U.S. Foreign Policy

As the United States prepares for the July 4 holiday, Senate Majority Whip John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, proposed a curious amendment for the Fiscal Year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the omnibus spending bill that...

Implications of the Argument: It’s been a tough few decades for national security analysts with no shortage of how to fix what is wrong with U.S. foreign policy. The 1990s were largely characterized by redefining grand strategy in a...

On June 6, the Wall Street Journal set off an avalanche of commentary by reporting that U.S. President Donald Trump ordered a drastic reduction in U.S. troops deployed in Germany within a space of only six months. The move...

In early June, Latvia published the 2020 iteration of its State Defense Concept (Valsts Aizsardzības Koncepcija) to replace the 2016 version. The Concept is a political planning document which will guide the details of defense policy and planning for...

Two recent Russian malicious cyber operations in Latvia targeted the government and a social media platform. But, legally, those instances do not rise to the level of a “cyberattack” as defined by the Tallinn Manual 2.0. Despite not satisfying...

Little to nothing, for two reasons. First, the U.S. leverages a sizeable sunk investment in German bases in very substantial part to support missions that are unrelated in any direct sense to its defense posture in Europe, if indeed...

From Emmanuel Macron to Ursula von der Leyen, many European leaders dream of the European Union (EU) asserting itself one day as a geopolitical superpower in its own right. There is still a long way to go, however. True,...

Under Vladimir Putin, Russia was moving away from its earlier embrace of Atlanticisim, seeing Russia as part of the Western world, and aspiring to emulate the West’s values and standards of governance, but still considered Russia part of an...

In February of this year, Colin S. Gray, the most consequential Anglo-American strategist of our time, died after a decades-long struggle with cancer. He was the teacher of two generations of U.S. and British defense experts. He was my...

It is a truism in international affairs that we live in an era of rapid, often destabilizing, change. That said, the global situation just a few months ago actually looked relatively stable and predictable. A lot that was going...