The signature of Joe Biden’s State Department has been the abdication of diplomacy. Its head, Antony Blinken, the chief U.S. diplomat, has abdicated the role of diplomat. Though obvious in Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea, this absence of diplomacy has been...
There is a dawning realization that the war in Ukraine is not going to end with the Ukrainian counteroffensive. It is not going to end with a military victory for Ukraine, and it is not going to end by attaining the goals necessary to force Russia to concede Ukraine’s...
“International law” and the “rules-based international order” sound like the same thing. They’re not. International law is the Charter international system firmly built upon the foundation of the United Nations. It is impartial and applies to everyone. Rules-based law...
The five members of BRICS promised that their fifteenth annual summit, held in Johannesburg, South Africa, would be an important one for BRICS’ development and that it would mark a significant moment in the changing international architecture. The political West...
The trouble started in 2014. A US supported coup took out the democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, with his eastern base, and replaced him with a West leaning president who was handpicked by the US. Victoria Nuland, who is now Acting Deputy...
Although Wagner leader Yevgeni Prigozhin had reportedly been banished to Belarus after his brief and spectacularly unsuccessful rebellion, he seemingly enjoyed a surprising freedom of movement. He apparently traveled between Belarus and Africa and traveled frequently...
US President Joe Biden’s policy in the war in Ukraine has been clear from the beginning: to put Ukraine in the best position “on the battlefield [to] be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table” while being careful “not fight the third world war in...
Getting a count of Ukraine’s dead that isn’t the output of someone’s propaganda machine is difficult to do. But the number of dead is indisputably a horror. Measuring the maiming of Ukraine solely in deaths, though, is an injustice to the depth of the Ukrainian wound....
At the end of June, 2023, Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s coup attempt quickly began and quickly ended. Officials in the political West were quick to diagnose the weakness in Putin’s government and the vulnerability in Russia’s forces in Ukraine. Neither diagnosis...
As Ukraine’s counteroffensive and chances of winning the war begin to show signs of falling apart, and the realization that, eventually, Ukraine will end the war only through negotiations begins to dawn, Kiev has begun a campaign of conferences to court the neutral...
