Last week, the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia announced the formation of AUKUS, a trilateral security agreement to bolster allied interests in the Indo-Pacific, a region key to Washington’s grand strategy. AUKUS’s first initiative is to develop nuclear submarines for Australia, to be provided by American and British companies. The deployment of Australian nuclear...
On September 1, President Biden welcomed President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to the White House. It was Zelensky’s first visit to the White House since taking office in 2019. Ukraine gained its independence following the Soviet Union’s dissolution, but has struggled to consolidate its democracy and stabilize its economy since then. It has suffered a...
On September 2, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro met with opposition leaders in Mexico City with the aim to ease the nation’s ongoing political and economic crisis. Each side brought its own goals to the negotiating table, with the hope that this set of talks would succeed where others have failed. The opposition hopes to advance...
Review of The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution: Power Politics in the Atomic Age by Keir Lieber and Daryl Press (Cornell University Press, 2020) The defining characteristics of the nuclear age are terror and peace.” [1] For Keir Lieber and Daryl Press, international relations scholars at Georgetown and Dartmouth, respectively, this is the defining paradox...
Review of Revolutionary Constitutions: Charismatic Leadership and the Rule of Law by Bruce Ackerman (Harvard, 2019). Nevertheless, the past is over and it is the future that beckons to us now. That future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we may fulfil the pledges we have so often...
America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.” This Henry Kissinger quote is a perennial favorite of American realists, informing decades of American grand strategy. In recent years, from threatening to withdraw from NATO to praising Kim Jung-Un in search of a blockbuster nuclear deal, the Trump Administration ruthlessly implemented this adage, with the...
Events in Afghanistan have overshadowed most other developments in U.S. foreign policy, including Vice President Kamala Harris’ recent travel to Singapore and Vietnam. Yet, combined with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s visits to these two countries and the Philippines in July, the Vice President’s trip signals renewed American engagement in Southeast Asia. Home to almost...
Two decades into the twenty-first century, the U.S. national security agenda is once again dominated by great power competition, as rivals are “contesting our geopolitical advantages and trying to change the international order in their favor.” [1] In a sharper key, this registers as alarm bells. Repeated, recent war games evidence real possibilities, if not...
Russian President Vladimir Putin recently used the 325th anniversary of the Russian navy’s founding to commemorate the marked growth and modernization of his country’s fleet. Much of this growth has occurred in the Black Sea, a region of great importance to Russia since the reign of Peter the Great in the eighteenth century. Following the...
Sunday evening, the Taliban took possession of Kabul. Afghanistan’s capital was the last and most important city to fall to the insurgency, after a week in which government military forces unraveled across the country. Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan president, has fled to the United Arab Emirates. His predecessor, Hamid Karzai, is negotiating the transfer of...
