United States Archive

The Korean Peninsula has long been a very dangerous place. Over the past several years, it became even more so as the North Korean regime began testing nuclear weapons and—most recently—ballistic missiles that could threaten the United States. Alarmed at this, the administration of President Donald Trump has pushed back hard and repeatedly stated that it will do anything necessary to counter this threat, including the preventative use of military force. For the past year, the heightened tensions and belligerent rhetoric on both sides have raised fears of a catastrophic conflict. But in a stunning turnabout earlier this week, North […]

U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an order imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. The tariffs, which will go into effect in 15 days, exempt Canada and Mexico for now, with the possibility of other states to be exempted as well. Combined with the resignation earlier this week of Gary Cohn, the president’s chief economic adviser who had been seen as a check on Trump’s protectionist instincts during his tenure as director of the National Economic Council, they signal that Trump is ready to make good on campaign promises of getting tough on trade—and in particular with China. […]

Amid all the focus on whether the Trump administration will recertify the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, Iran’s regional rival, Saudi Arabia, has rekindled nuclear ambitions of its own. Later this month, Saudi Arabia will announce the winner of a multibillion-dollar contract to build the nation’s first two nuclear reactors, set to be constructed along the Persian Gulf. A U.S. consortium is competing with many others in what has become a geopolitical contest, but not without controversy. The United States has participated in over 100 nuclear deals like this before, so what makes one with Saudi Arabia so divisive? Riyadh wants […]

Late last week, during his annual speech to the nation, Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled a raft of new and exotic military weapons systems that were in development, and in some cases ready to be deployed. Putin’s inventory included an enormous, new heavy intercontinental ballistic missile known as “Sarmat”; new maneuverable re-entry vehicles that will, in theory, be fitted onto Russian ballistic missiles to help them overwhelm American missile defenses; a nuclear-powered cruise missile apparently able to fly for thousands of miles just feet above the surface of the earth; and a nuclear-armed underwater drone potentially able to lay dormant […]

Security assistance is a longstanding American tool to build up cooperation with key countries, including regional heavyweights like Egypt, Nigeria and Pakistan, where security deficits have consequences for the United States. But security cooperation often requires bureaucratic agility and a true convergence of interests between the sender and receiver. Both elements have been in short supply recently, and new efforts to reform the enterprise seem unlikely to transform these difficult partnerships. In the past few weeks, Trump administration officials have engaged in several public dialogues about efforts to improve the suite of government-funded programs called security sector assistance. As with […]

In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner—both former senior officials in the Obama administration—noted that over the past 45 years, “neither carrots nor sticks have swayed China as predicted.” From Richard Nixon on, American presidents believed that U.S. diplomacy and military power could “persuade Beijing that it was neither possible nor necessary to challenge the U.S.-led security order in Asia.” But that didn’t prove true. Today, as Campbell and Ratner note, “China is on the path to becoming a military peer the likes of which the United States has not seen since the Soviet Union” […]