Foreign Affairs

The Weakness of the Strongmen

Not long ago in the sweep of history, countries that had once been buried behind the Iron Curtain, and even some Soviet republics, were transformed into members of the solidly democratic club. Some of those that weren’t, such as Ukraine, Georgia, and...

A Grand Strategy of Reciprocity

The United States has pursued two grand strategies in the 80 years since World War II. One was an extraordinary success: the policy of “containment” that guided American economic investments, foreign relations, and military deployments during the Cold...

Iran After the War China's Looming Succession Crisis America's Losing Cyber Strategy

Dispensable Nation

President Donald Trump’s rise to power and enduring political appeal have been fueled in part by his depiction of the United States as a failure: exhausted, weak, and ruined. In a characteristic act of self-contradiction, however, his foreign policy is...

The Rise and Fall of Great-Power Competition

“After being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century, great power competition returned.” So declared the National Security Strategy that President Donald Trump released in 2017, capturing in a single line the story that American foreign...

The Center Will Not Hold

e Strange Triumph of a Broken America

WILL TRUMP CHANGE THE WORLD?

Battles of Precise Mass

At the beginning of the war in Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainian forces deployed a handful of Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 Rusn- uncrewed aerial vehicles to hit sian targets.Those precise drone strikes were a sign of things to come. More than two years into the...

The Perils of Isolationism

In times of uncertainty, people reach for historical analogies. After 9/11, George W. Bush administration officials invoked Pearl Harbor as a standard comparison in processing the intelligence failure that led to the attack. Secretary of State Colin...

Sleepwalking Toward War

In The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914, the British historian Paul Kennedy explained how two traditionally friendly peoples ended up in a downward spiral of mutual hostility that led to World War I. Major structural forces drove the...