Articles

With threats from Russia and North Korea, NATO must have a real debate on the role of nuclear weapons in the defense of Europe.

Those who support the Obama administration's landmark nuclear deal with Iran are nervous, and for good reason. In his Sept. 19 address to the United Nations General Assembly, President Trump gave what was perhaps the clearest signal to date that he has no plans to recertify the agreement (formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) next month, as mandated by Congress.

Favoring Armenia pushes Azerbaijan into Russia's arms

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un seems bent on making it easier for the United States to go to war. If he draws first blood, it may be the last thing he ever does.

On Monday, North Korea's foreign minister Ri Yong Ho said that his country has "every right to make countermeasures, including the right to shoot down United States strategic bombers even when they are not inside the airspace border of our country." Pyongyang has reportedly moved interceptor aircraft closer to the flight path of U.S. bombers that have been patrolling North Korea's periphery. Ri said that attacking U.S. forces was legal since "it was the U.S. who first declared war on our country," apparently referring to statements from President Donald Trump.

In Sunday's national elections in Germany, Angela Merkel presided over a major political failure for her party and her country. Yes, Merkel will remain chancellor for a fourth term, probably in a fragile three-party coalition. However, a historic mission of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has been to prevent the emergence of a viable political party on the far right at the national level. Chancellors and CDU leaders from Konrad Adenauer through Helmut Kohl understood this mission and fulfilled it. Merkel has failed, largely due to her pursuit of an ever-larger political center through coopting leftist policies and programs. She thus left ample space on the right for the new Alternative for Germany (AfD) which gained 13 percent of the vote on Sunday.

America's energy transformation over the past decade has prompted the Trump administration to call for an age of American energy dominance.

What shapes Russia's calculus in the Syrian theater? Since its formal decision to intervene in the Syrian civil war in September 2015, the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin has become a guarantor of the stability of the Assad regime, as well as a key power broker in any conceivable solution to the ongoing crisis. Yet, two years on, Moscow's motivations for its continued presence in Syria are still not well understood by most observers, either in the Middle East or in the West.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results, then the United Nations has gone 'round the bend.

On Monday, the U.N. Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 2375, which imposed fresh sanctions on North Korea in response to that country's September 3 nuclear test. President Trump, who had pushed for much starker sanctions, called the resolution "not a big deal."

The western Asian nation of Iran is on the cusp of expanding its reach all the way to the Mediterranean Sea and Israel's northern border - a drive that will make its nuclear pursuit, ballistic missile development and terror sponsorship that much more dangerous to the United States and its regional allies.

An odd partnership is taking shape in the Middle East, where Iran and Turkey - two countries that have historically been strategic competitors - are suddenly making common cause.

The old saying goes that it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you. So if you are North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, taking extraordinary steps to ensure your personal security is not crazy, it's simply common sense.

President Trump's prime time address on Monday did more than simply chart a new course for America's military engagement in Afghanistan. It also marked a fresh approach to one of the most intractable problems that has confronted the United States since the start of the "war on terror": the duplicitous and dangerous role played by the nation of Pakistan.

When President Donald Trump threatened "fire and fury" in response to potential nuclear aggression from North Korea, the world held its collective breath. But a week later, the brewing calamity had abated, in large part due to the Trump administration's no-nonsense style of crisis management.

Today, the fight against the Islamic State terrorist group has become a top strategic priority of the United States and its allies in the region. In turn, the efforts of Washington and Middle Eastern partners have begun to pay real dividends, with recent months seeing a significant rollback the group's self-declared "caliphate" in Iraq and Syria. But lurking in the background of the current counterterrorism fight is another, and potentially even more significant, long-term threat.

Although it has come at enormous human and financial cost, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine that has raged in the latter's eastern territories since 2014 has helped spark a fundamental transformation of the Ukrainian military. The country now boasts the second-largest standing army in Europe (behind that of Russia), while a newfound sense of national unity - together with new training and greater readiness - has forged an increasingly capable fighting force. Nevertheless, at least one notable weak spot in Ukraine's current military posture remains.

In January 2009, Eastern Europeans were rudely reminded of a very blunt fact: If Russia wants to shut off the gas, it can.

Angered by backlogged debts, Gazprom, Russia's massive state petroleum and natural gas corporation, cut off its supply of gas to neighboring Ukraine - and, through it, to parts of the European Union. For weeks in the dead of winter, millions of Europeans were stranded without power, as Gazprom and its Ukrainian counterpart Naftogaz blamed one another for the crisis. While the flow of gas eventually resumed, European governments emerged from the experience shaken, and for good reason.

Something is stirring across the vast expanse encompassing the Caucasus and Central Asia, an area of nearly 1.6 million square miles and more than 86 million people. Throughout the region, political momentum is gathering for deeper cooperation, engagement, and coordination.

Pakistan has a long and troubled history of supporting extremists as a tool of statecraft - a policy that has, among many other things, inflamed tensions with regional rival India and roiled Islamabad's relations with Washington. Of late, however, this strategy of supporting proxies to maintain a zone of influence in the region has turned inward, with grievous consequences for the country's internal security and the cohesion of the Pakistani state itself.

Climate change has historically been a controversial topic, and former President Barack Obama was sharply criticized for addressing it during his time in office. However, the issue may be losing some of its political toxicity of late. More and more professionals and politicians on both sides of the aisle have begun speaking openly about the linkage between the environment and America's national security.

Last Friday marked the two-year anniversary of the Obama administration's signature foreign policy achievement: the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. Formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, that agreement was intended as a solution to Iran's persistent nuclear ambitions, and as a vehicle to reboot the Iranian regime's relationship with the world.