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Beginning last summer, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Morocco, and Bahrain signed onto the Abraham Accords—a peace deal some call “the most significant breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli conflict since the 1990s” (Foreign Policy, December 21, 2020). Many don’t believe these nations are interested in peace, but instead are concerned about how they can benefit from the deal—including technology, arms, and favors from the United States.

We endured 2020 and made it to 2021! People the world over have endured this past year, not only the pandemic but many other hardships and disasters. Endurance certainly is a quality we all could use more of—especially if the year to come is anything like the last!

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un recently “boasted of deploying hypersonic missiles, spy satellites, multi-warhead intercontinental ballistic missiles and the North's own nuclear-powered submarine” (Deutsche Welle, January 14, 2021). In response, South Korean officials are contemplating developing their own nuclear-powered submarine. Analysts are concerned “that North Korea is provoking an arms race with its southern neighbor and, potentially, Japan.”

As 2020 drew to a close, the European Union and China tied up a trade deal known as the “Comprehensive Agreement on Investment”—a deal that, only a year earlier, Chinese leaders thought very unlikely (The Diplomat, January 4, 2021). Ultimately, the agreement seeks to level the playing field for EU investments in China. In turn, more sectors of the European economy will open up for Chinese investment.

Some time ago, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor, now retired, of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper wrote an insightful editorial entitled, “Where are we now?” Commenting on the intractable political divide and civil unrest in the United States, the editor looked back to June 16, 1858, a time when the nation was facing a crisis as the prospect of civil war loomed over the issue of states’ rights and slavery.