Foreign Affairs

Theresa May retains office but hemorrhages power.

More ministers resign as May faces the axe.

What to expect from Tuesday's summit between Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in.

And how he’s exploiting anti-Semitism to fuel his rise.

The trip would likely coincide with the holiday marking the establishment of North Korea.

Beijing has increased its covert activities in the country.

For the first time, a populist coalition has taken over a Western European state.

Tony Smith, political science professor at Tufts, is a man on a mission. His mission: save Wilsonianism from its perversions by post-Cold War social scientists, military strategists like General David Petraeus, the RAND Corporation—and especially the neocons and neoliberals of the Bush and Obama…

Since President Trump's election, American allies and other foreign policy observers have been curious to know how the new White House intends to resolve an apparent contradiction. How is it possible that Trump seems keen to make some sort of deal with Vladimir Putin while expressing belligerent…

This week, Israel's prime minister will visit Washington and meet with our new president. They will have a complex agenda.

Since President Trump’s election, American allies and other foreign policy observers have been curious to know how the new White House intends to resolve an apparent contradiction. How is it possible that Trump seems keen to make some sort of deal with Vladimir Putin while expressing belligerent…

In a decision separate from the U.S. inquiries into Russian political interference during the 2016 presidential contest, Washington announced on Monday, January 9, that five prominent individuals inside Russia would be sanctioned. The U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) added…

The Obama chapter in American foreign policy ends like the climax of an action movie—with a fireball growing in the distance and filling the screen as a man in silhouette approaches in slow motion and then veers off camera. Barack Obama has set the Middle East on fire, and now it's spreading.

Republican senators Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham are joining forces to propose legislation that will cut off American taxpayer funding of the United Nations until the international body reverses its December 24 Security Council resolution on Israel.

The New York Times headline says it all: "Assad's Lesson From Aleppo: Force Works, With Few Consequences."

The New York Times headline says it all: “Assad's Lesson From Aleppo: Force Works, With Few Consequences."

CNN reports:

Thirty-seven years is a long time to wait for a phone call. That's how it must have felt to the Taiwanese people when their president, Tsai Ing-wen, had a 10-minute talk with Donald Trump on December 2—the first direct conversation between a Taiwanese leader and a U.S. president or president-elect…

Thirty-seven years is a long time to wait for a phone call. That’s how it must have felt to the Taiwanese people when their president, Tsai Ing-wen, had a 10-minute talk with Donald Trump on December 2—the first direct conversation between a Taiwanese leader and a U.S. president or president-elect…

The insertion of Nigel Farage into the dealings between President-elect Donald Trump and Prime Minister Theresa May’s government has yet to make the U.S.-U.K. Special Relationship more special, but it has already made it more complex and unpredictable. Is this Twitter-begot triangle a preview of…

The latest episode of Conversations with Bill Kristol features Elliott Abrams, former assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration and deputy national security advisor in the George W. Bush White House.

"Excessive" is the word that Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch president of the Eurozone countries, used for the Obama Justice Department's decision in mid-September to seek mammoth fines from Deutsche Bank. The German bank's various mortgage-underwriting violations were committed in the days before…

Hillary Clinton's campaign has been critical of Donald Trump's alleged coziness with Russia. This could boomerang on Clinton, however, and not just because of her own lead role in the Obama administration's failed attempt at a Russian "reset." Perhaps because it hit the newsstands before the…

"Great power competition” has just become a phrase that the Pentagon is forbidden to use when speaking of the People's Republic of China and the United States. The order was conveyed in the last few weeks by the White House in a classified document the contents of which were disclosed to the Navy…

Taibo City, Taiwan

Taibo City, Taiwan

The death of Islam Karimov, the 78-year old party boss and dictatorial president of Soviet and post-Soviet Uzbekistan, a key strategic power in Central Asia, was announced September 2 in official Uzbek media. The cause of his demise was reported to be a stroke, and rumors of it had circulated for…

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on Donald Trump's foreign policy speech Monday in Youngstown, Ohio.

