When U.S. Foreign Policy Loses Its Doctrine
Foreign policy is ultimately built on two foundations: power and credibility. Power allows a state to act. Credibility determines whether others believe its actions will be sustained long enough to matter. When policy becomes dominated by short-term transactions rather than strategic doctrine, trust erodes and credibility declines. The transactional trap undermines trust and creates a […]
The Liberal Case for Censorship
Free speech is a practice with preconditions, and our adversaries have learned to dismantle them. Defending those conditions is the most liberal thing a democracy can do. In the fall of 2023, Israeli television broadcast footage of hostages taken by Hamas on October 7. The videos showed emaciated, desperate, terrorized captives speaking directly to camera, […]
China's Quiet Contribution to the US-Iran Ceasefire
When US President Donald Trump publicly thanked Chinese President Xi Jinping in an interview with The New York Times for helping create the conditions that led to a ceasefire between the US and Iran, many observers were surprised. China and Iran have developed increasingly close economic and strategic ties over the past decade. Beijing has become Tehran’s largest trading […]
FORTUNE FAVORS THE BRAVE AND THE BALTICS
NATO doesn’t face the threat of an attack from Russia. It’s already being attacked. Stymied in Ukraine, where Russian troops have failed to seize fresh territory over the past year, President Vladimir Putin is upping the pressure on Europe by flying drones through NATO member states to probe the readiness of America and its allies […]
ISRAEL’S GRAND STRATEGY – AND POLITICS? – AT AN INFLECTION POINT
Grand Strategy has been elegantly defined by John Lewis Gaddis and others as the dynamic relationship between national goals – which can aim high – and the constraint of resources, which are always finite. For the leaders of Israel in its younger years, essentially seeking the stability necessary for resurrecting an ancient but dispersed nation, […]
AMERICAN LEADERSHIP ROLE IN EUROPE IS NOT AN OPTION
In early July a major NATO conference will take place in Ankara, Turkey. It arrives right after America’s 250th anniversary celebrations and at a moment of rising tensions between America and Europe over a welter of geopolitical issues, including trade, immigration, the Middle East, Ukraine and Russia. Will President Donald Trump seize the moment to […]
How Israel Lost the U.S.-Iran War
It needs to shift gears promptly if it doesn’t want to lose the next one too Israelis were feeling like dreamers, to quote the Psalmist, at the start of the latest Iran campaign. It wasn’t just the devout among them who were waxing euphoric. Despite the peril of its predicament—scrambling for cover from incoming missiles and drones—the […]
RED SKY AT NIGHT, SAILORS DELIGHT; RED SKY AT MORN, SAILOR TAKE WARN!
There is an old sailors’ proverb which holds that a red sky at night is a sign of fair weather to follow, whereas a red sky at morn brings storm clouds and rough weather. If this proverb applies to geopolitics, the modern state of maritime security resembles a crimson sky with storm clouds on the […]
ISRAEL’S AMERICAN DILEMMA: HOW TO WIN BACK DEMOCRATS AND YOUNG PEOPLE
By fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with the United States in two major military operations, Israel is benefiting from the closest relationship it has ever had with Washington. Yet in an ironic twist of political fate, at the very same time both political and more ominously, public support for the Jewish state is the lowest in decades. The […]
Central Asia and the Ongoing Iran Crisis
By far the greatest issue of concern for most Central Asians as they react to the ongoing Iran crisis is stability. They recognize that they live in an unstable neighborhood, sandwiched as they are between Russia and China, with Turkey, Pakistan, and Afghanistan also looming large. Iran was an important provider of agricultural goods and […]
A Peace Etched in Silicon
As an international megaproject, AI is achieving what decades of diplomacy could not. In the United States and many other countries today, AI is developing a bad rap. Propagandists are using the technology to flood the information commons, while autocrats supercharge state surveillance. A mounting obsession with digital sovereignty risks further fragmenting the internet into […]
Towards a Civilizational Perception of the Jewish State
In contemporary studies of international relations, the cultural background of foreign policy has become a central analytical tool for understanding how nations and non-state actors behave on the global stage. Scholars such as Alexander Wendt, Peter Katzenstein, and Benedict Anderson have demonstrated that states do not act solely according to material interests; rather, their foreign […]
