Donald Trump is president today because he was seen as a doer not a talker. Among the most common compliments paid him in 2016 was, “At least he gets things done!” And it was exasperation with a dithering GOP Congress, which had failed to enact his or its own agenda, that caused Trump to pull…
It is amazing yet somehow impressive how Washington manages in such a convoluted fashion to make so many countries irritated and resentful. There’s an art in it, really. Take the case of Turkey, Pakistan and pilot training. Following an attempted coup in Turkey last year its air force ran short of pilots, which wasn’t surprising…
The message from the two-day Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) conference, which concluded in Vladivostok on Thursday, is that Russia’s “pivot to Asia” in recent years, in the downstream of Western sanctions against it, has become a core vector of its foreign policies. The EEF began modestly in 2015 with the agenda of showcasing the “new reality”…
In the days since President Trump came down hard on Pakistan in his speech outlining America’s new Afghanistan strategy, the reaction in Islamabad—and elsewhere across the country—has been predictably angry and defiant. Pakistan’s National Security Committee, a group of top government and military officials, rejected Trump’s allegations—ones also made by many American leaders before him—that…
In the first part of this essay, I gave my interpretation of the background of the current confrontation in Korea. I argued that, while the past is the mother of the present, it has several fathers. What I remember is not necessarily what you remember; so, in this sense, the present also shapes or reshapes…
One of the most prominent political events of recent days was President Donald Trump’s address on the United States Policy on Afghanistan, which took place at Fort Myer on August 21 this year. The overall attention to the main points of this statement is understandable. For the first time in his first six months in…
