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...
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...
While it looks for now as if Monday’s Wall Street sell-off was a momentary blip within the market’s steady recent ascent, questions remain as to the long-term growth of the global economy as the Delta variant of COVID-19 spreads and fears about inflation mount. With the pandemic seemingly resurgent or, in many countries, still ever-present,...
This week, thousands of Cubans took to the streets in protest, demanding government action to address severe economic want and the COVID-19 pandemic, while also calling for the resignation of President Miguel Díaz-Canel and the end of sixty years of Communist rule. In response, the Cuban government has arrested over one hundred protesters and called...
For many visitors, Budapest casts a spellbinding beauty, sparkling with ageless jewels like Saint Stephen’s Basilica and the fin de siecle House of Parliament. Beneath this surface of gothic grandeur however, a determined fight is being waged for control of Hungary’s historical narrative, and thus for direction of its future progress. This fight is most...
Charismatic leaders, from George Washington to Nelson Mandela, have dominated political revolutions in many nations. More important than their charisma itself though, at least once the Bastille is stormed, is how these leaders channel charisma into a constitutional order. France’s twentieth-century experience with presidentialism provides a particularly rich example of this process, and exposes the...
This past Monday, President Biden ordered U.S. Forces to carry out airstrikes against targets along the Iraq-Syria border. The Pentagon stated that these targets had been housing munitions for Iranian-backed militia groups. At least four Kataib Sayyed al-Shuhada milita members were killed in the attack. A day later, militia units retaliated against U.S. forces in...
With a little less than six weeks before hardline conservative Ebrahim Raisi is inaugurated as the new President of Iran, President Biden’s top aides are engaged in a high stakes game of ‘telephone’ in Vienna. As Iranian negotiators refuse to meet their American counterparts in person, European intermediaries have shuttled between hotel rooms with messages...
“Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom,” Edmund Burke observed. At the turn of the twentieth century, both France and Germany were wooing Great Britain as an ally against the other. Why was it France, Britain’s nemesis for centuries, which succeeded in gaining British friendship? The answer is complex, but a large part...
