Column Archive

Editor’s note: Ellen Laipson’s Measured Response column will return next week. For how long will Vladimir Putin be a decisive figure at the United Nations? The Russian president has rarely visited Turtle Bay. But his unique mix of diplomatic aggression and agility has profoundly affected the institution over the past five years. Putin has used Russia’s veto in the Security Council to set the terms of debate over Syria and Ukraine. Moscow has also pointedly complicated Western initiatives to deal with crises in places where Russia has few deep interests, like Sudan and Burundi. Yet Russia has also been adept […]

Last weekend, a U.S. military drone killed Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, as he drove home from Iran to Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. This was a bold action, marking the first time an American drone strike had been ordered in the Taliban’s home base, rather than in Pakistan’s tribal areas that border Afghanistan. It may not signal yet another new U.S. strategy for the war in Afghanistan, but it is a significant tactical and political shift, recognition that as the Obama administration winds down, trends in the country are not good. As Dan De Luce and John […]

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka—The scars of Sri Lanka’s 26-year-long civil war remain plainly visible in the country’s north, where ethnic Tamils make up the vast majority of the population. Abandoned colonial mansions riddled with bullets stand as testament to the long war and the devastation it wrought on the region. More than half a decade after the fighting ended, despite a noticeable influx of investment from exiled Tamils, much needs to be done before the conflict between the Sinhalese-dominated state and the Tamil minority can finally be relegated to the pages of history, allowing Sri Lanka to work toward a prosperous […]

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has done it again. It seemed like only yesterday that he was claiming Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews until he was convinced to do so by the grand mufti of Jerusalem; that he was race-baiting Israeli Arabs to win re-election; that he was sticking his finger in the eye of the U.S. president—the leader of Israel’s closest ally—over the Iran nuclear deal. But with Netanyahu, there’s always some new provocation. This month, he struck at the very heart of the civilian-military relationship in Israel, in the process showing once again that there is […]

One of the latest mini-dramas in Washington’s overheated political scene is centered on whether the Obama administration manipulated the truth about the Iran nuclear negotiations in order to sell the resulting deal to Congress and the American public. The larger story is about how the earnest citizen can navigate in a world where officials, experts and journalists are engaged in a complicated exchange of information, spin and advocacy. It’s not necessarily a new problem, nor a fixable one, but it only deepens the mistrust between government and the governed. The controversy was kicked off by a recent New York Times […]

Who can do the best job of fighting terrorists in Africa? Islamist extremist groups such as al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, Somalia’s al-Shabab and northern Nigeria’s Boko Haram are garnering increasingly intense international attention. Last week, the U.S Army chief of staff was in Tanzania to discuss the threat with his African counterparts. In the meantime, United Nations Security Council ambassadors were visiting Somalia, while Western and Arab foreign ministers met in Vienna to discuss Libya, where the self-declared Islamic State has a foothold. Also last week, the Nigerian government claimed a symbolic victory when it announced that it had […]

In 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama campaigned for president promising to extricate the United States from its grinding wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. His administration, Obama hoped, would be known for domestic programs rather than war-fighting. Unfortunately America’s adversaries had different intentions. Obama has now been at war longer than any other U.S. president. A case can be made that America’s ongoing military involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere does not constitute “war” in the constitutional and strategic senses of the word. But it is clear that armed strife is the new normal, not an episodic aberration as […]

For all its current brutality and intractability, the war in Syria, like all wars, will one day come to an end. In pondering over what the Middle East will look like when that day comes, it is worth considering how the war will have changed Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia and political organization. Last week Hezbollah’sMustafa Badreddine was killed in Syria.Badreddine was not just an ordinary fighter for the group. He was responsible for some of Hezbollah’s most spectacular attacks over the years, including the 1983 U.S. Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, along with other hotel, embassy and airline bombings. […]

