Articles

Since Vladimir Putin launched his war against Ukraine back in February, speculation has run rampant about the Russian president's objectives. While objectives change in the course of any war, Mr. Putin himself has admitted that the invasion of Crimea was a strategic decision that, therefore, had strategic objectives in mind. Those objectives also relate to the current fighting in the Donbas region (encompassing Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk provinces). As such, Russia's conduct repudiates the speculation in Washington that Russia's Ukraine policy is something of an improvisation. Rather, U.S. policymakers would be well-served in trying to figure out the factors driving Mr. Putin's decision-making, both at home and abroad.

America's discussion about missile defense tends to be a one-sided conversation. More often than not, it revolves around what capabilities the United States has fielded to date, and what it plans to provide to its allies overseas. But in the not-too-distant future, the United States might be able to count on a new voice in the missile-defense debate, as political and intellectual shifts progressively nudge Canada into alignment on the need to defend North America against ballistic-missile attack.

This month, the OnCue Express gas station in Oklahoma City lowered its price for a gallon of regular gas to $1.99.

Nationwide, the average price is $2.41 per gallon, down from a high of $3.70 the end of April. Gas prices are the lowest they have been in five years and are expected to decline further, following the $50 collapse in oil prices since this summer.

As talks between U.S.-led global negotiators and Iran over its nuclear program resume this week in Geneva, the most welcome shift on the Iranian nuclear front may be occurring thousands of miles away in Washington.

Ukraine suffers more afflictions than Job. Most Western attention focuses on responding to the military confrontation with Russia and then on the economic and political consequences of two decades of oligarchic misrule. However, Ukraine also inherited at independence a genuine crisis in health and demographics, the product of catastrophic policies of the Soviet era compounded by the continuing stress of the post-Soviet transition.