Nearly 1 million people have been displaced in eastern Congo since rebels from the March 23 Movement, or M23, reemerged in early 2022 after having been dormant for almost a decade. Since then, the insurgency has caused humanitarian needs in the area to skyrocket, while raising thorny questions about regional stability.
There is a general consensus in Washington that the Abraham Accords—the series of normalization agreements between Israel and Arab countries launched in 2020—have been an overwhelming success and that expanding them to include Saudi Arabia will only increase their benefits. That might be an overly rosy assessment.
The true danger for NATO is not the emergence of European defense capacity, but the lack of it. A rebalanced alliance will require a new paradigm based on closer NATO-EU cooperation with a stronger European pillar within NATO. That will only happen if Europe adopts, and the U.S. supports, a more ambitious European defense agenda.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the question of whether women make better leaders in a crisis gained prominence. Now, the near-absence of women from the world stage has returned to being something of a “So what?” issue. But with the world continuing to face numerous crises, women’s political leadership is more, not less, important.