Erdoğan’s Long Game in Syria
More Essays
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Nuclear Proliferation Begins in Korea
Seventy-five years ago, an unexpected event on the Korean peninsula changed the world. In the coming years, that history may repeat itself: an increasingly likely development there has the potential to transform the entire international order once again. In June 1950, forces from communist North Korea invaded the non-communist south. The United States dispatched troops […]
America's Latin America Problem
Twenty years of US neglect have created space for adversaries to build permanent footholds in the Western Hemisphere. Iran and other adversaries are quietly building an operational network in America’s backyard, one that sanctions alone cannot dismantle. The Venezuela Nexus Recent testimony from Hugo “Pollo” Carvajal, Venezuela’s former intelligence chief, reveals the depth of Iran-Venezuela […]
Reconciliation Bills and the Defense Budget
Both during his presidential campaign and since taking office, President Donald Trump has repeatedly echoed Ronald Reagan’s famous phrase “peace through strength,” while emphasizing the major emerging long-term threat from the People’s Republic of China. Despite Trump’s pronouncements, however, his fiscal year 2026 budget falls short of the defense spending levels that the Biden administration […]
Holding the Front Line Against Terrorism: NATO’s Essential Role in Iraq
NATO Mission Iraq trains and advises Iraqi armed forces and government security agencies on a wide array of tasks against a number of terrorist threats. The evolution of NATO’s training mission in Iraq underlines its continuing need; NATO should consider exporting this model to other fragile states like Syria and Lebanon Throughout the period from […]
Europe Faces a Threat Bigger Than Russia: Its Own Balkanization
Bridge construction in the Western Balkans may be a microcosm of Europe’s fragmented, post-American future. During the Kosovo War of 1998-1999, the main bridge over the river Ibar in the ethnically divided town of Mitrovica was an important focal point. “On one side, sitting in chairs outside the Dolce Vita bar and listening to Italian music, are […]
Closer US - Hungary Military Cooperation is Good for Both Countries
Hungary and the United States have been allies since Hungary joined NATO in 1999. President Donald Trump’s reelection augurs well for closer ties on defense policy. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán visited Trump during the election campaign and called him “the man who can save the Western world.” Trump, in return, has said “there’s nobody that’s […]
Iran Must Relearn the Lessons from Its Eight-Year War with Iraq
The Islamic Republic of Iran, in the 12 Day War with Israel, witnessed the dramatic end of a strategy Iran spent thirty years perfecting and what it worked so hard to avoid: international isolation and direct military strikes on its own territory. Learning from Trauma Iran’s “proxy strategy” was born from trauma. The eight-year war […]
How to Finance Ukraine’s Defense Industry
At this year’s Ukraine Recovery Conference in Rome, all eyes were on the country’s fast-growing defense-technology sector. With Kyiv now in its fourth year of war with Russia, Ukraine’s home-grown firms urgently need fresh capital – public, private, and blended – to offset gaps in allied arms deliveries and anchor Ukraine’s long-term recovery. Longstanding prohibitions […]
Hamas at a Crossroads
Today’s Hamas is a very different organization from the one we knew from its formal establishment in December 1987 through its surprise attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Yet many politicians, members of the intelligence community and media commentators still insist on viewing the Palestinian “Islamic Resistance Movement” [the translation of the Arabic acronym […]
Zohran Mamdani and the American Tradition of Reinvention
Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben was a hero of the American Revolutionary War. He arrived at Valley Forge in the bleak second winter of the war and trained the ragtag American regiments into a disciplined, coordinated force. He is quite possibly the most celebrated German American in history. Italian Americans have Columbus Day, but German Americans […]
The Missing Peace in Africa’s Great Lakes Region
The Great Lakes region that encompasses Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo is among Africa’s most beautiful regions. Cloud-covered volcanos, terraced fields, lush jungles, and lakes dot the landscape. It is also among the most violent. The June 2025 peace agreement signed at the White House between two of the region’s countries (Rwanda […]
A Regime Collapse Strategy for Iran
The 12-Day War and President Trump’s conclusion of it did little to resolve a range of non-nuclear Iranian threats. These include drones (which attack American allies from Kyiv to Tel Aviv), terrorist proxies, and assassination plots inside America. If past is prologue, then Tehran will again seek to bloody America wherever and however it can, […]
