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...
Foreign Policy
Praying For a Christmas Truce in Ukraine
by Ted Snider | Dec 24, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, History
On December 11, Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban, as one of the last things he would do at the end of his term as the European Union’s rotating president, said he had proposed a Christmas truce between Ukraine and Russia. "At the end of the Hungarian EU...
America’s Origins of Russophobia
by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Dec 18, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy
For those that grew up in the United States in the 1990s and 2000s, the explosion of Russophobia over the past decade likely came as something of a surprise. A brief survey of the history of Russophobia, however, reveals that the decade and a half after the end of the...
Washington’s Long Flirtation with Syria’s Islamist Extremists
by Ted Galen Carpenter | Dec 18, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy
The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian government in late November and early December 2024 occurred with stunning speed. There was little question that Joe Biden’s administration and several U.S. allies, especially Turkey, were pleased with the outcome. Washington...
Syria Proves Tolstoy Right
by Brad Pearce | Dec 17, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy
The sudden collapse of the Syrian Arab Republic is one of the most inexplicable political events of the modern era. Though the regime was structurally unsound from over a decade of war and severe sanctions, by all accounts Bashar al'Assad's government had more or less...
The Hypocrisy of Bombing Iran
by Ted Snider | Dec 17, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy
President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly expressed concern that Iran could develop a nuclear bomb on his watch. In considering his options to prevent that, The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump is considering airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. Being...
The Long Train of Abuses that Culminated in the Ukraine War
by Carus Michaelangelo | Dec 16, 2024 | Book Reviews, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy
“A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing.” Scott Horton is the liberty movement’s foreign policy hedgehog, endeavoring to convince the American public of one essential truth: the folly of war. But within that sphere, Horton is a fox, weaving an...
To Help Syria, America Must Walk Away
by Lora Karch | Dec 11, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy
The short-lived Assad dynasty has a complex history that ironically came to power by participating in a series of coups that ultimately established the family’s leadership in 1971. Bashar’s father, Hafez, was a key player in the 1963 Syrian Coup d’Etat that brought...