Trump First, America Alone

The embarrassing spectacle of recent days, with President Donald Trump splitting with his intelligence agencies and a broad bipartisan consensus in Washington to deny that Moscow meddled in the 2016 presidential election, encapsulates an unprecedented array of problems in the making of U.S. foreign policy. They leave the United States in its most precarious place …

A Time to Celebrate Israel

“His Majesty’s Government,” British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour wrote a century ago in a 67-word paragraph that changed the course of history, “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object.” The 100-year anniversary …

A Setback for Peace Prospects

Perhaps United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who called Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to congratulate him on the new unity deal between Abbas’ Fatah Party and the terrorist group Hamas, simply didn’t know what Hamas had said about it a day earlier. The deal was important, said Saleh al-Arouri, Hamas’ deputy political leader and …

Defending the Indefensible

Like an all-too-proud father rejecting a teacher’s legitimate criticism of his child, former Secretary of State John Kerry is defending the U.S.-led global nuclear agreement with Iran that he engineered from the legitimate concerns of Iran-watchers in the Trump administration, Congress and the private sector. President Donald Trump and his top foreign policy advisers are …

Trump’s Big North Korea Decision

President Donald Trump’s dismissive comments about the new United Nations Security Council sanctions against North Korea, contrasting sharply with the boasts of his State Department, reflect the harsh reality that a sanctions-driven approach to reversing Pyongyang’s nuclear progress seems increasingly problematic. That means that Washington is nearing a sobering decision: whether to “contain” a nuclear-armed …

What McCain Means to the Liberal Order

“There is no moral equivalence,” an angry John McCain told the Senate in February, referring to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, “between that butcher and thug and KGB colonel and the United States of America, the country that Ronald Reagan used to call a shining city on a hill.” To “allege some kind of moral equivalence between …