Intelligence officers sometimes talk about “blowback,” when covert actions go bad and end up damaging the country that initiated them. A year later, that is...
After weeks of belligerent rhetoric, North Korea took a pause Tuesday. But where is the mercurial Kim Jong Un headed next? U.S. officials are debating whether...
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has defiance in his blood. It’s said his grandfather once asked what would happen if America defeated North Korea in war, to...
The North Korean nuclear threat is a “hinge” moment for the U.S. and China, and for the new international order both nations say they want. If Washington and...
When all right-thinking people in the nation’s capital seem to agree on something – as has been the case recently with legislation imposing new sanctions on...
Here’s a contrarian thought: President Trump had the right instinct to insist that China help resolve the nightmare problem of North Korea. A peaceful...
If President Donald Trump ordered a senior government official to support the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller, how should that person respond?Adm....
If the ghosts who inhabit the walls of the CIA could talk, they would tell Director Mike Pompeo to be careful. The agency is entering a danger zone where a...
What did the CIA’s covert assistance program for Syrian rebels accomplish? Bizarrely, the biggest consequence may be that it helped trigger the Russian...
The Chinese government, subtle masters of propaganda, seem to have discovered a Sun Tzu formula for taming dissent on the internet: The best strategy may not...
The diplomatic machinations that have enveloped Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar may seem like a membership feud in a Gulf club for the...
What lessons can we take from Daesh’s (ISIS) defeat in Mosul and its coming eviction from Raqqa? The collapse of the caliphate tells us that the U.S. can...
The self-proclaimed “deal-maker” finally got the beginnings of what could be an important diplomatic agreement in Friday’s Russian-American summit in Hamburg....
When Donald Trump met Vladimir Putin Friday in Hamburg, Germany, the two presidents should have had in the back of their minds the insignia worn by the Syrian...
For this Independence Day, at a moment when the tone of our political life would probably shame our founders, here are snapshots of some brave American...
Daesh (ISIS) headquarters in this city at the western gateway to Raqqa has been crushed like a sand castle by American bombs. At a dam complex on the...
Let’s imagine a Chinese “applied history” project, similar to the one at Harvard’s Belfer Center that helped spawn professor Graham Allison’s widely discussed...
Here in the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan the mood is “Kurdistan First” with the announcement of a referendum on independence in September. In neighboring Saudi...
The sudden embargo on Qatar pushed this month by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia has peeved the State Department and Pentagon, drawing sharp...
Forewarned is forearmed. So perhaps the country is lucky that President Donald Trump’s allies have floated the possibility that he might fire special counsel...
What does the FBI director do when he suspects the president is a manipulative liar? The answer in James Comey’s case is that he writes memos, tries to evade...
Seventy years ago Monday, Secretary of State George Marshall delivered a Harvard commencement day address that became the framework for what we call the...
When Russian President Vladimir Putin invited NBC’s Megyn Kelly to question him onstage at a glitzy forum here, maybe he thought he’d have an easier time than...
When Russian officials and analysts here talk about the U.S. investigation of their alleged hacking of the 2016 campaign, two themes predominate: They’re...
“Back channels” have been used by every modern president, from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama. If that’s so, what’s the problem with the pre-inauguration...