Emma Ashford is appropriately withering in her comments on the Biden administration’s Global Posture Review:The main problem with the posture review is that it was completely irrelevant. I’m honestly not sure how the Pentagon managed to take a year to come to such...
Giorgio Cafiero notes near the end of a new article on Israel and Iran that Iranian nuclear weapons are not a foregone conclusion if the Vienna talks fail and the agreement collapses:Iran’s nuclear activities seem designed to be mainly about boosting the country’s...
Fred Kaplan is puzzled by Biden’s failure to rejoin the nuclear deal quickly:More puzzling than Trump messing things up, though, is why President Joe Biden – who, during the campaign, said he would bring back the deal – didn’t move to do so right after entering office...
The top official in the Biden administration working on the Middle East gets something important very wrong. Brett McGurk said this last week:And when it came to military force for behavior change, that is a pretty fuzzy objective for a military force. When it comes...
Walter Russell Mead tries his hand at being a conspiracy theorist:Our adversaries – and some of our allies as well as several American policy makers and commentators – believe that a polarized America is locked into decline and retreat. This is not, the revisionist...
NBC News reports on the bankrupt “Plan B” options being considered by the Biden administration if nuclear talks in Vienna aren’t successful:As Iran and world powers prepare to resume negotiations next week on reviving a nuclear deal, the U.S. and its allies are...
Richard Haass dismisses negotiations in Vienna to salvage the nuclear deal, and then makes this assertion:And even if they do [succeed], any agreement will not resolve Iran’s push for regional primacy – or for nuclear weapons.If Iran were seeking “regional primacy,”...
Sarah Chayes has written what may be one of the most dastardly op-eds I have ever read. She warns against providing aid to Afghanistan too quickly because that would reduce Western “leverage” over the Taliban:Western countries should not move too fast. Just because...
Some of the lingering costs of the January 2020 Soleimani assassination include the injuries to U.S. personnel that suffered traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) in the retaliatory Iranian missile attack:He used to help run armed drone operations as part of the unit, but...
Joe Lieberman reminds us that he absolutely does not want any agreement with Iran:Akbar Shahid Ahmed reports on the Biden administration’s unwillingness to hold the Saudi government accountable for its crimes, including the crimes of the crown prince:For now, Biden’s...
