U.S. Foreign Policy Archive

Employing an adversarial tone that surprised many observers, the White House’s newly unveiled National Security Strategy described China as a “revisionist power” that “actively competes” against the United States and its allies and partners. It accused China of trying to “shift the regional balance in its favor” and “displace the United States in the Indo-Pacific region.” The strategy, the first released by President Donald Trump since taking office, also declared that China seeks to shape a world “antithetical” to U.S. values and interests, and painted China’s expanding economic and diplomatic influence in a decidedly negative light, deploying terms like “extractive” […]

This week, U.S. President Donald Trump released his inaugural National Security Strategy, or NSS. Since this document affects policy throughout the national security apparatus and helps explain the Trump administration’s priorities to the American public, Congress and the world, Washington’s national security experts immediately began dissecting it. Some analysts and organizations aligned with the Trump administration argued that it was a bold reassertion of American leadership in the world. Others saw it as decidedly mainstream. James Stavridis, a retired admiral and now the dean of the prestigious Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, called the new strategy a “centrist” document […]

The conflict in Ukraine, which has raged for more than four years since the Maidan uprising of November 2013, is often portrayed as a clash between the West, which favors greater integration with Europe and the United States, and the East, which favors ties with Russia. But it is degenerating into a clash of egos jockeying for control of a corrupt, dysfunctional state that outside powers other than Russia are barely invested in anymore. Consider the case of Mikheil Saakashvili, the controversial U.S.-educated former prime minister of Georgia, who in May 2015 was appointed governor of the Odessa region on […]

This week, U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled his National Security Strategy in a speech that touted the new agenda while at the same time contradicting key elements of the very strategy he was outlining. Among many policy professionals, the document produced an array of opinions, from alarm by those who pointed to sharp departures from traditional positions, to relief that it proposes a rather traditional conservative philosophy on national security. There is an explanation for the conflicting views by observers and the verbal self-punching by the president: The National Security Strategy thinly conceals an important secret about foreign policy in […]

Yesterday marked the eighth and final night of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. The gift-giving tradition in my family has always been to offer one major present on the first night and smaller ones, often practical items like gloves and scarves, on each of the following nights. Before lighting the candles yesterday, I thought about what gifts I would offer Donald Trump and his administration for Hanukkah this year. The list I came up with collapses my family’s tradition: Every one of the eight gifts, it turns out, are major presents, but they are all also practical when it comes […]

One year ago, the United Nations appeared to be poised between a moment of renewal and a total meltdown. An energetic new secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, promised to revitalize the organization after a decade of drift under Ban Ki-moon. The former Portuguese prime minister talked about a “surge of diplomacy” and the need to prevent looming conflicts. Listen to Richard Gowan discuss this article on WPR’s Trend Lines Podcast. His audio starts at 29:32: Yet he seemed doomed to run headlong into opposition from the administration of incoming U.S. President Donald Trump. The president-elect had repeatedly belittled and dismissed the U.N., […]

It is the season for columnists to nominate their words, songs and people of the year. Here are mine. My word of the year is “defeat,” with a special nod to its derivative form “defeatist.” My song is “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” by the Rolling Stones. And my people of 2017 are British Prime Minister Theresa May and U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. I acknowledge that these are not immediately obvious choices. “Defeat” is not exactly a novel word or concept, to start with. Its first known use in English was in the 15th century. “You […]

Four accidents involving the U.S. surface Navy in the Pacific in recent months, two of them deadly, have led to warnings of a readiness crisis at sea. These warnings received additional salience when a Navy resupply aircraft crashed in the Philippines Sea on Nov. 22, killing three of the 11 crew and passengers. The spate of deadly incidents has led the Navy to examine how it trains, equips and sustains its force to operate ever more complex missions with a shrinking fleet. The Navy’s leadership in late October released the findings of investigations into the collisions involving the USS John […]

It’s now well understood that many governments see their cyber capabilities as a tool to influence, coerce, deter and disrupt their enemies and rivals. Societies and states today are almost totally dependent on cyberspace to communicate, conduct routine but essential transactions, store information and make critical decisions about policy matters, from the mundane to the strategic. Yet it’s hard for people without deep technical understanding of the technology—your columnist included—to know where to fit these cyber realities into familiar categories for the conduct of national security and international relations. There’s also a risk of discussing openly how to respond to […]

U.S. President Donald Trump has reportedly approved the core elements of what will be his first official National Security Strategy, known within the government as the NSS. If true, it will be an impressive accomplishment. The difficult coordination needed to get agreement on the NSS within an administration, given the painful fine-tuning of every word, means that few presidents have produced one during their first year in office. In a speech last week at the annual Ronald Reagan Defense Forum in California, Trump’s national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, hinted at the major themes of the forthcoming strategy. Comparing today to […]

It is fitting that one day before U.S. President Donald Trump decided to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, breaking with 40 years of American policy, his State Department issued an order forbidding its staff and their families from traveling to Jerusalem’s Old City. It appears that before lighting the match, Trump did not want any of his own people near the powder keg when the fuse was lit. At the moment, it is not certain how extensive the blowback will be. Regionally, anger will be tempered by regimes unwilling to allow the possibility of wide-scale demonstrations getting beyond […]

The month of November saw a marked increase in the phenomenon known in Japan as “ghost ships”—North Korean fishing vessels that wash ashore or into Japanese waters, often empty or filled with the remains of deceased sailors. It seems like a fitting image for a visit taking place half the world away in Brussels, where U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson arrived yesterday for a European trip that will see him continue on to Austria and France. The parallels apply on a number of levels. Tillerson himself has been considered the political equivalent of a dead man walking—rumored to be […]

After President Donald Trump reluctantly signed legislation in August imposing new U.S. sanctions on Moscow for its interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Russia’s parliament last month drafted a bill that would try to shield Russian banks from further sanctions by obscuring their investments in the state-controlled arms industry. The United States and the European Union have imposed multiple layers of sanctions on Russia since 2014 for its actions in Ukraine. In an email interview, William Courtney, an adjunct senior fellow at the RAND Corporation and former U.S. ambassador to Georgia and Kazakhstan, discusses the impact of Western sanctions […]