Foreign Affairs

The real question now facing Iraq is how Iran will choose to respond to Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA.

Trump should think strategically about the motivations of all the summit’s key players: North Korea, China, South Korea, Japan, and Russia. What is it that they really want?

The real question is not whether Europeans are pissed off but whether they will do anything in response to Trump’s actions. The answer is most likely no.

The United States is failing to win its war on terrorism because al Qaeda and the Islamic State represent only a fraction of the real enemy: a global movement, unified by an ideology—Salafi jihadism—that exists outside of al Qaeda or the Islamic State.

For nearly a decade, the nuclear question has crowded out serious deliberations over a broader policy toward Iran.

Trump is raising uncertainty and degrading America's international authority on economic policy.

With the war in Afghanistan now in its 17th year, the U.S. military is engaged in the longest stretch of armed conflict in its history. And yet its leaders are keeping the American public in the dark about its operations around the world, while seeking to obscure what little information is available.

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At the height of World War II, Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine, argued that the United States had amassed such wealth and power that the twentieth century would come to be known simply as “the American Century.” His prediction proved prescient: despite being challenged for supremacy by Nazi Germany and, later, the Soviet Union, the United States prevailed against its adversaries. By the turn of the millennium, its position as the most powerful and influential state in the world appeared unimpeachable. As a result, the twentieth century was marked by the dominance not just of a particular country but also of the political system it helped spread: liberal democracy. 

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Western democracies are in trouble, grappling with rising inequality, lost confidence in government, fraying social fabrics, and intense political divides.

To have any chance of success, U.S. strategy toward North Korea must be guided by an accurate sense of how Kim’s regime thinks and what it knows about Washington. Failure to do so could lead the United States to stumble into the worst conflict since World War II.

In 2001, the reality was that there was really no better alternative than to let China join the WTO.

For about four years now, since Russia’s occupation of Crimea and China’s launch of the Belt and Road Initiative, there has been much speculation about whether another Cold War between East and West is coming. In the last month alone, headlines have proclaimed that “The New Cold War Is Here,” heralded “Putin’s New Cold War,” and warned that “Trump Is Preparing for a New Cold War.” But are we really returning to the past? Contemporary politics is full of false analogies, and the return of the Cold War seems to be one of them.

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The Trump administration must ground its summit diplomacy and overall approach to North Korea in a strategy of comprehensive coercion that clearly defines U.S. objectives, leverages Washington’s most effective diplomatic and military tools, and aligns its Korea policy with the broader U.S. strategy in Asia.

A healthy combination of strong political will in Washington and American leadership abroad can parry China’s unfair advantages without doing significant collateral damage in the process.

Putin and authoritarian leaders in his position have three primary options for succession.

Australia is pushing back against a campaign of political interference orchestrated by China.

Trump is not so much abandoning American exceptionalism as he is tapping into an earlier incarnation of it. As a grand strategy, this effort will not succeed, but its appeal has revealed the need for a new narrative to steer U.S. foreign policy.

Revealing official secrets and lies involves a form of moral risk-taking. And drawing the line between the right and wrong kinds of disclosures has grown harder than ever in the Trump era.