Nature-based solutions (NBS) use natural landscapes to address environmental challenges. Instead of piping rainwater away, NBS implementations in cities like Rotterdam in the Netherlands, aims to “turn the city into a sponge” that absorbs and stores water. These can include creating open spaces – like parks and plazas – that flood temporarily, using green roofs and walls to catch runoff, and creating or restoring wetlands to act as reservoirs during intense rain. These solutions serve to mitigate the effects of heavy rainfall while integrating greenery that decorates the existing urban landscape. Restoring natural waterways and incorporating permeable pavements and soils into existing and future urban infrastructures can also help to curb the effects of flooding with high payoff. For instance, studies conducted on the effects of restoring floodplains show that for every euro invested in restoration, four euros are avoided in damages. These solutions serve a dual purpose: managing water and improving urban life. European cities implementing NBS are planning ahead, redesigning cityscapes to work with natural water cycles instead of against them. 

Spanish cities have taken great strides in promoting nature-based solutions as preventative flood measures. In Madrid, an urban project transformed a section of highway into a prolific green urban park along the Manzanares River that spans an area over 7.5 kilometers. This Madrid Río project provided the city with lawns, trees, bike paths, and playgrounds which all sit over giant stormwater containers that collect excess water, prevent overflow from potential flood events, and even help cool the city during intense heat waves. This park has become one of Madrid’s most popular spots and serves to bring the nearby community together. However, the project cost about 4 billion euros and faced skepticism and political pressure at its outset. Madrid provides a great example of integrating a flexible flood buffer – a green riverpark that can soak up stormwater and return to hosting picnics and soccer games. 

With climate change bringing heavier downpours, cities are finding new ways to adapt beyond barriers and surge barriers. As a Dutch port city, Rotterdam has embraced a shift in perspective – living with the water by making the urban landscape itself part of the solution. Under its “Rotterdam Climate Proof” program, the city has spent roughly 100 million euros on climate adaptation, pioneering innovative measures to manage excess rainfall. In 2013, Rotterdam opened Benthemplein Water Square, a public plaza that can retain almost 2 million liters of rainwater when heavy rains hit. Benthemplein fills up like a pond and gradually drains after the storm, a concept so successful that it has since been adapted in cities worldwide. Rotterdam has also tested out multi-use water storage systems, other blue-green schoolyards and parks, dual-purpose waterways, green roofs, and floating architecture to combat sea-level rise. Rotterdam’s success with all of these innovative techniques has attracted attention around the globe, from New York to Tokyo. For cities, especially those like Rotterdam that are below sea-level, Rotterdam’s innovations may provide key insights to keep cities dry and afloat.

Europe’s densest major city, Paris, has relatively few natural areas, increasing the impact of oscillating heat waves and major flooding. In response, Paris is pursuing a greening strategy, including the Paris Climate Action Plan and the “Soil & Rainwater Plan”, which plan to adapt the urban environment to better handle water. This includes ridding the city of excess asphalt, planting more trees, and mandating green roofs on new buildings. They have also developed initiatives like the “Oasis schoolyards” program, which adds green spaces and gardens to schools in order to reduce runoff and increase permeability and water storage. Paris has primarily sought to add parks, urban forests, and green roofs into the urban landscape, infusing nature wherever possible. The city has sought to make the green infrastructure a legal requirement and guide new projects to include NBS and biodiversity considerations. Paris’ developments help demonstrate how developed and populated cities can adapt to flooding or climate change concerns through implementation of NBS initiatives to contribute to a safer, more sustainable urban landscape. 

Nature-based urban flood solutions come with major barriers to implementation, the first of which is funding. Green infrastructure often requires significant up-front investment, and while it may be cheaper in the long run, finding the money initially can be difficult. Madrid’s project cost about €4 billion, and even smaller projects like Rotterdam’s water squares or Paris’s schoolyard greenery need steady financing. Cities may be able to seek EU funds, climate resilience grants, or public-private partnerships to fund these sustainable ventures. Some cities are even exploring innovative funding solutions — charging new development fees to fund flood mitigation parks or using insurance savings to invest in nature-based features.  

Another challenge is finding space in dense cities where urban land is expensive and contested. Converting a street into a bioswale or a parking lot into a pond may face harsh resistance. It takes political courage and community support to reclaim land for NBS projects. Strong leadership and public engagement are crucial to overcoming the short-term disruptions that the construction of these projects can bring. By informing the public on the benefits of NBS projects, they may be more willing to take on the costs and inconveniences associated with their implementation. 

Cities must also ensure equity in climate adaptation, given the risk that creating green amenities will inadvertently fuel “green gentrification”, raising property values and pushing out lower-income residents. This has been observed in North American and European cities where new parks have led to higher rents in surrounding areas. To counter this, planners in major cities strive to distribute nature-based projects to all neighborhoods, alongside affordable housing policies. Combining this with community involvement — such as Rotterdam co-designing water squares with local students and church members — can help ensure projects meet local needs and that residents welcome the change. The implementation of these nature-based solutions must be administered equitably to ensure that the benefits of these greener streets are not merely shared among the affluent. 

Some other general considerations are maintenance, performance, and large-scale implementation into urban design. When implementing these solutions, cities must budget for long-term care just as they would for pipes and pumps. Trees grow and die, parks need maintenance, and bioswales can clog if not maintained. There is also a learning curve in city agencies which will only improve as more cities embark on NBS projects, providing more data to validate their effectiveness and provide insights into the best strategies for efficient implementation and upkeep. Even cities such as Valencia — which undertook NBS projects but continues to face flooding concerns — provide key opportunities to learn from and improve these sustainable urban practices. Additionally, to truly counter escalating flood risks, these approaches must move from small isolated demonstrations to standard practice in urban design. Collective action must be taken to successfully integrate these projects through a coordinated strategy to maximize impact and benefits systemically. 

European cities have a choice to make: reinforce their fortress mentality with higher barriers and larger sewers, or reinvent themselves to align with nature. The cases above help portray what the latter path can achieve — beautifying cities, improving health, and bringing people together. Going forward, city leaders should incorporate the lessons from these pioneers, incorporating new developments or renovations into urban infrastructure — whether a small park or permeable parking lane. Ambitious targets help set the intention, but clear policies and incentives are necessary to achieve them. Cities may start by updating zoning and building codes but should also include larger-scale planning, collaborating beyond city limits — restoring upstream wetlands for instance — to effectively reduce flooding. The EU and national governments can accelerate progress by funding innovation and implementation within nature-based solutions and facilitating knowledge exchange. 

The implementation of these solutions are more robust than some may realize and provide quantifiable benefits as we factor in the severity of the global climate crisis. A recent European Commission study found that combinations of NBS measures could help Europe maintain future flood impacts at today’s levels even under a 3°C warming scenario. Investing in resilience helps avoid disaster losses and results in additional benefits like tourism, recreation, and improved public health. It is also important to make the distinction in sustainable design that grey and green infrastructure are complements. Smart cities will utilize hybrid solutions, pairing grey infrastructure such as a necessary stormwater tunnel or a seawall with green infrastructure such as new parks or restored wetlands. Tying these practices together can help protect cities from floods and diversify the urban landscape in ways that bring unparalleled improvements to cities. 

All in all, the battle against urban flooding in Europe is creating a new type of city. A city with tree-lined streets, plazas that welcome water, and rivers reconnected to their floodplains. A city that treats nature as an ally to be woven into its fabric. From Madrid’s revitalized Manzanares to Rotterdam’s sponge-like neighborhoods and Paris’s green schoolyards, we are seeing the blueprint of how to build flood-resilient cities that are also healthier, happier places to live. European cities should continue to scale up these nature-based solutions, sharing successes and learning from setbacks. As climate pressures mount, the choice is clear: embrace nature as part of urban infrastructure, or risk being overwhelmed by future storms. The water will come one way or another – better to work with it, than to fight a losing battle against it.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Floods in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Image sourced from Flickr | CC License, no changes made     

Achievements of Made in China 2025

Made in China 2025 aimed to boost quality, innovation, productivity, and the integration of industrialization and informatization. It identified ten sectors for breakthrough development: Information Technology (IT), robotics, aviation and aerospace equipment, offshore engineering equipment and high-tech ships, rail transportation, new energy vehicles, electrical equipment, agricultural machinery, biotech, pharma, and medical devices, and emerging technologies. 

By 2023, China led global research in 37 out of 44 critical technologies, as identified by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Critical Technology Tracker, highlighting how China is achieving the goal of breakthrough development. Among these critical technologies, nanoscale materials, 5G and 6G technologies, machine learning, aircraft engines, electric batteries, biological manufacturing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms, and autonomous systems particularly demonstrate enhanced capabilities in several of the targeted sectors.

Apart from these ten sectors, the plan emphasized strategic priorities which included manufacturing innovation, integration of informatization and industrialization, industrial capabilities, brand-building, green manufacturing, service-oriented production, and internationalization. Today, China is reported to be among the leading countries in the global innovation race, demonstrating rapid progress in innovative capabilities in robotics, nuclear power, electric vehicles, biopharma, and AI, among others.

Considering the priority of integrating informatization and industrialization, China’s industrial internet was reported to have witnessed an 8.7 percent year-on-year growth in 2022, reaching an output of USD 167.7 billion in 2023. Recently, Beijing has been upgrading its industrial internet with 5G technology, launching a pilot project for this purpose in November 2024. On March 7, a national political adviser confirmed full sectoral coverage in all key industrial sectors. 

In terms of industrial capabilities, a report by the UN Industrial Development Organization highlights that in the first quarter of 2024, China performed best among all industrial economies in the manufacturing sector, recording a 1.3 percent growth.  Another report by UNIDO projects China to hold a 45 percent share in global industrial production by 2030, while the United States’ share is projected to shrink to 11 percent.   

Chinese brands have also made great strides in improving quality standards and going global, following the fourth strategic priority. Fifty Chinese brands featured on the World Brand Lab’s World’s 500 Most Influential Brands ranking in 2024 and 69 in Brand Finance’s Global 500 2025 report. Chinese brands have been expanding their reach most rapidly in the fast-expanding economies of the global south, having increased their sales in these countries fourfold between 2016 and 2024. 

