Military Archive

A key arms control treaty that limits the number of strategic nuclear weapons the United States and Russia can deploy is set to expire in February 2021. Without it, the two countries could be locked into a nuclear arms race not seen since the height of the Cold War. Fortunately, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as New START, is popular in both Washington and Moscow, and it can be extended for an additional five years with just the signatures of Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Renewing it should be the easiest foreign policy decision Trump can make. […]

If there is one big takeaway from The Washington Post’s publication of thousands of pages of documents detailing the extent of policy failures in Afghanistan, it is the great lengths that it takes to wake the American public up to the costs of pursuing a war without a strategy. As The Post’s examination of interviews produced as part of a wide-ranging and years-long review of U.S. policy by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, known as SIGAR, clearly shows, few officials charged with leading the war effort were willing to openly admit that most of what […]

The recent NATO summit in London underscored how Turkey’s relations with its allies are becoming increasingly confrontational. In the run-up to the meeting, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to veto the alliance’s defense plan for Poland and the Baltic states unless key Western powers became more attentive to Turkish interests in Syria. Although Erdogan eventually signed on to the summit’s final communique, the Turks are continuing to stonewall approval of the plan until the West agrees to designate the YPG, a Syrian Kurdish militia, as a terrorist group. Turkey has been vocally complaining about Western support for the YPG […]

While all eyes seemed to be on the impeachment hearings in the House Judiciary Committee in Washington this week, another judicial drama was unfolding at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. On Thursday, Helen Brady, a lawyer for the ICC’s chief prosecutor, argued that the court overstepped its mandate in April when it rejected the prosecutor’s request to open a formal investigation into alleged atrocities and abuses committed by U.S., Afghan and Taliban forces in the war in Afghanistan. It is a case that could have profound implications not only for President Donald Trump’s promise to negotiate an end […]

Leaders from NATO member states gathered in the U.K. this week for a two-day meeting to celebrate the alliance’s 70th anniversary. U.S. President Donald Trump is taking credit for increased military spending on the part of some NATO members, a frequent point of contention between the U.S. and its trans-Atlantic allies. But the challenges facing the alliance go well beyond that issue, as some European leaders are asking much more fundamental questions about the very essence and structure of NATO itself. To discuss the challenges facing NATO, WPR’s Elliot Waldman is joined by Claudia Major, a security expert at the […]

When President Donald Trump granted pardons to two Army officers—one convicted of war crimes, the other accused of them—and reversed the demotion of a Navy SEAL who was convicted of posing with the corpse of an enemy combatant, he exposed several troubling ambiguities about civilian-military relations in the United States. Civilian and uniformed defense officials feel most at ease when the dynamics of their relationship are clear-cut, with formal and tacit assignments of roles and responsibilities that leave little room for uncertainty. In practice, though, things are rarely so black and white. There is only one certainty so far in […]