2023

At Foreign Policy, we’re proud that we can bring readers not just the latest China scoop, but also a 4,000-word deep dive on Washington’s China hawks. That we can cover the nuances and implications of FTX’s downfall, but also the long history of offshore finance in the Bahamas, where the disgraced fintech company set up shop.

Our long reads help readers contextualize the news, question assumptions about the global order, and reimagine some of the world’s biggest problems. Read on for five of our favorites of 2023.

1. Democracy Isn’t Just About Voting

by Priya Satia, March 11

As Americans have grown concerned about the fate of their republic, many have started to question whether voting and elections guarantee democracy. In this essay, historian Priya Satia seeks to discourage that equation, which, she argues, is a vestige of colonial thought.

Even monarchies, Satia writes, can respond to democratic opinion: Just look to kingdoms in precolonial India, where democratic expression often held monarchs accountable before British colonialism rearranged the dynamic between ruler and ruled. Examining this history can push us to reconsider what a real democracy looks like. “Indeed,” Satia writes, “a too-narrow preoccupation with elections has caused many societies, especially Western ones, to devalue forms of public deliberation and collective action essential to security against oppression.”

2. Washington’s China Hawks Take Flight

by Robbie Gramer and Christina Lu, Feb. 15

 In 2013, after Xi Jinping was elected president of China, the world was optimistic that a new era of closer U.S.-China relations had begun. Now, as one expert put it, Washington’s engagement with Beijing is “deader than a doornail.” What went wrong over the past decade? And how did the China hawks take over Washington?

Foreign Policy reporters Robbie Gramer and Christina Lu explore these questions in their deep dive on how U.S. engagement with China turned into estrangement—and where the bilateral relationship might go from here.

Alex Nabaum illustration for Foreign Policy

3. A New Multilateralism

by Gordon Brown, Sept. 11

It is hardly controversial to say that the world’s multilateral institutions are broken. In recent decades, the post-World War II organizations that once promoted peace and reduced poverty have increasingly become toothless. And, former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown argues, they can’t be replaced by regional and bilateral relationships: “Clubs, large or small, will not give the world the stability it needs,” he writes.

What the world needs, Brown writes, is a new multilateral order. Here, he lays out a plan for Washington to take the lead in reinvigorating these institutions in a multipolar world. “The existential challenges that we now face … are creating a rare global moment when the bedrock shifts beneath our feet and the international architecture has to be remade once again,” Brown writes.

4. The Long Shadow of Oppenheimer’s Trinity Test

by Jack Detsch and Anusha Rathi, July 21

As Washington plans to invest up to $1.5 trillion in nuclear modernization, Foreign Policy revisited the New Mexico desert, where the nuclear age began. In this reported feature, FP’s Jack Detsch and Anusha Rathi look back on the fallout of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Trinity test explosion and examine the risks of a new era of nuclear brinkmanship at a time when nuclear weapons have become much more destructive than they were almost 80 years ago.

“Even if the Biden administration doesn’t want an arms race,” Detsch and Rathi write, “it may already have one on its hands.”

5. The Hidden History of the World’s Top Offshore Cryptocurrency Tax Haven

by Adam Tooze, Jan. 15

For decades, the Caribbean has been “a Frankenstein laboratory of global capitalism,” FP’s Adam Tooze writes. There’s a reason FTX, formerly one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, moved its headquarters to the Bahamas before its fall from grace. In this essay, Tooze delves into the history of the Bahamas as a center of offshore finance, weaving a fascinating story of how big money came to a region of extreme wealth inequalities that, as he puts it, “was once a battlefield of geopolitical tension and now faces the historic challenge of climate change.”