The Trump administration’s new National Defense Strategy is being touted as a sea change in US foreign policy – a shift from the “war on terrorism” to “great power competition,” a line that would not be out of place in the years leading...
When President Donald Trump bragged that his nuclear “button” was bigger and more efficient than North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un’s “button,” he was perpetuating the myth that the leaders of nuclear-armed nations control their weapons. But you do not have to be Trump,...
With the world focused on the scary possibility of war on the Korean Peninsula, not many people paid much attention to a series of naval exercises this past July in the Malacca Strait, a 550-mile long passage between Sumatra and Malaysia through which pass over 50,000...
The splintering of the powerful Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) into warring camps – with Qatar, supported by Turkey and Iran, on one side, and Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), supported by Egypt, on the other – has less to do with...
At a time of growing tensions between nuclear powers – Russia and NATO in Europe, and the US, North Korea, and China in Asia – Washington has quietly upgraded its nuclear weapons arsenal to create, according to three leading American scientists,...
At first glance, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s drive to create an executive presidency with almost unlimited power through a nationwide referendum looks like a slam-dunk. The man hasn’t lost an election since 1994, and he’s loaded the dice and stacked...
“Chaos,” “dismay,” “radically inept” – those are just a few of the recent headlines analyzing Donald Trump’s foreign policy. In truth, disorder would seem to be the strategy of the day. Picking up the morning newspaper or...
In his Jan. 13 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson made an extraordinary comment concerning China’s activities in the hotly disputed South China Sea. The United States, he said, must “send a clear...
President-elect Donald Trump’s off the cuff, chaotic approach to foreign policy had at least one thing going for it, even though it was more the feel of a blind pig rooting for acorns than a thought-out international initiative. In speaking with Pakistani Prime...
“We have fallen into a self-defeating spiral of reaction and counterterror,” writes Mark Danner in his new book Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War. “Our policies, meant to extirpate our enemies, have strengthened and perpetuated them.” Danner...