In the fall of 1967, when then-President Lyndon Johnson looked out from his increasingly isolated perch at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the signs of discontent and anger about the war in Vietnam were increasingly evident. A majority of the country negatively viewed his handling of the war, and for the first time since the U.S. intervention in Vietnam had begun, Gallup found that a majority of Americans believed the war was a mistake. On Johnson’s political left, anger over the war had reached a boiling point. In October, 100,000 anti-war demonstrators marched on the Pentagon in the largest anti-war protest in […]

This month marks the centenary of the Sykes-Picot treaty, a French-English agreement to establish areas of control and influence in the Arab lands of the Middle East after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The milestone has stirred up resentments and a sense that the flailing states of the region never really existed as coherent geographic entities. But changing borders is not easy, and even if one could draw a better map of the Middle East, it would not solve its deepest sources of distress. Much is being said about the 100th anniversary of the Sykes-Picot agreement, a minor event […]

Decision-makers rarely solve international tensions once and for all. They cobble together temporary fixes and leave future generations to iron out all the glitches later. Europe’s leaders are currently paying the price for their forebears’ failure to establish a durable order in Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, the U.S. and its allies appeared to have a unique opening to forge a lasting settlement to the continent’s security problems. There was no lack of ideas about to how to do this. Some argued that NATO should expand to cover the old Warsaw Pact, perhaps including […]

There has been a distinct pattern to America’s time as a global power: Whenever the United States becomes involved in a conflict, it quickly draws lessons that set the trajectory for the next conflict or problem. American strategy truly is iterative, with the recent past paving the way for future action. This means that getting the lessons right, or at least as right as possible, is a vital part of strategy-making. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, the lessons of Vietnam haunted policymakers and framed public debate over America’s role in the world. This led the U.S. military to […]

When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his campaign to prevent Ukraine from drawing closer to the European Union in 2014, his strategic objectives went beyond that Eastern European country’s borders. To be sure, Russia was concerned about Ukraine’s political and economic drift toward the West. But Moscow’s warnings to Kiev, which were followed by military action, were also meant as a signal to other countries that might have contemplated following in Ukraine’s steps. The message was aimed at what used to be a clearly demarcated sphere of influence, serving as a threat to any country that was once part of […]

A profile in The New York Times Magazine of Ben Rhodes, the Obama administration’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, has been the focus of attention in U.S. foreign policy and media circles since it appeared last week. There’s a lot of ground to cover in giving the article a critical reading, and little of it reflects positively on the author, David Samuels—or on the Obama administration, if not quite for the reasons Samuels claims. In a nutshell, Samuels uses what is ostensibly a profile of Rhodes, who is President Barack Obama’s speechwriter as well as one of his […]

The ouster of Ahmet Davutoglu as prime minister of Turkey is an internal matter. But it will almost certainly have negative repercussions for the hard-fought and controversial deal between Turkey and the European Union, by which Brussels agreed to compensate Ankara for helping to stem the flow of refugees and migrants to Europe. It’s the latest of several cases where domestic political dramas have affected the foreign policy interests of important middle powers. Last week, a long-simmering power struggle between Davutoglu and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to a boil. Erdogan had recently cajoled or convinced others in his […]

It is time for the United Nations to start thinking seriously about Donald Trump, for the simple reason that Trump is thinking seriously about the United Nations. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee told the New York Times last week that he has been mulling some potential U.N. ambassadors. Having electrified the GOP, he hopes to have an equally stunning impact on U.N. diplomacy. “The U.N. isn’t doing anything to end the big conflicts in the world,” he noted with his usual acuity, “so you need an ambassador who would win by really shaking up the U.N.” This is likely to […]

Two years ago the conflict between the self-styled Islamic State (ISIS) and the government of Iraq saw dramatic, unexpected shifts, as large swaths of territory and major cities changed hands. The battle lines moved back and forth. For a while it seemed that the extremists might march triumphantly into Baghdad. But then the Iraqi government and security forces regained their bearing and held on. Slowly the tide turned, at least a bit. Since then, anti-ISIS militias have grown stronger; U.S. air attacks have crippled the group; and the coalition fighting the movement has made strides in shutting down its access […]