On Ukraine, Biden needs to step up and make the case before it’s too late

As Europe’s fascists flexed their muscles in 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt cautioned: “Let no one imagine that America will escape; that America may expect mercy; that this Western Hemisphere will not be attacked; and that it will continue tranquilly and peacefully to carry on the ethics and the arts of civilization… There is a solidarity and …

US Needs More Holistic Response to Emerging Axis

With NATO’s latest gathering this week in Vilnius, Washington is understandably focused on what the United States and its allies should do next to help Ukraine rebuff Russia. Moscow’s invasion, however, is part of a larger, multi-nation challenge to which Washington has not yet developed a comprehensive response. That challenge is the axis of deepening …

Ukraine remains at heart of freedom’s future

“The global struggle for democracy approached a possible turning point in 2022,” Freedom House writes in its latest annual report on political rights and civil liberties around the world. “There were signs … that the world’s long freedom recession may be bottoming out, which would set the stage for a future recovery.” Freedom shrunk for the 17th straight …

Iran looks for signals of US resolve

“The Fuhrer beams,” Joseph Goebbels said of Hitler after Germany reoccupied the Rhineland in the spring of 1936 and the West did nothing. “England remains passive. France won’t act alone. Italy is disappointed and America uninterested.” As it turns out, Robert Kagan explains in “The Ghost at the Feast,” his new book about America’s global role between 1900 and …

High Time for the US to support Ukraine’s victory – and Russia’s defeat

President Biden’s surprise trip to Kyiv was gutsy, and he deserves credit for leading the West in an impressive military, diplomatic, and economic effort to isolate Moscow and help Ukraine rebuff Russia’s attempted conquest. One year into the war, however, Biden’s administration must discard its strategic ambiguity about U.S. war aims and make clear that, like Kyiv, …

Iran has good reasons to hang tough in nuke talks

Why won’t Iran cut a deal? Its regime has taken an uncompromising line in renewed talks over its nuclear program. Although that has left the United States and its allies bewildered and frustrated, the regime has solid reasons for doing so. After all, it is currently managing to weather the tough U.S. and global economic …

Will Russia’s Ukraine War Prompt An American Awakening On Iran?

President Joe Biden has revamped U.S. goals in Ukraine from de-escalation and negotiations to a Ukrainian victory and the “degrading” of Russia’s military, reflecting a long-overdue reappraisal of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his war aims. It is not the first time of late that Washington has come to see that conventional wisdom about a …