In the green manufacturing objective, progress has been more limited, with only three Chinese companies making it on TIME’s World’s Most Sustainable Companies of 2024 list. However, some progress has still been made, with thirteen out of sixteen targets for green development set for 2020 having been met. Beijing aims to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. 

These facts indicate that China has been substantially successful in achieving most of its 2025 targets. According to the Flanders-China Chamber of Commerce, over 86 percent of the goals of Made in China 2025 have been met, a claim supported by the indicators above. Given the relative success of this plan, China’s goals for the next ten years provide a roadmap for projecting China’s growth by 2035.

China’s Vision for 2035

Based on the success of the targets set for 2025 and their impact on changing the global manufacturing dynamics, it can be projected that China may attain similar success in its next ten-year plan. By 2035, Beijing aims to become a manufacturing powerhouse with a high capacity for innovation, a leader in global standard-setting, and an economic superpower, as laid out in its Vision 2035 and the China Standards 2035 plan. As part of Vision 2035, the 14th Five-Year Plan, released in 2020, laid out the long-term goal of doubling the size of the economy by 2035. A companion initiative, China Standards 2035, outlines Beijing’s intent to shape global standards for critical emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, information and communications technology, renewable energy, and biotechnology. 

In the economic domain, China’s GDP grew from USD 15.45 trillion in 2020 to USD 18.80 trillion in 2024. Doubling the economy from 2020 and reaching USD 31 trillion requires an annual growth of 4.8 percent, but forecasts predict a slowdown that drops annual growth to 3.3 percent by 2029 and below 3 percent after. However, that does not mean China’s growth will be insignificant. With GDP projected at USD 22.73 trillion by 2029, even a growth rate of below 2 percent could still achieve over 80 percent of the target by 2035. 

In the technology sector, Beijing is becoming increasingly active in international standard-setting, particularly in critical emerging technologies. In September 2024, the UN’s International Telecommunications Union approved three new standards for 6G mobile technology developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. As of February, Beijing had signed 108 agreements for standards cooperation and mutual recognition with various regional, national, and private partners. Furthermore, the Digital Silk Road under the Belt and Road Initiative also contributes to exporting Chinese standards of technology to partner countries. With Beijing already emerging as a major player in standard-setting, it can be anticipated to have substantially reduced the United States and its allies’ dominance in international standards-setting a decade from today, therefore acquiring considerable control over emerging technologies and their markets.

In 2023, President Xi highlighted “new quality productive forces” as the foundation for future technology-driven economic growth, based on three critical industries – electric vehicles (EVs), lithium-ion batteries, and solar photovoltaics (PV). This focus is reflected in China’s growth, with Beijing leading the world in innovation, production, and export in all three industries. Such progress in innovation can translate to a leading position on global standard-setting in these industries, enabling China to consolidate dominance in these markets.

Challenges on the Path to 2035

China’s path towards 2035 will not be one without obstacles threatening its pace of progress. The most pressing of these challenges will be efforts from the United States to prevent the attainment of goals that threaten American economic and technological dominance. Economic decoupling through tariffs, first initiated under President Trump in 2018, is accelerating again through the imposition of heightened tariffs under his second administration. A report on the effects of the 2018 trade war discovered that weak market substitution constrained Chinese exporters’ ability to offset the impact of tariff hikes through diversion to alternate foreign markets, an effect likely to reappear as the United States was China’s second-largest export market in 2024. However, the severity of this impact can be expected to be comparatively lower as China’s trade with other countries has been rising more rapidly than with the U.S. and its Western allies, with ASEAN remaining the largest trading partner and trade with BRI partners constituting over half the total trade in 2024.

Heightening instability in the international system, with increasing pockets of conflict and geopolitical tensions, will also continue undermining global economic growth, including that of China. In Southeast Asia, tensions over the South China Sea – particularly with the Philippines and Taiwan – threaten regional trade. Increasing assertiveness in these disputes by China has been accompanied by growing bilateral partnerships between the U.S. and these regional states. Taiwan, in particular, remains a potential flashpoint, evidenced by increasing Chinese military activity around the island, growing arms transfers from Washington to Taipei, and a softening of Washington’s stance against Taiwanese independence.

In the technology sector, the tech war with the U.S. will hinder Beijing’s efforts for technological dominance. Washington’s efforts to choke China’s access to semiconductor chips through Taiwan have remained a major obstacle in China’s technological growth, as evidenced by Beijing’s recent investigation into the impact of U.S. government subsidies in this sector. However, the DeepSeek upset to the U.S.-dominated AI industry has highlighted China’s ability to innovate despite these restrictions.

Conclusion

China’s growth towards its goals for 2035 will be constrained by these challenges, and the realization of these goals in their entirety cannot be expected to materialize. However, Beijing’s demonstrated ability to innovate and its efforts to expand the pool of its economic partners will bolster growth despite these challenges, making a success rate similar to that of ‘Made in China 2025’ plausible. This projected estimate of success for the 2035 goals would directly contribute to enhancing China’s economic might and technological dominance.

Significant changes in the international system can be expected as China continues on this projected growth trajectory, as the United States and its allies would have to double down against growing Chinese influence in order to protect the ideological dominance of the rule-based order. With this in mind, the next decade can be anticipated to be an important and turbulent one, as the degree of China’s success in achieving its goals for 2035 will impact the severity of its challenge to the dominance of the U.S.-led international political and economic order.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Tech Technology Factory Zuhai China, Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons | CC License, no changes made     

The youth generation in North Korea may just be the biggest threat to the North Korean regime. Unlike their relatives who grew up in the still stable 60s and 70s, millennials and Gen Z have no recollection of a prospering North Korea free of the poverty sweeping the state today. Officially referred to as the ‘marketplace generation’ in North Korea, young North Koreans have learned how to provide for themselves through the advancement of black markets and technology, securing access not only to living essentials but also to contraband like foreign media and fashion. As the primary drivers of foreign items in the state-wide black markets, the youth of North Korea are more aware of the promise of freedom outside of the regime than older generations. As the proportion of youth defectors increases, it is time to challenge the prevailing notion that North Korean citizens are blindly following the regime and focus instead on what is motivating the youth to challenge it.

Perceptions about North Koreans in the West tend towards the sensational. North Koreans are often portrayed as brainwashed and undyingly loyal to the regime, perpetuating the narrative that they cannot think for themselves. These perceptions not only make it difficult to empathize with the real stories of North Korean people but also make the situation on the Korean peninsula seem hopeless. After nearly 80 years spent divided, greater awareness of the capabilities of the North Korean people is necessary to figure out the path to reunification.

First, it is important to understand how North Korean youth engage with the outside world. Foreign media within North Korea usually originates from South Korea, China, or the United States, and includes TV shows, music, and magazines. Digital media is smuggled into the country on CD disks and USB sticks before being sold or rented out by black marketeers, who more often than not are youth. USB sticks are covertly exchanged after viewing at schools and other youth gathering places. At home, youth secretly watch dramas hidden under the covers or behind closed curtains. 

Foreign fashions are just as popular among the black market youth. Fashion items like blue jeans have been banned by the regime in recent years because of their salience as symbols of “Western imperialism” and cultural change. Youth caught wearing foreign fashions face punishments ranging from losing workplace advancement opportunities to public doxxing on the country’s propaganda radio program, Third Broadcast. However, despite the threat of consequences, youth still find ways to follow the trends of the actors and actresses they see in their contraband dramas, with many “true fashionistas” skipping the physical markets to buy banned items directly from black marketeers selling items like Western makeup and blue jeans directly out of their homes.  

Take Kang Jihyun, who defected in 2009. Defecting because of her dream to become a fashion designer, Kang’s story represents a growing trend of young North Koreans who defect for career opportunities and personal freedom. Kang’s journey to South Korea started with a simple pair of ripped blue jeans. After seeing a foreign tourist wearing the pair of ripped jeans, Kang became curious about all kinds of foreign fashions that seemed strange within North Korea’s strict clothing restrictions. Kang’s interest in fashion continued to grow despite “social and academic barriers” within North Korea, leading her to engage with any foreign media she could find in order to view the extensive fashion styles featured within.

Kang’s story highlights a growing push for freedom by North Korean youth—a “quiet information revolution.” As access to foreign items within North Korea increases, so does the public’s perception of freedom outside of North Korea. Of North Korean citizens’ foreign media viewing habits, researcher Sunny Yoon said: “The viewing patterns of foreign media in people’s daily lives may be one of a few indicators of social change in North Korea”. The youth population comprise nearly a quarter of the entire North Korean population and are the ones most often interacting with foreign materials. With this in mind, the role of the North Korean youth will “naturally eclipse” the role of the older generations in the future of North Korea, especially as youth become more connected with the outside world through technology and black markets. 

It is this increasing connection with the outside world that allows the generational traits of young people in North Korea to be understood through the lens of youth worldwide. In interviewing 120 American Generation Z (Gen Z) youth and parsing through nearly 70 million online writing samples from Gen Z authors, Stanford researchers found that compared to older generations, Gen Z are more likely to “question rules and authority”, especially when those rules concern issues of truthfulness. This matches existing perceptions of the generation, which often characterize Gen Z as more “individualistic” than their older counterparts, with a significant focus on “authenticity” and “self-expression”.

North Korean youth, most of whom are now Gen Z, display these same general trends of individualism as their Western counterparts. When asked about the meaning of freedom, a young North Korean defector responded that freedom is “‘being able to work in a certain place if you want and not if you don’t want, being able to do your own business if you want, living where you want and being able to go where you want’,” illustrating young North Koreans’ belief that freedom is based in choice and expression.  In the case of Yu Hyuk, who made the journey to South Korea alone at just 12 years old, music has become an outlet for authentic self-expression. Now 25, Yu is pursuing a career as a KPOP idol in the group 1VERSE . “‘Seeing that even North Koreans can have big dreams, I hope that other marginalized people can also have big dreams as they live their lives,’” Yu expressed while in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

Generational differences surrounding the value of authenticity also show in how North Korean youth interact with sanctioned state media and propaganda. Interviews of young North Koreans resettled in South Korea suggest that when North Korean youth watch state media, they watch with a conscious effort to resist the propaganda messaging. Interviewed defectors said of watching North Korean state media that it appeared “‘unreal’”, and that conversely, South Korean media depicted a “genuine life story.” In interacting with foreign media, North Korean youth are finding freedom in engaging with authentic accounts of self-expression, fighting the propaganda messaging implicit in North Korea’s state-sponsored television and music. The difficult choice made by many young North Korean defectors to seek freedom outside of North Korea is underpinned by generational ideas of individualism and the importance of authenticity. 

