President Donald Trump’s controversial interactions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky must not distract attention from the important question of U.S. policy toward Russia in connection with its war in Ukraine — especially as Zelensky and key European leaders send disturbing signals that they want to appease Russia’s Vladimir Putin in hopes of ending the war. …
Continue reading “US should support, but also prod, Ukraine”
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 …
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. This budding hegemony …
“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 …
After President John F. Kennedy was humiliated at the Bay of Pigs in April of 1961 and bullied by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at their Vienna summit that June, Khrushchev concluded that Kennedy was weak and ineffectual. Consequently, he decided a year later that he could tilt the geopolitical balance of power by installing nuclear …
In the 1990s, Western liberalism’s triumph seemed inevitable. The Soviet empire had disintegrated. Francis Fukuyama had proclaimed the “end of history.” By the end of the decade, the U.S. economy was surging, fueling higher living standards at every income level. More and more countries were seeking to establish the liberal political and economic systems that …
President Donald Trump’s unnerving failure to distinguish the free and democratic nation he leads from the autocratic and menacing Russia of strongman President Vladimir Putin has generated two notable sets of concerns – but the implications of Trump’s rhetorical excesses expand far beyond current story lines. “There are a lot of killers,” Trump replied when …