Syria

The world of statecraft is so fraught with risk that it is tempting, just to reduce the range of maddening uncertainty a tad or two, to assign either inevitability or impossibility to future propositions that are neither. The...

In the summer of 2014, the Obama administration found itself between a rock and a hard place. The Islamic State had just swept through northern Iraq, decimating the American-trained Iraqi army left to keep the peace after the U.S....

Granting or withholding humanitarian access in the Syrian civil war has been politicized, used by different warring parties to advance their military strategies and political objectives. For the regime, withholding access and preventing aid from reaching rebel-held areas is...

Books in Review Thomas J. Christensen, The China Challenge: Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2015). Henry Paulson, Dealing With China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower (New York: Twelve, 2015)....

Thanks to the jihadi version of an Edward Snowden data dump, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point now hosts documented evidence of who has joined the Islamic State’s ranks. When compared to other Islamic State foreign fighters estimates...

    “A nation without borders is not a nation. There must be a wall across the southern border.”Statement on www.donaldjtrump.com  “These drug cartels are showing more and more indices of insurgencies.”Secretary Hillary R. Clinton (September 2010) “In comparison...

It is easy to like the Kurds. In the first half of the 20th century, the international community slighted them, dividing historic Kurdistan among the newly formed states of Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Turkey. Now, in the 21st century,...