruption on the international stage and to pursue companies that do not abide by the trade embargoes demanded by U.S. foreign policy.

The signing in January 2009 of the gas supply and transit contracts between Gazprom and Naftogaz marked a turning point in Russian-Ukrainian gas relations: yearly intergovernmental, last minute and non-transparent winter deals were replaced by a predictable, long term commercial relationship. 

Almost 20 years after Vladimir Putin's accession to the presidency in 2000, how should the Russian political system be defined?

With globalization weakening their borders and their sovereignty, are states now marginalized on the global stage?