Commentary

Last week, President-elect Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, underwent Senate confirmation hearings. Venues like The Washington Post were predictably critical, especially on the issue of human rights. But the critics seem to...

Dalia Grybauskaite’s victory in Lithuania’s 2009 presidential elections and her insistence on altering her predecessor’s values-based, pro-American foreign policy suggested that she would pursue major foreign policy changes, particularly with two immediate neighbors—Belarus and Russia—and two Black Sea countries—Ukraine...

The end of 2016 brought important changes in Lebanon. Michel Aoun’s election in October finally ended the destabilizing presidential vacuum in place since May 2014, ushering in a new government of national unity under the premiership of Saad Hariri....

A few years ago, my beloved wife finally persuaded me to accompany her on a trip to Italy. It proved to be so sublime that tears come to my eyes whenever I reminisce about the history, culture, art, scenery,...

In mid-December 2016, outgoing U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon referred to Aleppo as a “synonym for hell“ and said that Adama Dieng, the U.N.'s Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, warned of the risk of genocide there....

The National Security Council (NSC) staff was once called the Keepers of the Keys, managers of the coordinating process that is central to an administration’s ability to plan and conduct a successful grand strategy. The NSC has had...

The State of Israel, and the U.S.-Israeli relationship, now stand before new perils—potentially quite serious ones. You might suppose that I am referring to the implications of the recent U.S. abstention in the U.N. Security Council concerning Resolution 2334....

The assassination of the Russian Ambassador to Turkey in an Ankara art gallery on December 19 was a dramatic event in every way. The ambassador had just begun speaking to the audience when a man pacing behind him,...

On 7:32pm on December 25, 1991, a red flag with a golden hammer and sickle was lowered for the last time from the Kremlin. It was replaced with the Russian tricolor: white, blue, red. “I hereby discontinue my activities...

In these days and in this country, when most people hear the phrase “sources of religious violence,” they tend to conflate religious violence with terrorism, tend to assume that the principal source of that violence is “religious” in nature,...