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July 23, 2015 Events in the Middle East seem to make some commentators and officials forget the fact that borders matter—everywhere, including the Middle East.  Most borders reflect the vagaries and irrationalities of history.  Sometimes they look arbitrary—history does not usually produce straight lines.  Borders frame states, and states are the constituents of the international system and order.  Borders bound sovereignty.  Their recognition implies acceptance of power within boundaries. ...

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July 22, 2015 Ukraine’s democratic transition has not gone as was hoped in 1991. The country has consistently waffled between a 4 and a 5 on Freedom House’s Nations in Transit scores, qualifying it as a transitional government or hybrid regime. It’s been 24 years since independence and the transition never really entered a higher gear, so it’s fair to call Ukraine a hybrid regime....

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It seems there is a deal. We know that because the President has already begun his pirouettes as befitting his role as Spinner-in-Chief, and because we have a leaked Russian version of the text that seems pretty realistically what it claims to be. Let me admit right off that I doubted that the Ayatollah Khamenei could bring himself to take “yes” for an answer, for reasons I have laid out several times before (most recently, in short, in “...

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The Foreign Policy Research Institute is making its scholars available to provide expert commentary on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action reached by the P5+1 - the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China, Russia, Germany, and the European Union - and the Islamic Republic of Iran on July 14, 2015. . John R. Haines is the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of...

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July 13, 2015 The Human Terrain System (HTS) – a U.S. Army program aimed at helping U.S. and allied military forces understand the people around them in Iraq and Afghanistan – is dead. And anthropologists are dancing ritualistically around its corpse....

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