Going forward, people outside of North Korea can support the growing movement of young defectors in a multitude of ways. South Korean citizens can express support for better readjustment programs for resettled North Koreans in South Korea, with a specific focus on breaking down educational barriers to success. Additionally, organizations like Liberty in North Korea (LiNK) and  People for Successful COrean REunification (PSCORE) fund everything from grassroots movements to increased access to foreign media in North Korea, paying for North Korean citizens to defect and educational programs for resettled defectors in both South Korea and in the US. 

Any effort to change perceptions of North Korean citizens may help usher in a brighter and freer future. North Korea’s youth will continue to fight for opportunities to defect and achieve the freedom they glimpse on the horizon. In their interactions with foreign and state media, there is no doubt that this generation will be the biggest threat to the North Korean regime in the coming years.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: North Korean Students, Image sourced from Flickr | CC License, no changes made

The fascination between America and China did not begin with Nixon’s visit but rather with desperation—the purest kind of fascination. In 1784, Robert Morris sailed the Empress of China, laden with spirits and silver, from the fledgling United States to Guangzhou. This voyage was not merely an act of trade but a defiance against British imperialism. The ship was glutted with 30 tons of ginseng, highly valued by the Chinese, and returned to New York Harbor with a profit equivalent to nearly $1 million in today’s money, along with silk, tea, and exotic spices, all symbols of China’s mystique.

The voyage of the Empress of China carried “the hopes of a newly independent nation” with backers who were “all the signatories of the Independence agreement,” making it once a private enterprise but a national priority.” When the ship returned in May 1785 with 800 chests of tea, 20,000 pairs of nankeen trousers, and porcelain, Congress responded with “a peculiar satisfaction in the successful issue of this first effort of the citizens of America to establish a direct trade with China.”

This fascination was not limited to commerce; it extended into cultural admiration. To Philip Freneau, a poet of the American Revolution, the very act of trade with China represented lashing out against British dominance. Nowhere is this unique relationship more apparent than in the story of American women in China. In the 19th century, American women were afforded education yet were relegated to homemakers. They would paradoxically find freedom in China, a country where women’s rights were far less developed. But that was precisely the case for Adele Field. In May 1865, she was a widow in a wedding gown, sobbing on the shores of a strange land. She had traveled 149 days from New York to be married in Hong Kong, only to find her husband, a Baptist missionary, dead of typhoid fever. For most, this heartbreak would have been the defining moment of their life. But for Adele Field, it was merely a footnote. 

Born in 1839 in upstate New York, she had already established herself as a principal of a girls’ school by 25 and was later hired by the Northern Baptist church as one of the first single women missionaries. Such women missionaries occupied a fascinating cultural position, coming to China in a period of cultural turmoil to help Chinese women become Christian, find a nice Chinese Christian husband, and settle into a life of Christian domesticity. Yet to Field, this was only the beginning of her education for her students, who would be remembered in history as “Bible women.” She taught her students hygiene, childcare, basic medical skills, and geography, unprecedented knowledge to a country still beginning to realize the harms of footbinding. And as Adele Field defied the norms set upon her by American womanhood, her defiance became contagious. Adele’s students, who eventually became the first graduating class of Jinling Women’s University, an American-funded institution in Nanjing, all took vows never to marry.

Adele’s story is but one of American missionary women who helped build up women’s rights in China. Such missionaries pushed for the unbinding of women’s feet in China, “freeing Chinese women literally to move up in the world,” while also campaigning against female infanticide by placing baskets on the side of Chinese lakes where babies would be thrown with the message “put your babies here.” Their impact lives on. Today, it is the same metaphorical baskets that exist, not as cruel, but only now in the form of countless American parents coming to adopt an influx of Chinese children. Yet perhaps the greatest reflection today of the legacy of women’s rights was Hillary Clinton’s 1995 speech at the UN International Women’s Conference in Beijing. She had been labeled a failure in America with her high-profile efforts to reform the nation’s health care system.

It is no coincidence that, following the footsteps of Adele Field and so many female missionaries before her, Clinton found her voice by inspiring Chinese womanhood. Clinton’s declaration that “women’s rights are human rights” marked a political turning point after difficult years as First Lady and inspired Chinese women to pursue freedom and equality. More than two decades later, that 21-minute speech lived on, standing out as a moment when Clinton began to forge an identity as a public figure on the world stage apart from her husband.

Yet, it isn’t accurate to think of this fascination as one-sided. Yung Wing, the first Chinese graduate from Yale University in 1854, envisioned a program where young Chinese boys would study Western science and engineering to modernize China. The Chinese Educational Mission (CEM) brought 120 boys to Hartford between 1872 and 1881. These students, some as young as eight or nine years old, lived with American families, attended local schools, and played baseball on weekends.

However, from the start, this exchange was fraught with tension. The Americanization of the boys alarmed Chinese officials in fear that they were neglecting their heritage. When some students began attending church with their American host families, Chinese officials pressured the emperor to shut the program down. Ultimately, the program was terminated in 1881, leaving behind both hope for modernization and disappointment over its abrupt end.  The lost opportunity became immortalized in the poem of influential official Huang Zunxian, who wrote, “A decade’s effort in training youths / Will lay the foundation for a century’s wealth and strength.” Despite its premature end, many students later returned to China and significantly contributed to China’s civil services, engineering, and the sciences. Yet their legacy lives on; how many overseas Chinese students remained scattered across America, the blossoming flowers of the seeds scattered more than a century ago.

Yet it is equally ignorant to view the history of the countries illuminated in the warm light of nostalgia. The tension today is nothing new. In the spring of 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Chester A. Arthur. This act slapped a 10-year ban on Chinese laborers immigrating to the United States. For the first time, federal law prohibited the entry of an ethnic working group because it endangered the good order of certain regions. Following the expiration of the Exclusion Act in 1892, Congress extended it for 10 more years in the form of the Geary Act, requiring each Chinese resident to register and obtain a certificate of residence. Without a certificate, they faced deportation.

More than a century later, Florida passed SB 264 in 2023, banning Chinese immigrants from buying a home in large swaths of the state. The law singles out people from China for especially draconian restrictions and harsher criminal penalties, including up to five years in prison for the person trying to buy a home. Ironically, the same country was built by “Chinese capital, funneled through Boston investment banks,” a vital funding source for the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s. John Forbes, an ancestor of former Secretary of State John Forbes Kerry, made millions in Guangzhou and returned to America with not only his silver “but also the silver of many of his Chinese colleagues,” which funded railroad construction from the East Coast to Chicago.

Furthermore, more than “half of the transcontinental railroad” was built by Chinese immigrants under brutal conditions. Between 1863 and 1869, an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 Chinese migrants laid the tracks of the western half of the railroad. Those workers pounded on solid rock from sunrise to sunset, hung off steep mountain cliffs in woven reed baskets, and withstood the harshest winters on record in the Sierra Nevada. Around 90% of the railroad workforce was Chinese at the height of construction. In an infamous bet made between Charles Crocker of the Central Pacific and Thomas Durant of the Union Pacific, Crocker proclaimed that his mostly Chinese crew could build 10 miles of track in one day in Utah. Between 7:00 am and 7:00 pm, the workers completed the ten miles and an extra 56 feet, laying nearly one mile of track per hour- a construction feat matched only today in the age of machines.

Americans know theirs is a country built upon law, but less is known about the Chinese’s helping to build America in this regard. Wong Kim Ark was born in the United States and regularly visited family in China. On returning from one trip, immigration officers barred his entry because of his ethnicity. Wong asserted his right to enter as a U.S. citizen and dared to challenge the Immigration Bureau. The result was the Supreme Court case United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), birthing the precedent that any person born in the United States is a citizen by birth. Despite enduring significant humiliation and mistreatment during the Chinese Exclusion Movement of 1882, Chinese immigrants utilized American law as a courageous means to combat racial discrimination. In the first decade of the Chinese Exclusion Act alone, Chinese Americans fought more than 7000 court cases, most of which they won.

Bitterness can only last so long. Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 thawed diplomatic channels that had been frozen throughout the Cold War.  The visit was a visual spectacle for the U.S. President, his entourage, and the rest of the world, who watched with bated breath as the leader of the free world traveled to the largest Communist nation. A whirlwind tour through three of China’s major cities brought Nixon to several famed historical sites and cultural performances and face-to-face with many senior Chinese leaders. A few weeks later, the Shanghai Communiqué established the “One China” policy and set the stage for normalized relations. However, it also revealed fundamental misunderstandings between the two sides. While the U.S. believed engagement would mold China into a democratic ally, Mao Zedong still clung to his mistrust, viewing America as “both a huge opportunity and a huge threat.”

Those words might be the greatest summary of the relationship today. In 2015, China’s education minister demanded “a ban on textbooks promoting Western values in all of China’s schools.” The government has ordered artists and architects to “serve socialism” and renamed housing developments that had been given Western names like “Yosemite” or “Manhattan Golden Dream Village.” The number of Chinese students coming to study in the U.S. has also declined, reflecting a significant shift in both policy and public perception as many Chinese students reconsider their educational options.

The relationship between America and China is akin to Buddhist reincarnation or the spinning tires of a Ford Mustang- a cycle of enchantment followed by hope, disappointment, bitterness, and renewed fascination. As both nations rise on parallel trajectories toward global power, their intertwined histories offer lessons for navigating future challenges. The contradictory ways Americans approach China, as both threat and opportunity, with fear and benevolence, are “hardwired in America’s DNA.” Similarly, China remains conflicted about America, seeking its technology and education while fearing its cultural and political influence.

