While on the campaign trail, Donald Trump promised he could end the war in Ukraine within twenty-four hours of being elected and before he even arrives in office. Peace has proven more difficult. Blame has frequently shifted from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to Russian President Vladimir Putin and back. But as a settlement has become more and more elusive, blame has begun to fall on more unusual suspects. At the end of August, Axios reported that “[s]ome U.S. officials have begun to see European leaders as a major obstacle.” While the United States and Europe have been partners in...

By President Donald Trump’s transactional criterion, NATO has been a costly failure that needs fixing or needs to be cut lose. Europe has failed to pay the price and has left the United States with the financial and military burden of defending Europe. The war in Ukraine has proven the point. But that was never the point of NATO. The point of NATO was never economic nor transactional. The point of NATO was, in large part, to keep Europe militarily coordinated with, dependent on and subordinate to the United States. The point wasn’t to extricate the U.S. from Europe, it was, as Lord Ismay,...

U.S. tariffs wear the cloak of financial policy to address trade imbalances, but they mask deeper geopolitical ambitions. That strategy may backfire. The pressure of U.S. tariffs is firming up the multipolar world it is meant to prevent. Pressure from sanctions has already fused Iran even tighter with Russia and Saudi Arabia. It is now, stunningly, contributing to the birth of relations with Egypt, a Middle Eastern power with whom Iran has had broken relations since 1979. In 2024, Iran and Egypt both became members of BRICS, a large and growing international organization whose primary...

The war with Russia is going very badly for Ukraine. At the beginning of July, the Russian armed forces took full control of the Luhansk region for the first time. And, though it is too early to tell if they will hold it, there are now unconfirmed reports that the Ukrainian front line defending Pokrovsk has collapsed and that the Russian army has broken through, rapidly advancing 6-10 kilometers and cutting Ukraine’s supply lines. There are now even unconfirmed reports that Russian forces have entered Pokrovsk, which, if true, is a severe strategic setback for Ukraine. But Ukrainians must...

U.S. President Donald Trump has consistently insisted that the war in Ukraine “is not Trump’s war. This is a Biden war, this is a Democrat war.” But on July 14, it started to look a lot like Trump’s war, as the president announced “billions and billions” of dollars of American military equipment to be sent to Ukraine along with “severe tariffs” to be applied to any country who buys oil from Russia if a peace deal is not reached in fifty days. But that appearance may be illusory, and the new weapons deal may be a deception. From one perspective, Trump’s reversal may be celebrated in Ukraine...

“I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal. I told them, in the strongest of words, to ‘just do it,’ but no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn’t get it done…Certain Iranian hardliner’s spoke bravely, but they didn’t know what was about to happen. They are all DEAD now, and it will only get worse!” President Donald Trump made this post on the morning that Israel struck Iran. Expressing the belief that the devastating attacks on Iran would weaken Iran’s hardliners and push them to capitulate to American terms and sign a nuclear deal, Trump said,...

On May 16, Russia and Ukraine held their first direct talks since the first months of the former's invasion. Despite the pessimistic evaluation by Ukrainian and European leaders, the return to diplomacy is itself a major achievement and step forward. The talks lasted an hour and forty minutes. Western leaders and Western media have given the first round of talks a failing grade. They have dismissed it for three reasons. They claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin first suggested direct negotiations and then did not show. They claim that he sent an insultingly low-level delegation. And...