Column Archive

Italy’s elections on Sunday refocused global attention on the challenges facing the European Union, as populist, euroskeptic parties combined to win a majority of votes. But a less-noticed scandal over a bureaucratic appointment in Brussels might offer a better explanation of just what is driving the voter backlash against the union. So far the scandal has barely registered a blip on the radar for anyone besides close EU-watchers, but it is in many ways emblematic of everything Brussels’ critics say is wrong with the bloc. It revolves around Martin Selmayr, the former chief of staff to European Commission President Jean-Claude […]

Security assistance is a longstanding American tool to build up cooperation with key countries, including regional heavyweights like Egypt, Nigeria and Pakistan, where security deficits have consequences for the United States. But security cooperation often requires bureaucratic agility and a true convergence of interests between the sender and receiver. Both elements have been in short supply recently, and new efforts to reform the enterprise seem unlikely to transform these difficult partnerships. In the past few weeks, Trump administration officials have engaged in several public dialogues about efforts to improve the suite of government-funded programs called security sector assistance. As with […]

If peacemakers want to have any chance of ending today’s wars, they must learn to think like cold-blooded killers. From Syria to Myanmar, armed forces are pursuing unrelenting military campaigns and indiscriminately punishing civilians in their search for victory. Over the past week, Syrian troops and their allies have kept up intense pressure on the rebel enclave of eastern Ghouta despite a chorus of international condemnation. Although the government forces have allowed a small amount of aid into Ghouta, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has promised to keep up the offensive. Having pressed previous sieges, like that of Aleppo in late […]

In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner—both former senior officials in the Obama administration—noted that over the past 45 years, “neither carrots nor sticks have swayed China as predicted.” From Richard Nixon on, American presidents believed that U.S. diplomacy and military power could “persuade Beijing that it was neither possible nor necessary to challenge the U.S.-led security order in Asia.” But that didn’t prove true. Today, as Campbell and Ratner note, “China is on the path to becoming a military peer the likes of which the United States has not seen since the Soviet Union” […]

Now that the self-proclaimed Islamic State is mostly uprooted in Syria, observers are wondering what the next stage in Syria’s complicated war will bring. The post-ISIS phase conjures a series of possible scenarios, including dangerous escalation and a much larger internationalization of the conflict, as seen in recent weeks with Turkey’s campaign against the Kurds, an American strike on reported Russian mercenaries attacking U.S.-backed forces, and Israel’s skirmish with Iran—all on Syrian soil. But there’s another area where the reverberations from the war in Syria have the potential to explode. Tensions between Lebanon and Israel are simmering, and all the […]