Intelligence Archive

A Washington Post exposé published Friday revealed new insights into the Obama administration’s real-time reaction to mounting evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The administration’s agonizing efforts to find a commensurate response, while avoiding escalation and the perception it was seeking to influence the election, will be interpreted through a mean-spirited partisan prism. That’s too bad, because there are sober lessons about politics and policymaking that should be considered across the partisan divide. The Obama administration struggled to find appropriate countermeasures to Russian meddling in the final weeks of its time in office, according to the […]

Buoyed by his party’s resounding success in last weekend’s parliamentary elections, France’s new president, Emmanuel Macron, is off to a strong start. While some were skeptical of his youth and inexperience—not to mention his brief participation in the unpopular government of his predecessor, Francois Hollande—Macron’s party, La Republique En Marche, is poised to become a dominant force in French politics. As one of its candidates told the Financial Times, “I’m again proud to be French.” That enthusiasm is no surprise: The French were tired of Hollande, who left office with dismal approval ratings and 10 percent national unemployment—a rate that […]

As the dust settles from President Donald Trump’s first visit to the Middle East, his policy in the region, such as it exists, is harkening back to the years before his predecessor, Barack Obama. Obama only sought minor recalibrations in long-standing U.S. policy toward its allies in the region, and his criticisms of them amounted to the mildest rebukes. But Trump’s visit made it clear that Saudi Arabia and Israel are, once again, the unmistakable pillars of America’s Middle East posture. Egypt also seems more firmly in the U.S. orbit than ever, given Trump and Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi’s mutual […]

This past week brought some further clarity to the underlying assumptions that drive U.S. President Donald Trump’s foreign policy. There’s now enough information to determine that the Trump team’s worldview is based on deeply held premises about the nasty, brutish nature of the human condition. He and his team are systematically walking away from the U.S. government’s decades-long emphasis on international cooperation and the architecture that supports it. The shift will have particularly dire consequences for the global community’s capacity to confront terrorism and climate change, with its impact on nuclear nonproliferation still an open question. In the aftermath of […]