Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, stands between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Faced with the fact that the United States has lost patience with the Afghan government’s dithering negotiations with the Taliban, Ghani now has little choice but to orchestrate a deal that will likely end his presidency—and almost …
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The Dangers of Trump’s Hasty Troop Withdrawal From Somalia
In a nod to his campaign promise to end U.S. participation in conflicts abroad, outgoing President Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of American troops from Somalia last week. The announcement came a week after Trump’s acting defense secretary, Christopher Miller, capped a whirlwind Middle East tour on Nov. 27 with …
Read More »Ending Yemen’s Multilayered War
For U.S. officials who worked under former President Barack Obama, many of whom are now beginning or contemplating jobs in Joe Biden’s administration, the war in Yemen casts a long shadow. What started on their watch as a primarily internal power struggle has since metastasized into a messy and multilayered …
Read More »Will Biden Seize the Opportunity for an Alliance With India?
President Joe Biden faces a slew of important foreign policy challenges. But with India, he has a historic opportunity to forge a strategic alliance to help build a stable balance of power in Asia and the wider Indo-Pacific region. India has been a bright spot in U.S. foreign policy over …
Read More »The U.S. Military Must Be Nonpartisan, but Not Apolitical
When an agitated mob of extremist supporters of President Donald Trump sacked the U.S. Capitol last month, egged on by Trump and other Republican politicians, they struck at the bedrock principles in the oath that members of the U.S. armed forces swear to protect and defend the Constitution. Nonetheless, America’s …
Read More »How the U.S. Should Respond to Russia’s New Escalation in Ukraine
For the better part of six years since Russia and Ukraine signed the Minsk II cease-fire accord for the disputed eastern Ukrainian region of Donbass, one question has loomed: How will the U.S. and NATO respond if Russian troops again cross back over the so-called Line of Contact, dividing Ukrainian …
Read More »Syrian organizations work to remove war remnants in northwest Syria
Syria has been labeled one of the worst countries in the world in terms of the number of mines planted since the war broke out in 2011, with more than 12,000 killed in mine and explosive accidents. Syria has become one of the worst countries in the world in terms …
Read More »Reject Nord Stream 2 Once and for All
Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma found himself in the company of a political titan, France’s President François Mitterrand, on a gloomy day in December 1994. “Young man, you will be tricked, one way or another,” Mitterrand told Mr. Kuchma, who was then the leader of a newly independent nation. Unsettled as …
Read More »Sino-Russian rapprochement and Greater Eurasia: From geopolitical pole to international society?
Can international anarchy be stabilized, if not globally, then at least regionally? Those scholars who give a positive answer usually refer to the North Atlantic community which can be categorized as an international society from the viewpoint of the English school. The emergence of such a community outside the West …
Read More »A Chance to Stop Syria and Russia From Using Chemical Weapons
Moscow and Damascus have evaded all accountability, but Biden can build a coalition to change that. The battle for the future of nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction is underway within an obscure but important international organization based in The Hague. The looming showdown at the Organisation for the Prohibition …
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