James Mattis is considering arming Ukraine—a strategy that’s sure to backfire. Arming Ukraine has always been a bad idea. It was a bad idea when it was first proposed by the Brookings Institution in early 2015 and it’s a bad idea now that Defense Secretary James Mattis is reviving it. It was a bad idea under Barack…
Since Willy Brandt made Egon Bahr’s “Ostpolitik” official government policy in 1969, Germany’s leaders have been divided. Some want closer ties to Washington, and others demand a common European home with Russia. As voters prepare for the polls, the debate has kicked off again. Over in Berlin, they’ve been enduring an election campaign so tedious…
It was famously dubbed the European power keg, a term deemed appropriate by such strategists as German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Such figures feared the imminent release of violence in the Balkans, the sort that just might unravel the grand European plan for armed stability at the start of the Twentieth Century. A light, a…
Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama wanted Islamabad to be more assertive against terrorist groups too. While there are a lot of missing pages in President Donald Trump’s new policy on Afghanistan (how many U.S. troops will be deployed; how much will this all cost; what conditions does he expect the Afghan government to…
The Kurdish-led “Syrian Democratic Forces” recently announced that the US has a strategy for military, economic, and political influence in northern Syria for decades to come. The US of course denied the implication that it was planning to occupy this strategically positioned territory, though one would do well to remember that it already has 10…
Beijing has said it will not allow war or chaos on the Korean Peninsula, as two US B-1B bombers conducted a new flight in the area, joined by South Korean and Japanese fighter jets in a show of force amid mounting tensions. The statement was made by defense ministry spokesman Ren Guoqiang at a monthly news briefing…
