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A lot happens every day. Alliances shift, leaders change, and conflicts erupt. With In Brief, we’ll help you make sense of it all. Each week, experts will dig deep on a single issue happening in the world to help you better understand it.***Fentanyl and other opioids trafficked into the United States are currently fueling the largest drug crisis in the country’s history. Since 2000, more than a million people in the United States have died of drug overdoses – mostly from opioids – and in the last few years illegal fentanyl smuggled into the country and mixed with other drugs has only exacerbated this trend. However, this isn’t just a U.S.-based problem – the chemicals used to make the drug largely come from China and cartels in Mexico are key to the drugs’ flow into the United States. We asked three experts to tell us more about the fentanyl crisis, the role of foreign actors in it, and the measures being taken to stem it.Read more below. Vanda Felbab-Brown Director, Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors & Senior Fellow at the Brookings InstitutionThe fentanyl crisis is the most lethal drug crisis not just in U.S. history, but also in the world’s. Treatment and harm reduction measures are indispensable for addressing it. But so are supply-side measures. China is the principal source of precursor chemicals for the production of fentanyl. In Mexico, the precursors are synthesized into fentanyl by the Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco Nueva Generacion cartel, which then traffic it to the United States. Yet, counternarcotics cooperation with China and Mexico has collapsed. China subordinates law-enforcement cooperation to its geostrategic relations — as competition with the United States has intensified, China ended law-enforcement cooperation. In Mexico, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador gave up on resisting the cartels, hoping a hands-off approach