Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the United States has led an international campaign to shun and isolate Russian President Vladimir Putin. Former U.S. President Joe Biden did not talk to Putin once after the war began. That policy of isolation is now over. On February 12, U.S. President Donald Trump confirmed that he had a “lengthy and highly productive phone call” with Putin. But Trump did not just open the door a cautious crack. He flung it wide. He did not just agree to further phone calls, but that he would go to Moscow and Putin would come to Washington: “We agreed to work...

On January 6, Indonesia formally entered BRICS as a full member. It was an important geopolitical shift that went largely unreported and little discussed in the mainstream western media. BRICS is an international organization whose primary purpose is to balance U.S. hegemony in a new multipolar world. Its roots go back to 1996 and the emergence of the core group of Russia, India, and China (RIC). In 2009, along with Brazil, BRIC held its first summit. In 2010, South Africa joined, and BRICS was formed, making it, perhaps, the only major international body in which representatives of Africa...

A leaked document has given us a first glimpse at President Donald Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian online newspaper Strana, U.S. officials handed the plan to European diplomats who then passed it on to Ukraine. The existence of the plan has not been verified, and Andriy Yermak, head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, has said “no ‘100-day peace plan’ as reported by the media exists in reality.” If the plan is real, and if it is being put on the table by the Trump administration as a finished product that, if rejected, will lead to more sanctions on Russia...

There may be a battle looming, not just between the United States and Ukraine over the conscription of men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, but also within the Donald Trump administration. The call for Ukraine to cast a wider conscription net predates the Trump administration. Facing imminent loss on the battlefield after NATO had bankrupted its supply of weapons, demanding that Ukraine throw more men into battle emerged as the last grasp solution during the Joe Biden administration. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said, “In fact, we believe manpower is the most...

Before the first day of Donald Trump’s second term in office, he already had more diplomatic achievements than Joe Biden did on the last day of his. The entrance of the Trump team into the negotiations was the difference in Gaza. Biden opened his administration with the promise of “a new era of relentless diplomacy.” But after four years of wasted opportunity, the Biden administration would struggle to name a single diplomatic accomplishment. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s inclusion in his January 2 exit interview with The New York Times of the Biden administration’s “core goal” of...

The present severed from the past is easily misunderstood. In discussions of the Russia-Ukraine war, not enough is made of the historical fact that, at the end of the Cold War, the newly independent Ukraine promised not to join NATO, and NATO promised not to expand to Ukraine. Not enough is made of the fact that Article IX of the 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine, “External and Internal Security,” says that Ukraine “solemnly declares its intention of becoming a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs…” That promise was later enshrined in Ukraine’s...

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has recently taken to calling the outgoing Prime Minister of Canada the “Governor…of the Great State of Canada.” In past days, he has gone beyond the jocular tone that some Canadian ministers have insisted he had, citing quite specific reasons why Canada would benefit from annexation by the States. Canadians, he said, pay taxes that are “far too high.” Trump said that, if Canada “was to become our 51st State, their Taxes would be cut by more than 60%, their businesses would immediately double in size, and they would be militarily protected like no other...

Maybe Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), who is now the leader of Syria, really has changed. Maybe he has matured, as he told CNN, as if his years as an al-Qaeda terrorist leader were a youthful indiscretion. But the world cannot simply take the pragmatic rebel at his word. On December 8, after Bashar al-Asaad fell and Jolani took over control of Syria, U.S. President Joe Biden said, “We’ve taken note of statements by the leaders of these rebel groups in recent days and they’re saying the right things now. But as they take on greater responsibility, we will...