Column Archive

It is time to start making serious plans to reconstruct U.S. diplomacy once the Trump era ends. The U.S. president has only been in office for six months. If he can shake off the specter of impeachment, Donald Trump will direct American foreign policy until 2021 or 2025. But it is now utterly clear that he will leave the international system, at the very best, in disarray. The only really intriguing question about his remaining time in the White House is whether or not the U.S. will enter into a major war due to his miscalculations. If Trump has followed […]

It has been more than 14 years since the U.S. military last fought large formations of conventional enemy troops. Unless the unthinkable happens with North Korea, American forces may not see a large-scale traditional war for many more years to come, if ever. Yet, every day, the military, intelligence community, law enforcement and other government agencies face a plethora of shadow enemies, ranging from complex criminal-terrorist networks to ideologically motivated individuals. While the risk of conventional war or gray-zone aggression from an adversary state is not gone entirely, the 21st-century security environment is dominated by nonstate challenges. This is an […]

For many of the United States’ friends and allies, the Trump administration’s foreign policy has been the source of confusion and anxiety. Nowhere is that sentiment more acute than in Eastern Europe, the region that endured decades of Soviet domination and strived since the end of the Cold War to come under the West’s protective umbrella. It is there, in the territories closest to Russia, where President Donald Trump’s efforts to transform Washington’s relationship with Moscow is most worrisome, particularly during a time when Russia is flexing its military muscle beyond its borders with increasing brazenness. In an effort to […]

At the end of 2015, South American political and economic prospects were promising. Just 18 months later and the situation has been upended, leaving a region whose future is not nearly as bright as it once appeared to be. SANTIAGO, Chile—Imagine an Obama administration official looking out at the world from the vantage point of December 2015. The Middle East is engulfed in bloody conflict and crackdowns on domestic dissent. Africa is muddling through a humbling correction to the “success story” narrative that had been used to portray the continent’s preceding decade of dynamic growth and democratic progress. Asia is […]

Tunisia is a paradox. It is the Arab Spring’s one fragile success story, still committed to a democratic path. It is also the largest recruiting ground for Islamist terrorist groups, revealing deep fault lines in the country’s efforts to provide its citizens with more political and economic opportunity. The Trump administration is currently sending mixed signals in terms of its approach to the country, highlighting the key role Congress can play in ensuring a balanced and productive policy. Tunisia—small, relatively homogeneous and endowed with strong human development indicators rather than natural resources—is the last Arab Spring country standing. It has […]

If you want a catchphrase to summarize the Trump administration’s first six months of dealing with the United Nations, the best option is probably, “It could be a lot worse.” U.S. President Donald Trump has frequently attacked the U.N. since taking office. The president’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate change accord at the start of June marked a major escalation in his offensive on multilateralism. Yet Turtle Bay is not in ruins, in part because, on a day-to-day basis, the U.S. is a more flexible player at the U.N. than its leader’s rhetoric suggests. American diplomats have taken […]

After nearly 16 years of military and diplomatic efforts, the U.S. cannot secure Afghanistan from the Taliban. During that time, the administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump all wanted to believe that if they could just find the right U.S. troop levels and fine-tune the assistance provided to the government of Afghanistan, things would work out. But it never happened. Victory remains elusive. Now, as the American public and its elected leaders grow impatient with the unending war and realize that doing more of the same will never produce different results, out-of-the-box proposals are on the […]

With less than two weeks left before Venezuelans vote on a constitution-drafting constituent assembly, the Trump administration jumped into the fray, threatening to impose economic sanctions if Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro moves to rewrite the constitution to his liking. With that, Washington took a step down a path filled with landmines. The Trump administration is not wrong to exert pressure on the increasingly undemocratic Venezuelan regime. The Venezuelan people deserve international support. But in seeking to influence events in Venezuela, Washington should maneuver very carefully. The key to successful outside support is preventing Maduro from successfully framing this conflict as […]

