WMD Archive

This week, America commemorated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the world worried once again about North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. All that is missing to illustrate all three of the biggest threats that will be priorities for the foreseeable future is a catastrophic natural disaster linked to climate change. The next president will have to update the strategies to cope with all three, with varying international mechanisms in place to do so. National security experts often say that if everything is a priority, then nothing is. They wish that political leaders and bureaucratic processes would do a better job at […]

Iran has had the chance to change how it engages with the outside world as a result of the nuclear agreement it signed with world powers a year ago, and also as a key player in the crises that haunt the Middle East. But there’s little sign that Tehran wants to take a new tack in its relations with the West or with its neighbors, and political forces in the U.S. also appear uninterested in prospects for normalization with Iran. Instead, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seems bent on ensuring that the nuclear agreement signed in July 2015 does […]