This relationship has become “the most consequential relationship between any two countries in the world.” To move forward constructively requires acknowledging shared contributions while addressing ideological differences. Whether through scientific collaboration or cultural exchange programs like those pioneered by Yung Wing or Adele Field centuries ago, the wheel must continue turning toward mutual understanding rather than conflict. In observing this wheel’s revolution across 250 years, from Robert Morris’ voyage on the Empress of China to today’s geopolitical tensions, we find that history offers not only cautionary tales but also reasons for optimism. China and America are entangled, and understanding our shared past is essential for navigating this complex relationship in the years to come.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: American Paddle Steamer ‘Willamette’ at Canton (Guangzhou), Image sourced from Picryl | CC License, no changes made

To be clear, M23 offensives since January have seriously worsened an already dire security situation in the Eastern part of the DRC. In the last four months, rebel fighters have captured Goma and Bukavu, the two largest cities in the region, as well as valuable gold and coltan mines. Thousands have been killed by both sides and hundreds of thousands displaced. 1.6 million children are out of school, and sexual violence has spiked in recent months. However, it is misleading to attribute these atrocities directly to M23 when patterns of violence often point towards the Congolese government. Bukavu and Goma were ravaged in the days before M23 troops arrived, and the mining hub of Walikale was recently looted by government militias after M23 withdrew. On the battlefield, M23 has proven to be a professional and efficient fighting force, with summary executions being the primary complaints lodged towards them. Instead, it is the Congolese army commonly known as FARDC that seems to resemble a ragtag militia, plagued with graft, desertion, and accusations of abuse. Furthermore, since 2023, the capital Kinshasa has increasingly relied on loosely organized and notoriously brutal local militias known as Wazalendo, as well as former Rwandan genocide perpetrators known as FDLR. Perhaps it is less surprising, then, that M23 columns often march into towns and villages to locals cheering in the streets.

Of course, Rwanda’s illegal meddling in the DRC is sincerely problematic. Though never explicitly admitted, it is a well established fact that Rwandan soldiers are supporting (if not outnumbering) M23 fighters in the Eastern DRC. Logistical, armament, and training support from the Rwandan Defence Force are also likely why M23 has proven so professional in the field. In return, M23 facilitates the smuggling of precious minerals across the border, including nearly 280 tons of coltan that was recently exposed in a Luxembourg commodity scandal. Additionally, Rwanda’s largest net export by far is gold, which at $885 million in 2023 dwarfs any possible domestic production. Along with neighboring Uganda, which exported over $2.2 billion in likely-smuggled gold in the same year, Rwanda has benefited substantially from the looting of resources from the DRC. However, OEC data reveals that net Rwandan gold exports grew mostly in the years between 2014 ($10 million) and 2018 ($709 million)—years when M23 was not active—implying that such illegal profiteering may not be linked to military intervention. If anything, rising resource smuggling can be viewed as a product of the Congolese state’s receding control over its eastern provinces at large, and M23’s influence only a streamlining of already-established black market trade routes. While this data does not absolve Rwandan culpability, it does expose crucial inconsistencies in the narrative that Rwandan intervention is driven primarily by capitalist greed.

Fundamentally, ending Congo’s cycle of physical and economic injustice is more complicated than curtailing Rwandan involvement not least because the fates of these two nations have been interconnected for decades. As Kagame’s ethnic Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front advanced through Rwanda in spring 1994 to clear out the murderous bands that killed 800,000 Tutsi in 100 days, thousands of genocide perpetrators and nearly a million ethnic Hutu civilians fled into neighboring Congo, formerly Zaire. Hosted by then Congolese president Mobutu Sese Seko and abetted by the French military, the now-infamous Interahamwe began planning a counter invasion—something the post-genocide Rwandan government could not accept. When Mobutu refused to hand perpetrators over, RPF soldiers invaded Zaire, killing an estimated 25,000 to 45,000 refugees and fomenting rebellion in the process. In decades since, continued conflict has convinced successive Congolese governments to consistently incorporate Hutu genocidaires into the national army whilst excluding Tutsi from citizenship rights. The M23 movement is merely the latest manifestation of this exclusion, named after a March 23rd, 2009 peace agreement which the rebels claim has been violated by the government. So although most genocide perpetrators have long since hung up their weapons, anti-Tutsi sentiment in the Congo is as strong as ever. As such, Rwandan interference in Congolese affairs, while likely disproportionate, can not be quickly dismissed for the security of both Rwandans and Congolese Tutsis.

Ultimately, the conflict can best be understood internally. Viewed as a threat to political power, the Mobutu and Kabila regimes kept FARDC as weak and ineffectual as possible for decades. Watching the state retreat from every aspect of governance except resource extraction left peripheral regions in the East a tinderbox of discontent. When sectarian violence overflowed into the region from Rwanda and Burundi in the 1990s, armed groups sprung up by the dozen; most of them were fighting against the government until M23’s recent offensives. In fact, of the seven million displaced persons in the Congo, six were displaced in the years when M23 was dormant. Moreover, UNICEF complaints about M23 forcing children out of school are arguably voided by the fact that the Congolese government hasn’t funded such public services since the Cold War. Indeed, when Congo’s current president Felix Tshisekedi took office in 2019, he practically inherited a failed state. 

Unfortunately for Congolese citizens, Tshisekedi’s leadership has been equally disastrous. He only won the presidency by striking a deal with outgoing despot Joseph Kabila to rig the election, compromising what little legitimacy the longtime Belgian resident had to begin with. Until 2024, his choice for deputy minister of defense had spent more time imprisoned in the Hague than in domestic politics. Other cabinet positions are filled with business partners and cronies alike, leading to widespread criticism from NGOs such as Amnesty International. Tshisekedi was slowly becoming an international pariah, that is, until M23 overran Goma in January. 

Since then, the pendulum of criticism has swung completely and unjustifiably towards Rwanda. Groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have abandoned criticism of Tshisekedi and called for overwhelming international pressure against the alleged invaders. Western media has demonized M23 as public enemy number one in the Congo despite the presence of Islamic State groups and continued activities of Hutu genocidaires. The Economist went so far as to compare Kagame’s policies to Putin’s irredentist ambitions in Ukraine—a laughable analogy for anyone familiar with a map. The very humanitarians so eager to point out the Goma prison fire and mass rape that occurred during fighting between M23 and the army forget to mention that a nearly identical incident occurred in a Kinshasa prison months earlier and has become an epicemic across the country. Moreover, in deriding Rwanda’s appalling human rights and press freedom records, journalists conveniently gloss over the fact that the DRC consistently ranks lower on every index. And for all the valid criticism of Rwanda plundering Congolese minerals, Tshisekedi’s solution has been to offer those same minerals to Western companies at even more exploitative terms. In fact, the president has seemingly spent more time lobbying congress and the EU than governing. Thus far, the results of lobbying have been mixed, but it is frankly pathetic that the largest Western proponent of sanctions against Rwanda is the very entity responsible for murdering Patrice Lumumba, inciting ethnic divisions in Rwanda, and genociding millions in the Congo Free State.

Thus, even if one were to generously acknowledge all of Rwanda’s wrongdoings, international media should have equal if not more qualms with the Congolese government. None of M23 and Rwanda’s exploitation, abuse, or misinformation compares to Tshisekedi’s shamelessly advertised persecution complex. Indeed, global sympathy and plump aid cheques have made conflict a handsomely profitable endeavor for his regime, perhaps explaining his refusal to engage in talks with M23 until April. Tshisekedi is a corporatist despot who has consistently failed to deliver on promises, and at a certain point, the West must recognize his scapegoating behavior for what it is. This conflict is not a question of Rwandan exploitation or Congolese peace but exploitation from which direction, and the sitting Congolese president has proven himself willing to exploit his own people to the maximum.

Ultimately, long-term prospects for recovery depend entirely on the ability for the state to govern effectively. It remains to be seen how well M23 can govern its territory, but early signs imply a harsh but efficient and stable administration. On the other hand, the current regime in Kinshasa is an unmitigated disaster in statecraft. At the current rate, a Rwandan withdrawal will do nothing but line the pockets of Kinshasa elites. As the Africa Center for Strategic Studies recognizes, until Tshisekedi and the current government are replaced by genuine reform and national dialogue, conflict in the Congo will likely never abate. Any media analysis of the region should recognize this reality.Why, then, has Western media seemingly accepted Kinshasa’s ruse? Revisiting Fayulu and Smith’s article in Foreign Policy points towards a possible cause for such widespread defamation of Rwanda: self interest. Milain Fayulu’s father happens to be Martin Fayulu, an opposition politician in the DRC who delusionally blames Rwanda for his 2018 electoral loss (as mentioned above, outgoing president Joseph Kabila helped Tshisekedi rig that election). Jeffrey Smith is the founder of Vanguard Africa, a prominent backer of Rwanda’s long-discredited and genocide-questioning opposition figure Victoire Ingabire. Yet an abundance of overzealous Rwanda critics should not be allowed to distort the fact that the Congo conflict is a fundamentally internal problem. For all of Kagame’s faults, the real arsonist is Congolese president Felix Tshisekedi, and he has built a career masquerading as a firefighter.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Members of the M23 rebel group provide security for their leaders during a public walkabout in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, Image sourced from EPA Images | CC License, no changes made

Its reach is expansive, yet despite its vast implications, AI governance remains largely concentrated in the hands of senior policymakers, corporate leaders, and technocrats. The voices of the next generation—those who will inherit and advance this technology—are still notably absent from the global policy table. Youth Leaders Davos (YLD), a powerful initiative founded and led by the visionary global educator and entrepreneur April Swando Hu (Yale ’84), provided a unique platform to address this critical gap during the 2025 World Economic Forum week in Davos, Switzerland. In Davos, I joined youth leaders from across the globe to confront one of the most urgent challenges of our time: ethical and inclusive AI governance. This catalytic incubator of ideas, conceived by Ms. Hu’s commitment to fostering future-oriented leadership, transformed abstract interests into actionable conviction.

Participating in a specialized forum on the ethical implications of AI in healthcare diagnostics and a simulation exercise on international cooperation in regulating large language models served as critical launchpads for understanding the complexities and urgency of youth involvement in these crucial conversations. These experiences underscored how the future of global governance will be inextricably linked to the governance of artificial intelligence, demanding the inclusion of diverse perspectives to navigate its profound societal implications.

Global institutions have begun to respond: UNESCO introduced a global ethical framework for AI, the OECD offers AI policy observatories, and the EU’s AI Act marks a regulatory landmark. While these frameworks represent important progress, there remains an opportunity to integrate more diverse, youth-driven perspectives—especially from the Global South. Young people, who are both at the forefront of technological innovation and among those most impacted by its outcomes, bring vital insights that can complement the expertise of established policymakers and technocrats.   