Tokyo

Why is John Kerry eager to provide Iran with more economic benefits by publicly declaring the Iranians may actually deserve more relief? Why did the secretary of state tell Charlie Rose that the United States and Iran want the same thing when it comes to ending the war in Syria? Why does America’s…

Since 2009, the world has been trying to make sense of America’s foreign and national security policies under Barack Obama. Allies and enemies, historians and scholars, the president’s critics and his supporters—all have struggled to define, or even discern, an Obama Doctrine. So last week, the man…

Since 2009, the world has been trying to make sense of America’s foreign and national security policies under Barack Obama. Allies and enemies, historians and scholars, the president’s critics and his supporters—all have struggled to define, or even discern, an Obama Doctrine. So last week, the man…

The world’s attention was largely turned to Ukraine last week. To the extent that the Middle East was on the front pages, the focus was the new agreement between the PLO and Hamas, its implications for the “peace process,” and John Kerry’s comment about Israel as an “apartheid state.” 

It's hard to look on the bright side of the dismemberment of a sovereign state by force of arms. But because of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the ongoing threat Vladimir Putin intends to pose to eastern Ukraine, the Obama administration must now face international reality free of one of its…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with executive editor Fred Barnes on President Obama's performance and the Democrats' chances in 2014.

On February 22, popular protests led to the fall of the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych in Kiev. On February 27, in response to this setback, President Vladimir Putin sent forces into Crimea to seize it from Ukraine. On March 19, President Barack Obama delivered his response. He…

The fallout continues from the New York Times’s failed attempt to change the narrative on the Ben-ghazi attacks. The latest hit comes from an unexpected source—the Washington Post:

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on his most recent piece on Benghazi and Obamacare.

Berlin

Syria has receded from the front pages. A long and winding road of failed diplomacy lies ahead, and who wants to bother covering that? Meanwhile, Bashar al-Assad is more firmly in power than before, al Qaeda is stronger among the Syrian rebels, the United States has lost credibility, and Iran and…

When President Obama abruptly called off the bombing strike on Syria and decided to seek the approval of Congress, he surprised no one more than French president François Hollande. France, the only country set to join the United States in the raid, was left in the lurch. Hollande was humiliated and…

A number of Israel’s former foes share its concerns about Iran’s nuclear program, but this is mostly on the principle that an enemy of one’s enemy is a friend. Israel can claim to have a genuinely close partnership with only one majority-Muslim country. It is said that Azerbaijani-Israeli relations…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on President Obama's foreign policy is viewed in the Middle East.

The Scrapbook enjoyed what might charitably be called a warmhearted chuckle at the news that President Obama had abruptly canceled his planned “summit” meeting in Moscow with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Even the reliably turgid language of White House press secretary Jay Carney was unusually…

The town of Kidal, about 200 miles north of Gao, the big hub on the Niger River in eastern Mali, is hot and dry, and its police and electricity function erratically. The town, whose population is about 25,000, fell under the control of forces hostile to Mali’s central government in Bamako, which is…

For decades during the Cold War, U.S. policy sought to minimize the role of Moscow in the Middle East. As the Soviet Union weakened dramatically in the late 1980s and early 1990s, so too did its capacity to influence events there (and many other places besides). So matters have stood since. A…

Barack Obama’s foreign policy has one core principle: Get the United States out of the Middle East wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that he “inherited” from George W. Bush and avoid repeating those mistakes. There have been other themes sounded by the White House, most notably the “Pacific pivot,” but…

One might expect Keith Alexander to advocate on behalf of the two programs at the center of our national debate about terrorism and surveillance. He is, after all, the head of the National Security Agency, which runs them. “It’s dozens of terrorist events that these have helped prevent—both here…

When newspaper editors get together for their next good head-scratching session​—​Why do they hate us? Why don’t they take us seriously? Why are they abandoning us in droves?​—​someone should hand out copies of Ruth Marcus’s column “The girls are back” from the June 12 issue of the Washington Post. 

Two weeks of protests across Turkey that have left four dead and more than 5,000 injured have observers wondering whether Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is facing an Anatolian Spring. Is Turkey’s Islamic ruler weathering a crisis similar to the revolutionary climate that sent Arab protesters…

The Obama administration is heralding a conference later this month in Geneva where representatives of Bashar al-Assad’s regime will ostensibly sit down with the Syrian rebel forces opposing them. The effect will be to prop up Assad. Sen. John McCain, on the other hand, is committed to the Syrian…

CIA director David Petraeus was surprised when he read the freshly rewritten talking points an aide had emailed him in the early afternoon of Saturday, September 15. One day earlier, analysts with the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis had drafted a set of unclassified talking points policymakers…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with contributing editor Reuel Marc Gerecht on his piece on the Iranian regime and its apologists.

"The GOP of old has grown stale and moss-covered,” Kentucky senator Rand Paul said Thursday to the Conservative Political Action Conference. “I don’t think we need to name any names here, do we?” he added coyly.