Moscow detains nearly 1,400 protesters after a bloody crackdown and returns its most prominent opposition figure to jail after what he suspects was a state-ordered poisoning that put him in the hospital. Beijing hints that it will send its army to quell protests against Hong Kong’s China-backed government. For all their outward self-confidence, the governments …
Continue reading “With autocrats on defensive, US has opportunity”
In Latin America, a U.S. retreat that began under President Barack Obama has accelerated under President Donald Trump, creating a vacuum that China, Russia, and Iran are moving to fill. The most fruitful opportunity for those U.S. adversaries lies in the socialism-ravaged state of Venezuela, where each of them is jockeying for position, but opportunities …
Continue reading “China, Russia, Iran rise in Latin America as US retreats”
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 …
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 …
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 …
John Kennedy once said that “it is the president alone who must make the major decisions of our foreign policy,” and I have long thought he was right because, at moments of national peril, our presidents can’t as a practical matter share the conduct of foreign policy with a body like Congress. FDR couldn’t lead …
“I can assure you,” Wendy Sherman, President Barack Obama’s lead negotiator on the Iran nuclear deal, said the other day, “that if Iran takes truly horrific terrorist action, or truly horrific human rights action, that people will respond.” Uh huh. Sherman’s comments, which she made during a May 25 event at the Center for Strategic …