How a Bad Deal in the Indian Ocean Undermines the West
On May 22, the UK government of Labour’s Keir Starmer signed a treaty with the island nation of Mauritius, a former British colony in the Indian Ocean, to cede sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, a seven-atoll archipelago that includes the Diego Garcia military base. Though the deal contains protections for this base, it also raises […]
In Israel, A Public Diplomacy Pivot
Israel has begun a little-noticed foreign policy transformation. Against the backdrop of its ongoing war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Jerusalem has launched a new initiative in strategic communications. The shift was borne of necessity. Historically, Israel’s international outreach has been based on the concept of hasbara [means “explanation”] – if the country were […]
A Netanyahu Visit Like No Other
On July 7, Prime Minister Netanyahu will have his third Oval Office meeting with President Trump in six months. But this will be a visit unlike any before it. Netanyahu arrives in Washington as the man who won the Twelve Day War with Iran. He will also be there as President Trump’s (occasionally difficult) wartime […]
Lessons of the Middle East War
All wars teach lessons. The war that began with the murderous assault on southern Israel by the governing organization of Gaza, Hamas, on October 7, 2023, and ended – at least for now — on June 22, 2025 with the American bombing of three major parts of the Iranian nuclear weapons program, demonstrates the importance […]
Why President Trump Should Place Central Asia on His Agenda
For three decades Central Asia has remained largely peripheral to Washington’s strategic horizon. Yet Kazakhstan now supplies more than forty percent of the world’s mined uranium, while Turkmenistan controls one of the planet’s largest natural-gas deposits. No sitting US president has visited one of the region’s five countries – Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. […]
Trump and the Latin American Right: Ideology and Interest
Three leading right-wing politicians in Latin America, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, Argentine President Javier Milei, and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, have made much of their relationships with President Trump. Bukele’s Prisons at Trump’s Disposal Of the three, Bukele has established the closest rapport with Trump, a major shift from the suspicion with which he […]
Book Reviews
The Wolf’s Lair in German Memory
Before the Downfall, Hitler’s Years in the Wolf’s Lairby Felix Bohr, Suhrkamp, 2025 [in German] On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus Schenck von Stauffenberg traveled from Rangsdorf airfield outside of Berlin to Adolf Hitler’s field headquarters near the town of Rastenburg in East Prussia – the Wolfsschanze or Wolf’s Lair. After landing, Stauffenberg finished his […]
The Best American Diplomatic Memoir of the Cold War
Foreign Service, Five Decades on the Frontlines of American Diplomacyby James F. Dobbins, RAND Corporation, 2017 Memoirs written by American diplomats can be slow-going. Narratives lurch from meeting to meeting in self-serving, bureaucratic prose (“And then I told the first deputy prime minister of Montenegro…”) But there are exceptions in the genre, and the late […]
What the United States Should and Should Not Do in the Middle East
The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present and Future in the Middle East by Steven Cook, Oxford University Press, 2024 In the third of the three Godfather movies, Al Pacino, playing Michael Corleone, laments his inability to make a complete break with the family’s criminal past: “Just when I thought I was out,” he exclaims […]
Videos
Interview with Hillel Halkin
Robert Silverman: You are an American Jew who moved to Israel, with your wife, as a young couple shortly after the Six-Day War. Then you wrote a book in the 1970s that influenced a whole generation of American Jews. It was called Letters to an American Jewish Friend. And you were talking to your counterparts […]
Interview with Yossi Klein Halevi
Yossi Klein Halevi: In terms of my personal journey, it’s framed by my evolving, understanding of the Holocaust, my relationship to the Holocaust and my generation’s experience as opposed to my father’s experience. My father was a survivor from Hungary. I grew up in a very charged Holocaust environment in Brooklyn, in the 1960s, which […]
Interview with Gadi Taub
Gadi Taub: I believed in Oslo [the 1990s Palestinian-Israeli peace process] because I imagined the Palestinians to be like us. I imagined their national liberation movement to be a national liberation movement just like ours. Then reality just exploded outside my window. Tel Aviv is small. So from where I lived back then, when a […]