This generational gap became clear during discussions where senior leaders contributed deep expertise on the technical and geopolitical dimensions of AI, while our cohort brought complementary perspectives rooted in ethical urgency, lived experience, and future-oriented thinking. We questioned how AI could reinforce structural inequities if left unchecked, and how algorithmic opacity might deepen divisions along socioeconomic and racial lines. Far from being idealistic, these concerns reflected a grounded understanding of how power and technology intersect.

International institutions can embed fairness, transparency, and sustainability into digital systems by adopting inclusive, human-centered design standards that prioritize equity across socioeconomic and cultural contexts. Fairness begins with representative data: AI systems must be trained on diverse, de-biased datasets that reflect global populations, not just data from dominant regions or demographics. To ensure transparency, institutions should advocate for algorithmic explainability—requiring developers to disclose decision-making processes and enabling public audits of AI tools deployed in high-stakes areas like healthcare and finance. Sustainability, meanwhile, demands regulatory alignment between technological innovation and environmental stewardship; this includes incentivizing energy-efficient AI models and embedding climate risk assessments into digital infrastructure development. Only through such principled and coordinated action can international institutions ensure that AI development aligns with the broader goals of equity, accountability, and long-term global well-being.

History offers precedents. Youth-led advocacy has long shaped global discourse—from the anti-apartheid movement to climate activism. More recently, figures like Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai have challenged international bodies to rethink who gets to speak and what solutions are prioritized. Yet when it comes to emerging technologies like AI, young voices are often sidelined in favor of corporate interests or state security agendas.   

What would a more inclusive model of AI governance look like? It would involve intergenerational collaboration, yes, but also concrete policy mechanisms: youth representation in multilateral AI forums, funding for grassroots AI education in underrepresented regions, and a global youth assembly to propose digital rights frameworks. Just as the Paris Agreement was shaped by civil society and indigenous voices, the future of AI demands broad-based legitimacy grounded in ethical pluralism.

Three key principles should guide international AI governance moving forward. First, self-aware leadership. Before we can regulate machines, we must interrogate our own values. Leadership development grounded in self-reflection, empathy, and humility is critical to resisting the technocratic temptation to govern from above. Second, cross-cultural intelligence. AI systems are trained on data, but values are shaped by culture. Building ethical AI requires deep, cross-cultural engagement that prioritizes local contexts and historically marginalized communities. Third, purpose-driven innovation. Innovation must serve people, not just markets. As the tech sector becomes increasingly globalized, international bodies must align AI development with public goods—healthcare, education, and climate resilience—rather than profit maximization.   

The principles of self-awareness, cross-cultural intelligence, and purpose-driven innovation, underscored during my time with Youth Leaders Davos during the 2025 World Economic Forum week, offer a vital framework for how the next generation can and must contribute to shaping the ethical trajectory of AI on a global scale. Given the profound and multifaceted impact of AI on the international order, the inclusion of youth perspectives in its governance is not merely desirable but an imperative for a future that is both technologically advanced and ethically sound.

Artificial intelligence does not represent an inevitable trajectory, but rather a domain shaped by intentional design. The principles and values that guide its development today will fundamentally influence the international order and societal structures of tomorrow. The insights gained at Youth Leaders Davos highlight the urgent need to empower young leaders in this critical endeavor.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Annual Meeting Davos: Aerial photograph of Davos, Image sourced from Flickr | CC License, no changes made

Section One: Introduction 

Donald Trump’s recent announcement of “Iron Dome for America”—now referred to as a “Golden” Dome—upends established precedent in nuclear politics, and while it may not violate direct aspects of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or the New START, other countries have already expressed their discomfort with the program. The Iron Dome may cause other states to violate the aforementioned treaties and expand their nuclear arsenals, causing issues within international politics and nuclear deterrence that have persisted since 1945. President Trump puts the United States and other nuclear powers in uncomfortable and unprecedented positions by signing an executive order to create drastically more intense missile defense mechanisms for the U.S, calling into question nuclear treaties that the U.S. has ratified, and potentially catalyzing a resurgence in the global nuclear arms race. 

Section Two: Background

Since his first term in office, President Trump has had a volatile and contentious history with nuclear power and relationships with other states’ nuclear programs. In his first term, it was unclear whether President Trump would renew the key non-proliferation agreement between the U.S. and Russia, the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty). He encouraged powers such as Iran to resume the development of nuclear weapons and only recently restored pressure on Iran’s capacity to obtain a nuclear weapon by signing the National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM), calling Iran out for violations of the NPT and saying, “A radical regime like this can never be allowed to acquire or develop nuclear weapons.” There have also been discussions of the U.S. restarting nuclear testing for the first time since 1992, which would be an entirely political move to “demonstrate strength” and is not necessary for actual nuclear testing. Generally, President Trump has been problematic and unpredictable regarding nuclear politics, which raises the question of what his defense goals are for the next four years, and whether they will be permissible under the NPT. 

The NPT, created in 1968 and entered into force in 1970, is a treaty that exists with the aim of expanding the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. The treaty was created by a UN-sponsored committee focusing on disarmament. According to the United Nations, “the NPT has been the cornerstone of [the] global nuclear non-proliferation regime.” In line with experts such as Scott Sagan, the creators of the NPT contend that the way to prevent nuclear warfare is to regulate and decrease the dissemination of nuclear weapons as much as possible. The design of the NPT relies on the cooperation of both nuclear and non-nuclear weapon states. The basis of the treaty is that non-nuclear weapon states should renounce their development or acquisition of nuclear weapons in exchange for nuclear weapon states sharing their nuclear technology for

peaceful purposes, such as energy production. The cornerstone of the treaty is an understanding between nuclear and non-nuclear weapon states. 

Historically, the U.S.’s role in the NPT has been important to conflict resolution and international law more generally. While the NPT has not altogether halted nuclear proliferation, it has greatly slowed the spread of nuclear weapons and set precedents for foreign cooperation regarding nuclear weapons, which, during the Cold War, was an extreme concern. In recent developments, President Trump has signed an executive order calling for an “Iron Dome for America.” 

Ironically, the Iron Dome for America project shares a name with a defense project that exists in Israel, the original “Iron Dome” system. This defense system was created to defend from short-range rockets, shells, and mortars in 2008. The U.S. based a missile defense shield on Israel’s “Iron Dome” project, known as the SkyHunter missile defense system. These systems are, as they presently exist, not inherently problematic on a world-political stage because they prevent small weapons. Since the 1980s, the missile defense system that has existed within the U.S. has only been large enough to prevent missiles from nations such as North Korea or Iran. The U.S. purposefully elected not to scale these defense frameworks to a degree that would be able to defend the nation from a state such as Russia. This is because, in regard to nuclear theory, “mutually assured destruction” is an extreme deterrent for the use of nuclear weapons. China will not choose to send nuclear weapons to the U.S. because they know that the nuclear weapons will greatly harm the U.S., and the U.S., as a nuclear power with secure second-strike capabilities, will have no choice but to strike China back. This will eventually lead to mutually assured destruction between the two powers.

However, President Trump’s “Iron Dome for America” plan aims to not just deter small missile or rocket attacks. Rather, on January 27th, he prompted Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to create new plans for “Defense […] against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries” within 60 days. The creation of this defense technology would largely impact the delicate balance between nuclear powers that currently exist: it could cause the U.S. to “dominate the deterrence spectrum.” Suppose Russia suspects that the potential impact of their nuclear weapons has been reduced. Will they feel more comfortable striking the U.S. or other states with their weapons because there may no longer be clear, mutually assured destruction? More importantly, will this trigger Russia to try and scale up its nuclear programs to innovate around U.S. protection technologies and gain back the power and security nuclear weapons gave them? 

The Iron Dome for America plan has already prompted a response from Russia, with a foreign official claiming it would target the ability of Russia and China to exercise nuclear deterrence. She went on to say that it would “hinder the prospects for talks on nuclear arms control” and that “the indicated U.S. approaches will not contribute to reducing tensions or improving the situation in the strategic sphere.” Furthermore, this has left Russia potentially in a place where they may feel as though they have to violate the New START and increase their nuclear arsenal. Even if Russia elects not to violate the treaty, the New START is due for renewal in 2026, and it is possible that if Russia feels threatened, they opt not to renew the treaty, or attempt to negotiate to drastically change the treaty’s terms. 

While there are few direct historical examples of a nation’s missile defense policy promoting adversaries to expand their nuclear arsenals, there are certainly examples of nuclear arms races or, more broadly, general defense system development competition. One example is the “shipbuilding arms race” between Germany and the United Kingdom before WWI. A more famous example of a nuclear arms race is the Soviet Union and the U.S. during the Cold War. There was explicit competition in the development of nuclear arsenals, which was only encouraged by the opposing state furthering their development. There was a constant fear that either party would “bolt out of the blue” and strike the other state first just to have a first-strike advantage, catalyzing even more of an emphasis on nuclear development. 

Because the advancement of missile defense systems has similar implications for deterrence or the effectiveness of a nation’s nuclear system, it is clear that rapid nuclearization or development of nuclear protection systems are both strategically destabilizing. As a policy brief in Stimson states, “If one nation learns that a rival is rapidly developing systems that could overwhelm or defeat its defenses, a realist response dictates that that nation must do the same to offset any strategic advantage its rival might gain.” 

Furthermore, the U.S. aimed to create a missile defense program reminiscent of the Iron Dome during the Reagan Administration. In 1983, President Reagan announced his plans for the “Strategic Defense Initiative” (SDI). The program ended a mere ten years later when President Clinton was elected; however, it prompted similar discomfort from the USSR. A recently declassified paper from the CIA’s internal journal, Studies in Intelligence, states that, “In response to the SDI, Moscow threatened a variety of military countermeasures in lieu of developing a parallel missile defense system.” Additionally, the Soviet General Secretary at the time considered “increasing the number of missiles, reinforcing missile silos to increase their survivability, [and] developing and deploying an underwater missile that would not be affected by the space-based missile shield,” according to the paper. It is clear that the development of the SDI triggered a state of alarm from the USSR, and the whole situation is largely comparable to the present Iron Dome in America. 