Over the past 25 years, three explanatory models of the future of international relations have emerged to dominate how American foreign policy analysts see the post-Cold War world. All have been influential in debates over that time, serving as prisms that helped simplify the complexity of the world’s great challenges to make them more manageable. But if some of their conclusions and predictions have been borne out, important aspects of all of them have been debunked by events. Now we find ourselves in a hybrid world that has visible traits of all of these models, but bears little resemblance to […]

The defeat in Mosul of the so-called Islamic State was supposed to be good news for Iraq. But challenges that remain—ranging from Shiite militias’ new role and Sunni Iraqis’ enduring mistrust of each other and Baghdad, to the lack of state capacity to restore basic services—mean that Mosul’s nightmare will just continue. For some modest signs of constructive political change that is happening in Iraq, we need to look deeper, at local and regional developments. The recapture of Mosul on July 10 by Iraqi forces, with the help of Shiite and Kurdish militia, was supposed to usher in a new […]

Who would you nominate as the most consequential figure in international diplomacy in 2017 so far? There are quite a few credible candidates. Donald “Slayer” Trump has made quite an impact since becoming U.S. president in January. German Chancellor Angela “Status Quo” Merkel still weighs in as the most serious defender of liberal internationalism. Her French counterpart, Emmanuel “Daft Punk” Macron, sure has the makings of a global superstar. Yet there is an argument that the most influential diplomat this year has actually been an old-time favorite who has ostensibly left the geopolitical stage: Barack Obama. Since ceding the White […]

Earlier this week Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared Mosul freed from the forces of the self-styled Islamic State, the result of the longest and most destructive urban battle of the 21st century. Elsewhere in Iraq, the Islamic State is close to losing most of the territory it once controlled. Across the border in Syria, the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces are driving the group out of its stronghold in Raqqa. Soon it may lose Deir Ezzor, the last urban center it controls. While this is all good news, the Islamic State is far from eradicated. Many of its foreign fighters […]

One year after a coup attempt in Turkey, liberals are scrambling to defend what’s left of the country’s democracy. They are up against an increasingly assertive government campaign to dismantle many of the institutions and practices that had made Turkey the world’s freest, most open and democratic Muslim state. Liberal leaders, with massive popular support, have launched what looks like a make-or-break effort against steep odds. On Sunday, more than a million people turned out in Istanbul, joining tens of thousands who had braved brutal heat to take part in a 250-mile, three-week march from the capital Ankara. The participants […]

The challenge of writing about U.S. foreign policy in the Trump era is twofold. First, the United States does not have a foreign policy per se in the Trump era. Rather, it has a disparate collection of poorly coordinated and at times contradictory channels of communication and engagement with the world, some run through the White House, others by Cabinet officials and still others by faceless bureaucrats who are either improvising around the margins or working the clean-up crew. Looming over them all is the tragicomic figure of President Donald Trump himself, whose declarations, we are told, have little bearing […]

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has been doing real diplomacy lately, from the G-20 summit to his personal mediation mission to the Persian Gulf. At the same time, there’s progress to report on his ambitious project to transform the State Department into a more focused and efficient institution. After a rocky start that saw him either sidelined by the White House or out of step with it on major issues, Tillerson has been looking more and more like a normal secretary of state in recent days. At the G-20 summit and the high-profile bilateral meetings that took place in […]

Diplomacy is a mendacious business. “An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country,” one 17th-century wit supposedly quipped. Diplomats are still expected to massage, twist or conceal facts to suit their countries’ national interests. By contrast, international institutions are generally meant to make diplomacy a marginally more honest business by upholding higher standards of objectivity. Organizations like the United Nations and World Bank draw a lot of their credibility from the assumption that they tell the truth. In the last century, the League of Nations and then the U.N. pioneered the global […]

Earlier this week North Korea tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile. While Pyongyang already has an extensive arsenal of medium-range missiles, most experts believed it would be several more years before it could field a weapon that could hit the United States. They were wrong. While the missile launch did not alter the essence of the U.S.-North Korea nuclear crisis, it did add urgency. Now Americans must relearn the lexicon of nuclear strategy they largely forgot after the end of the Cold War and use it to understand North Korea’s intentions and objectives. Of the two adversaries, North Korea has […]