Recent threatening statements by incoming President Donald Trump have raised the question of why any country would risk partnering with the United States. But the erosion in trust has not begun with the incoming Trump administration. Several years ago, Saudi Arabia...
During the Cold War, American and Russian officials and diplomats were in constant communication. The Cuban missile crisis was resolved, not by isolating each other, but by communicating with each other. Contrary to American mythology, the Cuban missile crisis was...
The present severed from the past is easily misunderstood. In discussions of the Russia-Ukraine war, not enough is made of the historical facts that, at the end of the Cold War, the newly independent Ukraine promised not to join NATO, and NATO promised not to expand...
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has recently taken to calling the Prime Minister of Canada the “Governor… of the Great State of Canada.” In the past days, he has gone beyond the jocular tone that some Canadian ministers have insisted he had, citing quite specific...
Maybe Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), who is now the leader of Syria, really has changed. Maybe he has matured, as he told CNN, as if his years as an al-Qaeda terrorist leader were a youthful indiscretion. But the world cannot simply...
On December 11, Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that, as one of the last things he would do at the end of his term as the European Union’s rotating president, he proposed a Christmas truce between Ukraine and Russia. "At the end of the Hungarian EU...
The Russian Armed Forces are pushing west through the Donbas region of Ukraine. Their advance has consistently been called slow, but this is no longer true. In October and November, Russia captured over 1,500 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory. The pace has...
President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly expressed concern that Iran could develop a nuclear bomb on his watch. In considering his options to prevent that, The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump is considering the possibility of airstrikes on Iranian nuclear...
In a reversal of the old proverb “Better the devil you know,” the U.S. and its partners in the Political West have embraced the devil they don’t. In Syria, they have traded Iran for al-Qaeda. When Bashar al-Assad fell, many of his international partners suffered...
After an inconceivably fast twelve day march through Syria by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is in exile in Moscow, his government has fallen, the more than five decade’s long Ba’ath rule of Syria is over and a group descended from...
