Reprinted from The Realist Review. News comes this weekend that the ‘Department of War’ now has Nigeria in its crosshairs. Taking to Truth Social on Saturday, Trump let loose on the Nigerian government, warning that, …If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the...
What Happened to America First?
Reprinted from The Realist Review. A quarter of a century ago, a newly elected Republican president, who campaigned on a promise of a more humble, less arrogant foreign policy was putting together his Cabinet and national security team. By the time he was finished,...
Remembering Stephen F. Cohen and Sherle Schwenninger
Reprinted from The Realist Review. Five years ago this September, the scholar Sherle R. Schwenninger, perhaps the most lucid thinker on U.S. foreign policy this country has ever produced, died alone in his apartment in Manhattan. To my embarrassment, I had only a...
Ukraine’s Embrace of Suicidal Nationalism
Reprinted from The Realist Review. The recent assassination of the Ukrainian neo-fascist politician Andriy Parubiy are a grim reminder of the far-right origins of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution — a revolution which eventually gave way to the full-scale Russian...
The Decline of American Diplomacy
Reprinted from The Realist Review. A few years ago at a panel discussion at Washington DC’s venerable Tabard Inn, I spotted a face I hadn’t expected to see. But Thomas R. Pickering, even at 90 years of age, stood out. A legend in the annals of American diplomacy,...
Sixty-Three Years, Nothing Has Changed
Reprinted from The Realist Review. Exactly 63 years ago, on a summer afternoon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Kennedy White House adviser, Arthur Schlesinger, returned to Harvard where he had, until recently, been a professor of history. Schlesinger had come at the...
Presidents Trump and Putin Must Seize the Moment in Alaska
Reprinted with permission from The Realist Review This week’s summit between Presidents Trump and Putin in Alaska is an opportunity for Russia and the West to negotiate a peaceful settlement in Ukraine. There will be no perfect solution—for any settlement to resemble...
Democracy in Georgia Is Under Threat by the US Congress and the Helsinki Commission
Tbilisi – It was Lincoln who once said “I would like to see someone proud of the place in which they live.” The 16th president never made it to the South Caucasus, but here reside a people quite justly proud of the place in which they live. Among the most striking...
Toward a Policy of Restrained Pessimism
Reprinted with permission from The Realist Review. The discursive rhetoric President Trump deploys when speaking about Russia and its apex-leader, Mr. Putin, risks lending the impression that once the unfortunate business of the war wraps up, he and Mr. Putin will at...
The Vance Doctrine
The last vice president to serve during wartime was also the last president to have done so: George H.W. Bush (1924-2018). Bush’s presidency, unlike that of his son’s, was marked, mainly, by a prudential approach to foreign affairs. Bush’s warning about the dangers of...