Section Three: Examination and Application of International Law 

Momentarily ignoring the question of the feasibility of the “Iron Dome,” which some argue may prove to be a problem, what are the possible implications for international law, specifically looking at U.S. nuclear treaties? As established earlier, the NPT has been one of the most successful international efforts to prevent the global spread of nuclear weapons. 191 states adhere to the treaty, including five “nuclear-weapon states.” The NPT emphasizes nonproliferation, disarmament, and peaceful uses of nuclear energy. It is worth acknowledging that there are also four known nuclear weapon states that do not adhere to the NPT: India, Pakistan, North Korea, who pulled out of the NPT in 2003, and Israel, who does not acknowledge their possession of nuclear weapons, maintaining a policy of deliberate ambiguity. 

The U.S.’s expansion of defense mechanisms is not technically in violation of their NPT agreement to “develop” or “acquire” nuclear weapons. However, it indirectly may trigger other nations to do so because it threatens deterrence and a nuclear balance. This can be seen in the strained relationship between the U.S. and Russia. Although the U.S.’s actions did not directly violate the New START, they are upending a balance that has existed since the Cold War by making a drastic change that could jeopardize nuclear deterrence between the two states, forcing Russia to violate the New START and increasing their nuclear arsenal. Russia’s potential response would be based on strategic necessity rather than a legal requirement. That being said, the legalities are slightly more complicated than stating that the U.S. is outright not in violation of the New START.

Although the New START states that “Current and planned U.S. missile defense programs are not constrained by New START,” this statement is conditional on more information. The treaty’s preamble acknowledges the “interrelationship between strategic offensive arms and strategic defensive arms” but goes on to establish that “current strategic defensive arms do not undermine the viability and effectiveness of the strategic offensive arms of the Parties.” This means that the treaty is contingent on the fact that the strategic defensive arms are not effective enough to defend from large military powers and realign interpolitical military dynamics. The U.S.’s plan to develop weapons that would undermine the viability and effectiveness of the strategic offensive arms of the Parties is an entirely different question, and it could be inferred from the treaty that this development is not permitted. It is unclear whether the U.S. is presently in violation of the New START. Because they currently only intend to develop these systems and have not actually done so, it may be true that they have not yet violated the New START. However, because other states, such as Russia, have begun to feel threatened and anticipate the U.S.’s capabilities to undermine the viability of their weapons’ efficacy, the U.S. may be violating the treaty. Overall, it is clear that the U.S. is certainly disrupting the international order and has the potential to be violating treaties. 

Section Four: Discussion of the Legal Question 

All this information prompts the question, would there be any way to utilize international law to prevent the U.S. from going forward with this defense expansion, preventing other states from feeling as though they must expand their nuclear arsenals to keep up? 

There is a lack of a formal enforcing body within the NPT. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) exists as a “safeguards system,” meaning that they independently “verify a State’s legal obligation that nuclear facilities are not misused and nuclear material is no diverted from peaceful uses.” Furthermore, part of the NPT is a conference that occurs twice every decade to review the treaty’s effectiveness. Preparations are currently being made for the next conference in 2026. However, the U.S. has not technically violated any aspect of the NPT with the Iron Dome. While it may disrupt international nuclear dealings, it may not fall under the NPT to deal with their actions. 

Furthermore, it is worth asking if the question of nuclear weapons falls under customary international law at all. Customary international law contains two main prongs: state practice and opinio juris. For a practice to qualify as an opinio juris and therefore fall under the rule of customary international law, states must follow the practice from a sense of legal obligations. According to a comment on the 1987 Third Restatement in the International Law, Eighth Edition textbook by Allen S. Weiner and Chimène Keitner, “a practice that is generally followed but which states feel legally free to disregard does not contribute to customary international law.” The International Court of Justice (ICJ), the dispute resolution body for the UN, was called upon by the UN General Assembly to examine whether nuclear weapons qualified as an opinio juris. Some states referenced the non-use of nuclear weapons since 1945 as a legal acknowledgment by nuclear weapon states. However, other states claimed that the use of nuclear weapons is legal in certain cases, such as cases of self-defense. Overall, the court said it could not find that there is an opinio juris in relation to nuclear weapons because there was such stark disagreement, meaning that nuclear war as a broad topic is not covered by customary international law. The International Law, Eighth Edition book echoed a similar sentiment, quoting from the ICJ: “There is in neither customary nor conventional international law any comprehensive and universal prohibition of the threat or use of nuclear weapons as such.” 

That being said, many existing treaties regulate the usage of nuclear weapons, such as the following listed in the book: Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963), Threshold Test Ban Treaty (1974), Peaceful Nuclear Explosion Treaty (1976), Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (1996) – not entered into force. 

In addition to the existence of an opinio juris, the court went on to give an opinion on the legality of the use of nuclear weapons in the aforementioned case. The court concluded that it would have jurisdiction to comment on the legality of the use of nuclear weapons and thought to apply use of force laws to the question. The court specifically noted the fact that nuclear weapons cannot distinguish between civilian and military targets. Ultimately, the ICJ ruled that “[it] cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.” The court additionally noted that NPT member states were obligated to “pursue in good faith and to conclude negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.” Importantly, the ICJ was wary of the potential for its decision to tamper with nuclear deterrence and the delicate international balance. 

Given these rulings, the ICJ has not made effective rulings regarding the NPT and would be unlikely to create any kind of enforceable ruling if nuclear violations were to occur, partially out of fear of impacting the deterrence balance that exists. It is far more likely that a treaty, such as the New START, be more effective at enforcing nuclear non-proliferation than the ICJ. But, in the case that the ICJ is called on to make a ruling regarding nuclear weapons, the UN Security Council would hypothetically be able to take action. The Security Council is able to take action to restore international peace in accordance with Chapter VII of the UN Charter and does so to enforce the ICJ’s rulings with recourse, such as establishing sanctions.

Other organizations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), have also posed questions regarding the validity of nuclear weapon usage. In the case of the WHO, they asked whether nuclear weapons would breach their constitution due to the potential effects on health. The ICJ ruled once more in this case that they could not give an advisory opinion on this case because it left the scope of the WHO and encroached on the question of the general legality of the use of nuclear weapons. Additionally, the court stated that because the WHO was a specialized organization, this was exiting the organization’s “principle of specialty.” 

Another potential method of mediation for nuclear disputes could be through general diplomatic efforts. This has been the most effective instrument of dispute resolution so far, simply given the fact that we have not yet experienced all-out nuclear warfare. Diplomacy is largely effective because of the stakes between nations when dealing with nuclear weapon negotiations. However, one of the prime locations for such diplomacy, the NPT Review Conference that occurs once every five years, proves a difficult environment to get things accomplished. The conference largely exists to hold the five nuclear weapon states that have signed the NPT accountable for fulfilling their treaty obligations. Likely because there is so much sensitivity regarding nuclear weapons, it is rare for a final outcome document to be adopted, even when the final document does not propose any dramatic changes. The Review Conference has not had an agreed outcome in over a decade, demonstrating its ineffectiveness as an arbitration mechanism. 

Section Five: Policy Recommendations 

In the coming weeks, it will be important to see what specifically Defense Secretary Hegseth comes up with during his “60-day” time period to create a more specific plan. The 60-day period expires at the end of March. It will be interesting to see whether the Trump

Administration’s plan will be at all feasible in regard to the technology and funding required, especially while the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is attempting to cut down on unnecessary costs. Nuclear and defense research is infamously expensive, but the DOGE likely will not target the defense budget, so this may not be a concern. Furthermore, the NPT has been indefinitely extended since 1995, but it will be fascinating to see if these changes in missile defense technology impact the conversation at the NPT Review Conference in 2026 or the negotiations of treaties such as the New START, which is also due for renewal next year. These details will most likely play a role in what any international dispute resolution body is able to do and what the reactions of other states will be. 

Furthermore, I would remind U.S. policymakers that there is an extremely delicate balance that exists between nuclear weapon states, and a wrong move could be detrimental on a global scale. Although this discussion is not about expanding the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal, their current discussions could catalyze other states to do so, and it will be important for the U.S. to maintain strategic stability and prevent escalation, prioritizing values that are highlighted in international law. 

For other states, I recommend that they begin to look towards potential solutions of international law, primarily through the aforementioned treaties, although it is unclear whether the Trump Administration would choose to listen to any solutions given by international courts, organizations, or treaties. Most importantly, even if the U.S. chooses to go through with the “Iron Dome for America,” I believe it is of the utmost consequence that other states do not begin violating their nuclear treaties and expanding their arsenals, as that will trigger extreme international issues and potentially a new era of nuclear arms races.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: A Medium Extended Air Defense System Missile is Launched, Image sourced from NARA & DVIDS Public Domain Archive | CC License, no changes made

In Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 classic Dr. Strangelove, the United States foreign policy apparatus is satirically immobilized by absurdity as a nuclear threat looms on the horizon. The leadership of the government is left paralyzed by a reality in which bureaucracy and apocalypse converge—until all is disintegrated into oblivion. While the world today is not at the edge of a nuclear catastrophe just yet, the foreign policy of the current administration echoes Kubrick’s deepest fears. A new system is emerging, one that seamlessly blends a Kafkaesque megalomania over deporting international students, individuals with “suspicious tattoos,” and openly innocent citizens, with an economic policy that is far closer to a hollowed-out economic theater than any notion of economic theory.¹ Absurdity in this new political reality has increasingly become the norm—a mode of foreign policy largely unfamiliar to this country in its newly mutated form. 

Kafka in ICEland

The absurdity of today finds its parallels in Kafka’s The Trial, where the main character, Joseph K., finds himself for reasons never revealed, arrested and prosecuted for an unspecified crime. Not dissimilarly, over the last months, students across the country have been arrested, detained, and stripped of their rightful stay within a country that has for decades proclaimed its unwavering dedication to liberty and freedom of speech.² When Joseph K. questions the reason for his arrest, the authorities promptly respond “[i]t is not our place to tell you that.”³ Analogously, students that have been detained across the country have largely not received any legal reasoning for their detention, with 1300 visas being revoked under the pretense of “national security” as a catch-all justification.⁴ The arrest of Turkish graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, which resembled more a kidnapping than an interaction with law enforcement, stands out as the most direct attempt by the administration to steal Kafka’s script. Just as Ozturk was taken away by agents in plain clothing, Joseph K. unsuccessfully attempts to grasp his own arrest:“Which of the authorities is conducting the proceedings? Are you a state official? None of you is in uniform.”⁵⁶ This symbolic blurring between the image of legal detention and unlawful abduction fosters an atmosphere of perpetual fear, a self-policing incentive of the absurdist regime. In this new absurd world, we as international students—just like Kafka’s Joseph K.—find ourselves under an inconspicuously blatant attack. 

