Barely four years after the Pretoria Agreement formally ended one of the deadliest wars of the twenty-first century, serious fighting has returned to northern Ethiopia. As we begin October, Tigrayan forces have seized the airports at Mekelle, Aksum, and Shire,...
On September 17, Julian Assange’s return to Twitter/X did not go unnoticed. With more than fifty-one million impressions, it becomes clear his and WikiLeaks’ impact is undeniable. Still, his journalism and WikiLeaks have not come without scrutiny. Former Republican...
On September 10, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky landed in Canada where he and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney signed a 100-year partnership “elevat[ing] the relationship between their countries into a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and confirming...
Populism trades long-term institutional stability for the short-term high of mob rule, eroding the rule of law to feed its own ego. By reducing complex social realities into a toxic divide of "us versus them," it turns democratic governance into a zero-sum war. When...
The 1998 action thriller Enemy of the State (RIP Gene Hackman) imagined a world in which government surveillance could follow an ordinary citizen almost anywhere, drawing on cameras, communications data, and increasingly sophisticated technology to monitor his...
The same campaign that’s reportedly weakening Iran is also indirectly strengthening China’s economic and strategic position in the Middle East. Israel and the United States’ efforts to eliminate the late Ayatollah’s counterparts have widened a lane for China to exert...
The New York Times Magazine recently published an essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the "brains" behind the 1619 Project, titled, "By Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own." It has become the discourse du jour for a variety of reasons, particularly that this...
U.S. President Donald Trump sat beside Finnish President Alexander Stubb in the Oval Office on October 9, 2025, and turned a meeting about icebreakers into a lecture about Spain. "You people are gonna have to start speaking to Spain," Trump said. "You have to call...
When President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in Beijing this past May, the outcome was largely as anticipated: ceremonial pomp, a handful of commercial commitments, rhetorical emphasis on “stability,” and little progress on the structural frictions...
Located in Northeast Africa, Sudan receives relatively little attention in discussions of global geopolitics. This is despite the country being embroiled in a devastating civil war between Sudan’s army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) since 2023. With potentially...
President Donald Trump signaled that he is entitled to raze the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts if he is not permitted to add his name to the building’s front wall. Trump’s appointees to the center’s board of trustees rubber-stamped adding the president's name...
Editor's Note: The following letter was received by the Institute from Dr. Michael K. Launer, Emeritus Professor of Russian at Florida State University and is published with his permission. This is a brief response to Ted Snider’s September 8, 2026 article, "All...
One of the enduring mysteries of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing case is the little-known but well-documented and indisputable fact that Timothy McVeigh and the “others unknown” involved in the bombing used two different Ryder trucks in the later stages of the bombing...
The United Arab Emirates spent eight years and a fortune trying to own a stretch of water. It bought proxies, seized islands, built runways and naval bases along both banks of the Bab el-Mandeb, and sold the whole program to Washington as the wall that would keep Iran...
U.S. Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) was born in 1986 in Newark and has lived there ever since. She grew up in a public high rise with three younger siblings and a mother who struggled with substance abuse. She looked instead for guidance to her fifth grade...
On January 22, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld stepped behind the podium at the Foreign Press Center in Washington and, with one answer to a Dutch public television reporter, redrew the map of Europe. The reporter wanted to know why so many Europeans trusted Saddam Hussein more...
The 55th Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting, held in Koror, Palau, from August 31 to September 3, offered a revealing window into the limits of an increasingly ambitious external security agenda in the Pacific. The immediate subject was Australia’s expanding...
The war in the Middle East keeps getting worse for President Donald Trump. The campaign to defeat Iran and establish a new order in the Middle East that left Tehran’s allies marginalized has imploded spectacularly. Not only is Iran still fighting, but it has also...
