Column Archive

Last week, President Donald Trump announced that John Bolton was replacing U.S. Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as assistant to the president for national security affairs, otherwise known as the national security adviser. While Bolton is a longtime government official, having served every Republican president since Ronald Reagan, his appointment was immediately condemned across the political spectrum, given his well-documented views as a war hawk. Colin Kahl and Jon Wolfsthal, two veterans of the Obama administration, labeled him a “national security threat,” arguing that his “ascendance increases the risk of not one but two wars—with North Korea and Iran.” Writing […]

Earlier this month, representatives of 20 countries sat around a table in the White House to discuss ways to ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. That same day, on a road inside Gaza, a bomb exploded, striking a convoy carrying a high-level Palestinian delegation, including the Palestinian Authority’s prime minister. The group was traveling through the Hamas-dominated coastal enclave to inaugurate a new water purification plant. If the roadside bomb, which failed to kill any of its targets, highlighted the deadly rivalries that continue to plague the beleaguered territory, the White House conference put on display the fierce dilemmas that […]

On Monday, over 20 European countries collectively expelled almost 60 Russian diplomats suspected of being intelligence operatives. The move signaled a significant escalation in Europe’s collective response to Moscow’s alleged role in a nerve agent attack in southern England in early March that left a former Russian spy and his daughter in a coma, and the British police officer who responded to the scene hospitalized. That the United States joined the European response, by expelling another 60 Russian operatives and closing the Russian consulate in Seattle, underscored Western solidarity against the latest of repeated Russian provocations. Until last week, British […]

Last week, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a long investigative report on how Israel discovered and then destroyed a nearly completed plutonium nuclear reactor in Syria’s eastern desert in September 2007. The episode, including the ups and downs of the intelligence process that led to the decision to strike in what Haaretz called a “daring, hair-raising operation,” provides a window into how to think about intelligence and policy challenges in other cases involving nascent nuclear programs. After a decade of secrecy, military censors in Israel lifted the ban on journalists publishing the details of the attack. Haaretz reporters Amos Harel […]

Is Ban Ki-moon the emblematic international figure of our times? This is probably not a proposition you have considered before. Although it is only 15 months since Ban ended his 10-year tenure as secretary-general of the United Nations, he feels like a distant memory. Ban was a cautious and often marginal figure in a world of mounting crises. While he played a significant role in ensuring the ratification of the Paris climate change agreement in his last year in office, he could only do so because the United States, China and other major states were on his side. A little […]

This week marked the 15th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which was ostensibly launched to make the Middle East more secure. By any measure, it failed to do that. The region is significantly more unstable now than it was then and shows every sign of remaining that way. A few thousand miles from Iraq, American troops continue fighting and dying in Afghanistan. Victory there—at least as it was envisioned when U.S. forces first arrived in 2001—remains elusive. So is the global defeat of the Islamist extremist movements that caused the United States to get involved in Iraq and […]

When Vladimir Putin won a landslide victory to a fourth term as Russia’s president on Sunday, it came as a surprise to no one. Still, his re-election was noteworthy for many reasons, including how apparent it is that as democracy loses ground around the world, Putin embodies the model for the 21st-century descent into authoritarianism—a model that is being emulated by other aspiring autocrats. That Putin’s re-election has repercussions far beyond Russia was evident in the headlines that dominated the news in the days leading up to the vote. A former Russian spy and his daughter were found slumped on […]

The emergence of nativist movements and populist leaders in Europe and America has had Western liberal democracy on the ropes over the past few years. Two developments in the past week suggest that things could get worse before they get better. The implications of the first development were clear. The two most formidable long-term challengers and counterweights to Western power—Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin—were returned to office, perhaps indefinitely. The second might take some time to sort through and make sense of. Revelations about the practices of a British political consultancy, Cambridge Analytica, have put the […]

This week, Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince and the presumed real leader of the kingdom, arrives in the United States for a lengthy visit. On his trip, the 32-year-old prince, the architect of a newly bullish Saudi foreign policy, will likely address a wide range of bilateral and regional issues that have, on balance, strengthened U.S.-Saudi ties since Donald Trump became president. The visit is unlikely to herald any breakthrough in the nearly 10-month-long rift within the Gulf Cooperation Council, which pits Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain—plus Egypt—against Qatar. Trump’s pro-Saudi instincts have made […]

The United Nations has weathered the first phase of the Trump era, starting out 2018 in better shape than seemed possible a year ago. But U.S. relations with the U.N. could take a sharp and sudden turn for the worse quite soon. President Donald Trump took office promising to slash the U.N.’s budget and rip up international agreements. But he has often shied away from delivering on his direst threats. His ambassador in New York, Nikki Haley, has shaved significant sums off U.N. budgets but avoided more severe cuts that would halt the organization’s operations. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has […]

For more than 70 years after World War II, U.S. foreign and national security policy followed a distinctive pattern. Despite many policy differences between Republicans and Democrats, there was also deep agreement about the overall goal and logic of U.S. strategy. Across the political spectrum, most political leaders and opinion-shapers believed that preserving the global order by cultivating and working with allies and partners was the best way to advance U.S. national interests. And they agreed that this should be done by a cadre of foreign and national security policy experts who moved in and out of government service, guided […]

Before Colombians voted in congressional and presidential primary elections last Sunday, the front-runner in the race for president, according to early polls, was Gustavo Petro, a former leftist guerrilla fighter and once-mayor of Bogota. But to anyone who thought those numbers meant Colombia was about to take a sharp leftward turn, the election results came as a surprise. The most startling outcome from the congressional vote was the spectacularly disastrous performance by the FARC, the longtime rebel group that signed a peace deal in 2016, demobilized and entered politics, repurposing its Spanish acronym from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia […]

For the past 14 months, the refrain of President Donald Trump’s defenders within the U.S. foreign policy community has been to ignore what he says on Twitter and pay attention to what his administration is doing. It’s safe to say Rex Tillerson might have a word or two for them regarding the wisdom of that advice. In the latest stunning development to come out of Trump’s White House, Tillerson was unceremoniously axed as secretary of state, reportedly learning of the news via the president’s Twitter account upon his return from a weeklong tour of Africa. Trump’s explanation for the move, […]

From the homeland security folks who respond to national disasters to the armed forces planning for hostile encounters with state or nonstate adversaries, the U.S. security community understands that climate change affects what they do, often profoundly. Despite the skeptics in the highest ranks of government, there is quiet and steady progress being made to integrate greater knowledge about climate change and its impacts into threat assessments, planning and training for future security contingencies. For more than 20 years, the defense community has been studying the environment and climate change, and their implications for how the U.S. prepares for military […]

This is an era of diplomatic bluster, bluff and buffering. The blusterers and bluffers get most of the attention. U.S. President Donald Trump is a master of the crude threat, encapsulated in his promise to unleash “fire and fury” on North Korea. Yet such rhetoric is now the common currency of international affairs. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has lambasted Trump as a “dotard.” Russian President Vladimir Putin boasts about his country’s unstoppable nuclear missiles. Foreign policy analysts, once accustomed to parsing the careful phrases of former U.S. President Barack Obama, now spend days trying to distinguish between meaningless […]

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 […]

With less than four months until Mexico’s presidential election, it looks like a perfect storm of support is brewing for the perennial standard-bearer of the left, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, known as AMLO. The former mayor of Mexico City, who is mounting his third quest for the presidency, could hardly find the current conditions more to his liking. Everywhere he looks, at home and abroad, the stars appear to be aligning in his favor. His foes are fighting each other; the president of the United States is using rhetoric that unwittingly bolsters his prospects; and even Russia is apparently putting […]