These detentions not only mirror Kafka in the literary sense, but also emblematize a new legal architecture which has become decoupled from its own fundamental intent. In this new political climate, justice within the immigration system has become nothing more than a system of symbols, part of a broader theater where innocence and guilt are no longer legal categories, but narrative conveniences in a broader agenda. By invoking national security as an all-encompassing justification, the administration is transforming immigration into an even more dramatic hall of mirrors. Repression is now carried out through a bureaucratic order, that subsumes the values enshrined in its own constitution.⁷ What is most fascinating is the dramatic contrast of these policies with the small-governance and free speech narrative that were so central to this administration’s campaign.⁸ This grotesque absurdity fosters a new legal order where fear dominates freedom and where students like myself are increasingly coerced into silence. We are forced to surrender our right to speak freely in exchange for the illusion of safety.⁹ 

The Biopolitics of Bureaucracy 

Students represent just one facet of an immigration policy that has been weaponized by the executive branch’s opaque bureaucratic authority to enforce its narrative. In this new reality, non‑citizens and citizens alike are reduced to what Giorgio Agamben calls bare life—the biological existence of a person stripped of all political, social, and cultural attributes, leaving only the capacity to be alive.¹⁰ The recent game of cat and mouse between the leadership of the current administration and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele on the fate of Abrego Garcia, a man illegally sent to prison abroad due to an “administrative error,” demonstrates this more clearly than anyone else.¹¹ Both administrations have actively withdrawn their own ability to return a definitively innocent individual home. Bukele has dismissed the idea of returning Abrego Garcia as “absurd” (perversely ironic given the horrid absurdity of the overall situation). Meanwhile, the presidential administration has deflected responsibility by citing bureaucratic limitations and repeating disproven claims of gang affiliation, using legal ambiguity as a shield against accountability.¹²¹³ Tattoos and racial prejudice have become the new law and order, dictating whether one deserves freedom. Notably, it has been made clear that this is only the beginning. “Homegrowns are next.”¹⁴

Kafka demonstrated long ago how a bureaucratic machine can reduce one’s life to nothing: in the final seconds of his life Joseph K. proclaims “like a dog!” before he is executed by a system that has stripped him of humanity.¹⁵ The goal today is precisely the same: to create a society that coerces you into bare life if you step out of line. Yes, you are alive, but with no rights, no dignity, no recourse, and with no more ‘liberty’ than a dog. The presidential administration in its case against Garcia has called this an  “intuitive sense of liberty.”¹⁶ The most insidious danger lies in normalizing this state of exception, turning what should be an extraordinary suspension of rights into an everyday tool of governance. When the absurd becomes the norm, its power grows and the intentionality behind it becomes ever more powerful.

The Economy of Spectacle

Absurdity as policy is not restricted to the world of immigration, however, as starkly portrayed in the administration’s approach to economic foreign policy. If justice now functions as a theater for national security, the economy has become its equally unstable twin—a simulation of productivity and actionability that has abandoned all semblance of material grounding. French thinker Jean Baudrillard terms this phenomenon quite fittingly: transeconomics. Transeconomics is the stage at which the economy no longer functions according to production, value, or market logic—but instead becomes a game of speculation and spectacle governed by floating, arbitrary rules.¹⁷ It imitates the structure of economic rationality while discarding its substance—an “ecstasy of value” where meaning collapses into performance.¹⁸ The administration’s tariff policy has become exactly that, a performance where the standard rules of economic theory are dismissed to make way for unfounded narratives that emphasize the trade deficit as an end-all be-all for the pure purpose of narrative.

Notably, this game seems detached from consequence for the administration which is able to “pause” its policy just as easily, and with as little reason as it had to enforce it in the first place. This in the eyes of Baudrillard is the death of “Political Economy” as we have imagined it— a system in which economics has become “the exacerbation of its own logic to the point of self-parody.”¹⁹ The materiality of economic theory in this context has been to an extent destroyed, replaced by a narrative of tariffs as performative vengeance, and grounded in a formula so arbitrary and contextless that some have even speculated it was drafted by an LLM.²⁰ As a result, by becoming ungrounded from widely accepted theory, this new form of economic policy manufactures a veneer of meaningful action out of orchestrated chaos, and quietly harvests profit from the ensuing market absurdity.²¹ Ironically this system, which “effectively co-opts the energy of poker,” is being directed by a man whose own casinos have been through four bankruptcies.²²²³

Conclusion

This new era is fundamentally shifting foreign policy, blurring the line between governance and absurdity, cruelty and policy, both  domestically and globally. In Kafka’s world, Joseph K. is swallowed by the machine. In ours, the hyperreal, bureaucratic fog has not yet fully submerged the liberty which this country claims to be built on. Baudrillard saw in the collapse not salvation but an opportunity for rupture within a system that is internally combusting, “vanquished by its simulacrum of itself.”²⁴ There may be a future where the system becomes so unreal, so self-parodied, that it can no longer maintain the illusion of order through narrative—even if that seems to be the precise strong suit of those at the helm of this ship today. In Dr. Strangelove, the end comes not with a decisive act of war, but with a farce no one bothers to stop. Absurdity becomes an end in itself— set to the sound of “We’ll Meet Again” and mushroom clouds. If we are not ready to ride the bomb of absurdity into oblivion, we must continue naming it, shining a bright light into the bureaucratic fog and the vague language of securitization to disrupt the complicity the spectacle so actively depends on. Doing this is the only prospect there is for a future where truth is not treated as contraband and free speech as an exclusive club, where obedience is the only currency of entry.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Kafka Self Portrait, Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons  | CC License, no changes made

1. Lilia Luciano and Nicole Brown Chau, “ICE Claims Tattoos Tie Migrants to the Tren de Aragua Gang. Experts Say They Aren’t Reliable Identifiers,” CBS News, April 8, 2025, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-tattoos-tren-de-aragua-venezuela-gang/. ↩︎
2. Miranda Jeyaretnam, “These Are the Students Targeted by Trump’s Immigration Enforcement Over Campus Activism,” Time, April 1, 2025, https://time.com/7272060/international-students-targeted-trump-ice-detention-deport-campus-palestinian-activism/. ↩︎
3. Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Mike Mitchell, with introduction and notes by Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6. ↩︎
4. Guardian staff and agency, “Foreign Students Sue Trump Officials over Revoked Visas as 1,000 Affected,” The Guardian, April 17, 2025, 4:25 p.m. CEST, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/17/trump-international-students-visas. ↩︎
5. John Hudson, “No Evidence Linking Tufts Student to Antisemitism or Terrorism, State Dept. Office Found,” The Washington Post, April 13, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/04/13/tufts-student-rumeysa-ozturk-rubio-trump/. ↩︎
6. Kafka, The Trial, 12. ↩︎
7. Nicholas Riccardi and Christine Fernando, “Trump Campaigned as a Protector of Free Speech but Critics Say His Actions Threaten It,” PBS NewsHour, March 12, 2025, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-campaigned-as-a-protector-of-free-speech-but-critics-say-his-actions-threaten-it. ↩︎
8. White House, “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” Presidential Actions, January 2025. ↩︎
9. Anvee Bhutani, “Student journalists remove stories on Trump,” The Guardian, April 7, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/07/student-journalists-remove-stories-trump. ↩︎
10. “Bare life,” in A Dictionary of Critical Theory, ed. Ian Buchanan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025), accessed April 15, 2025, https://www.oxfordreference.com/.
    ↩︎
11. Nick Miroff, “An ‘Administrative Error’ Sends a Maryland Father to a Salvadoran Prison,” The Atlantic,  March 31, 2025, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/an-administrative-error-sends-a-man-to-a-salvadoran-prison/682254/. ↩︎
12. BBC News, “BBC News Live,” accessed April 15, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cwy03j9vddlt. ↩︎
13. Nina Totenberg and Christina Gatti, “Supreme Court Says Trump Officials Should Help Return Wrongly Deported Maryland Man,” NPR, April 10, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/04/10/nx-s1-5358421/supreme-court-abrego-garcia-deportation-decision. ↩︎
14. Brian Mann, “‘Homegrowns Are Next’: Trump Hopes to Deport and Jail U.S. Citizens Abroad,” Morning Edition, NPR, April 16, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/04/16/nx-s1-5366178/trump-deport-jail-u-s-citizens-homegrowns-el-salvador. ↩︎
15. Kafka, The Trial, 165. ↩︎
16. United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Kilmarn Armando Abrego Garcia v. Kristi Noem. No. 25‑1404. Filed April 17, 2025. ↩︎
17. Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1993), 35. ↩︎
18. Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, 35. ↩︎
19. Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, 35. ↩︎
20. Dominic Preston, “Trump’s New Tariff Math Looks a Lot Like ChatGPT’s,” The Verge, April 3, 2025, https://www.theverge.com/news/642620/trump-tariffs-formula-ai-chatgpt-gemini-claude-grok. ↩︎
21. Karni, Annie. 2025. “Greene Bought Market Dip Before Trump Paused Tariffs, Profiting From the Rally.” New York Times, April 14, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/politics/marjorie-taylor-greene-bought-stock-trump-tariffs-pause.html. ↩︎
22. Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, 35. ↩︎
23. Jonathan Lipson, “Bankruptcy Expert Studies Trump Casinos,” Temple Now, October 25, 2016, https://news.temple.edu/news/2016-10-25/bankruptcy-expert-studies-trump-casinos. ↩︎
24. Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, 35. ↩︎

The consequences of climate inaction have been catastrophic. While all Pakistanis face exposure to climate-related disasters, women and girls—particularly those who menstruate—bear a disproportionate share of the burden. The 2021 floods displaced hundreds of thousands, while the 2022 monsoon floods, intensified by global warming, affected more than 33 million people. Among them were 650,000 pregnant women who lost access to essential healthcare, many forced to give birth without medical assistance or sanitary conditions. A staggering 8 million individuals were left without menstrual hygiene products or even toilets, stripping them of the means to manage menstruation with dignity.

