US

When the abuse of inmates at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison broke into the open in 2004, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld offered to resign. Twice. Both times President George W. Bush rejected Rumsfeld’s offer; he only fired him after the Democrats took both the House and the Senate in the 2006 mid-term elections. Secretary […]

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is celebrating its 100th anniversary. On April 11, the Empire State building will light up in green to evoke the famous flickering green light that Jay Gatsby watches from his dock night after night—an appropriate homage since the book is set in Long Island and New York. Fitzgerald’s gravesite […]

When I first met Elbridge Colby (known as Bridge), he was a young analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis, where I served as a senior advisor. CNA is the US Navy and Marine Corps think tank and one of the “Federally Funded Research and Development Centers,” along with the RAND Corporation, MITRE, the Johns […]

Trump has stunned Europe by following through on his pledge to force an end to the fighting in Ukraine, and making European allies take more responsibility for their own security. The Pentagon has reportedly been instructed to prepare to withdraw US forces deployed in Syria. Is the Trump administration in the early stages of actually […]

What happens on the battlefields of Ukraine will not stay in Ukraine. As the Spanish Civil War was a laboratory for the Second World War, so the current war in Ukraine prefigures technologies to be used in the next one. The US and its allies – Israel, Taiwan, South Korea, the Baltic States and Poland, […]

President Donald Trump has enhanced his reputation for unpredictability in foreign policy with his novel suggestion, at a joint press conference with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that the people currently living in the Gaza Strip be evacuated and that the United States assume control of that territory and rebuild it. The president is surely […]

Not since Grover Cleveland won non-consecutive terms in 1884 and 1892 has an American president duplicated this feat. Now Donald Trump, at 78 years old, has come back to win a second term. With it, he has loomed large over American politics for well over a decade.  Will Trump’s second term become a success? Or […]

When Donald Trump takes the oath of office on January 20, 2025, he will confront a world in turmoil. What are the four biggest foreign policy crises/opportunities that he will likely face over the next year? The first and most obvious is Ukraine. Ever since he invaded on February 24, 2022, Russian president Vladimir Putin […]

The Republican Party’s 2024 Platform did not mention Africa. Yet this does not mean that a coherent and potentially transformative American approach towards the “continent of tomorrow” cannot be found in the foreign policy vision articulated by President Trump and in the record of his first term. Here are three general guiding principles: First, America […]

The US-China relationship faces certain tension and rising competition over the next four years. While it is impossible in general to predict specific new administration policies, there are likely to be wide swings between efforts to engage China and seek compromise, with efforts to compete, confront, or even contain Beijing. President Trump will be surrounded by […]

Donald Trump’s victory by an unassailable margin has shocked America’s bicoastal liberal intelligentsia. A majority of media pundits, whether talking heads or press columnists, could not imagine that the former and now future president could do anything more than eke out a narrow electoral victory. They simply could not comprehend how Americans other than Trump’s […]

It would be hard to think of a starker contrast than that between the two candidates on foreign policy. One refers to America as a “garbage can for the world.” The other says that “the American dream belongs to all of us.” One is calling for a massive increase in tariffs, while the other dismisses them […]

In the tumult that always accompanies a US presidential election – with each side fearing the end of “democracy” or “America” if the other side prevails – some Americans have lost sight of what admirers see clearly from afar: A remarkable, resilient country on which turns the hopes and inspirations of the world. Every US presidential election is billed as “the most consequential […]

The principal product of Washington D.C. is words. They come in three different kinds of packages: memoranda, by which government departments and organizations communicate internally; op-ed articles, by which these various groups communicate with each other and the public; and reports, usually compiled under the auspices of people with expertise in the subject being addressed. […]

How will Kamala Harris conduct foreign policy if she becomes president in January 2025? Would she hew to traditional Democratic Party stands on dealing with authoritarian regimes, climate change and foreign alliances? Or will she veer off in unpredictable directions? One obvious place to try and answer this question might be to explore Harris’ own […]

The image of former president Donald J. Trump, at the age of seventy-eight, wrestling with the Secret Service to stand upright and pump his fist in the air and shout, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” has resonated throughout the world. Bloodied but undefeated, he resembled a roaring lion to his supporters. Republican pollster Frank Luntz predicts that […]