Climate disasters have also disrupted food systems, especially in rural and agrarian regions. The resulting malnutrition exacerbates the challenges menstruators face, as adequate nutrition is essential to regulate menstrual cycles and maintain reproductive health. Research suggests that menstruation demands significant energy and nutrient intake; in its absence, growth can be stunted, and the onset of menstruation delayed. While the global average age of menarche is 12, in Pakistan it tends to occur later, often between ages 12 and 16, reflecting the dual burden of food insecurity and environmental exposure.

These delays and disruptions are not merely biological inconveniences—they carry long-term health consequences. Climate-induced menstrual irregularities have been linked to heightened risks of infertility, depression, cardiovascular disease, and osteoporosis. This growing health crisis underscores the extent to which environmental stressors can reproduce cycles of gendered vulnerability.

In contexts of extreme scarcity, societal desperation often gives rise to further injustices. In climate-vulnerable regions of Pakistan and beyond, there is a documented rise in child marriages—young girls exchanged for food or resources in order to alleviate family hunger. Though such practices are condemned globally, they resurface in moments of crisis, revealing the intersection of climate instability and entrenched gender inequality. These forms of gender-based violence are compounded by the absence of institutional protections during and after environmental disasters.

The scientific community has drawn a direct line between anthropogenic climate change and these worsening conditions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II—tasked with assessing climate change’s impacts, vulnerabilities, and adaptation—has reported with high levels of evidence and confidence that the glacial melting and unprecedented flooding observed in Pakistan are attributable to rising global temperatures. These climatic shifts not only bring extreme weather, but also environmental contamination: floods and droughts disturb landfills, industrial zones, and agricultural soils, triggering the release of toxins such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), pesticides, and other chemicals. Contact with such substances—including flame retardants and heavy metals like lead—has been scientifically linked to delayed puberty and menstrual onset. These impacts are reflected in self-reported menarche among Pakistani girls: over 80% of respondents were between the ages of 12 and 16 upon starting their period.

The inequity of climate change is thus twofold: it is an environmental emergency and a social justice crisis. Yet Pakistan’s policy priorities often fail to reflect this dual urgency. Military spending remains one of the country’s largest budget items, consistently outpacing allocations to climate resilience or public health. Although Pakistan has appealed for international aid—highlighting its disproportionate vulnerability despite contributing less than 1% of historic emissions — its domestic expenditures reveal a misalignment with its own rhetoric.Redirecting funds from militarization or fossil fuel subsidies toward green infrastructure, healthcare access, and gender-sensitive adaptation policies is not merely advisable, it is necessary.

As emphasized by the IPCC Working Group II, which assesses climate impacts and regional vulnerabilities, no nation can adapt to climate change in isolation. Pakistan’s climate response must be integrated into broader global frameworks. This includes advocating for more equitable disbursement under United Nations climate finance mechanisms, increased participation in the Green Climate Fund, and engagement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to restructure debt in exchange for environmental investment. At a regional level, Pakistan would also benefit from deeper cooperation with other South Asian states facing similar challenges. Multilateral platforms could help harmonize climate adaptation strategies, especially around shared river systems, agricultural resilience, and migration preparedness.

The stakes of climate inaction are no longer abstract. They are embedded in the lives of girls who miss school because of a lack of pads, in the hospitals overwhelmed during floods, and in the communities forced to barter away their daughters for survival. Confronting this reality demands a transformation not only in policy but in priorities—placing health, gender equity, and sustainability at the heart of Pakistan’s climate agenda.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Emergency Flood Response in Pakistan, Image sourced from Flickr | CC License, no changes made

From an investor’s perspective, one of the largest changes is Article 47. Now, it states that the shareholder(s) of a limited liability company must fully pay the company’s registered capital amount within five years from the company’s incorporation date. Yet, this forced realignment of the capital contribution term poses several practical problems. For starters, what happens when an investor wishes to invest in a company that has been incorporated for four years and 364 days? In order to strictly adhere to the new law, investors must make the full capital contribution in a single day, a clearly unrealistic task. Or what happens when an investor wishes to invest in a company that was incorporated over five years ago? It then becomes physically impossible for investors to adhere to the new capital contribution term of five years after the company’s incorporation date. A more realistic interpretation is that the new Company Law sets the payment date to be five years after the investor becomes a shareholder. However, this reading still poses challenges to the existing structure. Currently, many companies, including foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs), have articles that give shareholders much more time (anywhere from 10-30 years) to pay out their capital contribution. 

Not only do investors now have to pay their capital contribution in a much shorter time frame, they also run the risk of having to pay even before the time frame ends. Article 55 now states that if a company cannot pay its debts, the creditors can require the shareholders to contribute their required capital even before the five-year period ends to the extent of the company’s debts. Therefore, under the new structure, many private equity and venture capital investors would have to raise capital in a much shorter period, which would certainly deter many investors. 

This situation could possibly be elucidated through an example much more relevant to the common person, namely purchasing a house. Normally, the length of a mortgage is around 30 years, making monthly payments manageable for the average person. Now imagine if the length of the mortgage was shortened to five years, but the total amount that needs to be paid remains the same. Naturally, monthly payments would skyrocket and become unaffordable for most home buyers, and the number of home-buyers would plummet. This is exactly the situation that private equity and venture capital firms are now being put in, and just as there would be far fewer home buyers if mortgage terms were drastically shortened, there would also be far fewer firms willing to invest in companies. 

In addition to the much shorter time frame given to investors, they also have to take on much more risk. Another large change comes in the new Article 88 of the Company Law, which states that if a shareholder transfers their shares that have unfinished capital contribution, the transferee shall bear the obligation to pay the capital contribution. If the capital contribution is not paid in full in accordance with the capital contribution date stipulated in the company’s articles of association or if the actual value of the non-monetary property contributed as capital is significantly lower than the value of the shares, the transferor and the transferee shall bear joint liability within the scope of insufficient capital. If the transferee is not and should not be aware of the aforementioned circumstances, the transferor shall bear the responsibility for the missing capital. All of this legalese boils down to the idea that either the transferor or the transferee is liable for the capital not contributed of “flawed shares,” or shares that have not been paid for in full, in the case of a transfer. The assignment of liability is unusual, as the transferee is liable for the debt rather than the transferor. This in itself is not necessarily a problem, as investors (usually the transferee) can simply purchase the shares for only the amount of capital contributed and pay off the capital not contributed later. 

The second stipulation is much riskier for potential investors. The only method for the transferee to not bear liability for “flawed shares” is if it could be proven that the transferee did not know and had no responsibility to know if the shares were “flawed.” From a legal perspective, this is quite a tall task. Thus the transferee relies on the good faith of the transferor to acknowledge that the shares are “flawed” and to allow negotiations based on the fact that the shares are flawed. Therefore, the investors must do a lot more due diligence on the shareholders they are buying from to prevent themselves from buying “flawed shares.” And who wants to do more work for the same results? Of course, we could entertain the argument that there is a lot of money to be made, enough to warrant the extra work. However, in some cases, there simply is not enough information for investors to judge whether the shareholders are selling in good faith or not. The investor would surely be hesitant to buy shares and invest in these cases. 

Of course, the new Company Law is not all doom and gloom for potential investors. Article 89 of the Company Law states that if the controlling shareholder(s) misuse their shareholder rights to meaningfully damage the company, other shareholders have a right to request to buy back their shares at a reasonable price. This seemingly defends the rights of investors, protecting them from the incompetence and malignancy of the controlling shareholder. In practice, this might not go as well as expected. The execution of this law hinges on the idea that there is a “reasonable price,” without which it seems that there cannot be any transactions. Another point of tension is the difference between the buyback rights in the Company Law and those of a contract. Many companies go through multiple rounds of fundraising, with later rounds often costing a lot more capital due to the rise in stock prices. Therefore, investors in later rounds often have prioritized buyback rights in their contracts, meaning they are offered the option to purchase more stock before investors of previous rounds. But the new Company Law seems to offer all shareholders equal buyback rights. This, combined with the aforementioned reliance of this law on the idea of a “reasonable price,” poses a major roadblock for this section of the Company Law to be implemented smoothly. 

The changes to these three sections of the new Company Law seem to suggest hostility towards investors. Not only do investors have to pay their capital contributions on a much shorter time scale than under the old Company Law, they also might have to accept the risk of shareholders selling “flawed shares” in bad faith when further due diligence is not possible. The new legal rights that protect shareholders present practical challenges in their implementation.  This new law indeed furthers and protects the rights of the companies insofar as it guarantees a timeline for capital contribution, ensures complete payment of “flawed shares,” and offers methods of ousting malignant controlling shareholders. But all this comes at the cost of stripping away the agency of the investor, which may lead to investors exiting the Chinese market. 

This is a cause for concern for China. In 2021, there were over 3,600 private equity and venture capital deals in the Chinese market with a total valuation of over 130 billion dollars. However, since then, that number has been in steady decline, dropping to barely 3,000 deals with a total valuation of slightly over 75 billion dollars the next year. American private equity and venture capital firms in particular only closed two-thirds the amount of deals made in 2021 and invested one-third the money, an even steeper decline than the world as a whole.  As of February 2024, there are only 267 private equity or venture capital-funded deals in the Chinese market, with a measly five of them being American firms. These deals combine for a valuation of 3.25 billion dollars. Some simple math reveals that continuing on this pace, there will be 1602 deals closed in 2024 with a total valuation of 19.5 billion dollars. Investments in the Chinese market are rapidly declining, and the Chinese market, like every other market, needs investments to ensure continued growth. Therefore, the Chinese government should be trying to attract foreign investment with investor-friendly policies. But with these new hostile company laws, the Chinese government is pushing investors further away from China.  In the very first article of the very first section of the new Company Law, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress claims that the goal of this redrafting is to “Perfect the Chinese-style corporate structure and promote the entrepreneurial spirit.” However, with the new laws pushing away investors, who will fund this “entrepreneurial spirit?” It appears that in pursuing “the Chinese-style” of stability through regulation, the “entrepreneurial spirit” is disregarded by the Standing Committee.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: 中文（中国大陆, Image source from Wikimedia Commons | CC License, no changes made