Articles
Mar 9, 2026
There are two winners in Iran. Neither one is America.
The Middle East first came to dominate U.S. defense policy in the 1970s — the decade of the Arab oil embargo, the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Back then, the United States was dependent on Middle Eastern oil, leading President Jimmy Carter to announce a new doctrine in 1980: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
Washington Post
Mar 6, 2026
Trump’s mini-me ambassadors are insulting and alienating U.S. allies
President Donald Trump is pursuing an ambitious foreign-policy agenda, which ranges from regime change in Iran to peacemaking in Ukraine. Normally U.S. ambassadors would be on the frontlines of such efforts. Yet in December, the Trump administration recalled more than two dozen career ambassadors, and it has been slow to fill vacancies. The result is that the U.S. lacks ambassadors in such important countries as Brazil, Egypt, Germany, Indonesia, Iraq, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates.
Washington Post
Feb 28, 2026
There is no reason to think this war with Iran is necessary
My big takeaway from the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq — which I deeply regret having supported — is that the United States should go to war only when it has to. It should not engage in preventative wars against nebulous threats based on suspect intelligence and without a clear endgame.
Washington Post
Feb 23, 2026
The U.S. is sleepwalking into war with Iran. Trump won’t explain why.
The U.S. military has assembled a formidable armada in the Middle East, including two aircraft carrier strike groups and dozens of additional aircraft. It is the largest array of U.S. warplanes in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. All signs suggest that military action against Iran could be imminent. The question is why. President Donald Trump isn’t explaining why he’s acting or what he hopes to achieve, so the world can only speculate.
Washington Post
Feb 16, 2026
Even far-right foreign leaders are getting sick of Trump’s meddling
President Donald Trump trashes so many norms that it’s easy to overlook how outlandish some of his actions are. Take his habit of formally endorsing candidates in other countries’ elections. Previous presidents occasionally made their preferences plain, often to their subsequent regret: Bill Clinton was supportive of Boris Yeltsin in Russia’s 1996 election and Barack Obama was critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel’s 2015 election. But seldom, if ever, have presidents interjected themselves as brazenly as Trump has done in foreign politics.
Washington Post
Feb 9, 2026
Trump has a strongman’s contempt for international law
President Donald Trump’s contempt for the rule of law in America — and the judges who enforce it — is by now well-established. Whether seeking to deport migrants without hearings or refusing to spend appropriated funds or unilaterally tearing down the East Wing of the White House, Trump has shown scant regard for legal limits on his authority.
Washington Post
Feb 2, 2026
Americans may come to regret alienating the ‘mighty middle powers’
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, in his now-famous speech at the Davos conference, issued a stirring call for the “middle powers” to protect their own interests at a time when the great powers are running roughshod over the “rules-based international order.” Recent examples include not only Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s attempts to claim the South China Sea, but also President Donald Trump’s threats to annex Greenland and his punitive tariffs on America’s closest allies. “Middle powers must act together,” Carney said, “because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”
Washington Post
Jan 26, 2026
Trump’s Board of Peace is already floundering
President Donald Trump is often accused of being a warmonger and a rogue leader who acts in defiance of international law and global opinion. His menacing plan (abandoned for now) to seize Greenland from Denmark, the “easy way” or the “hard way,” shows why that characterization has become so widely accepted outside his MAGA base.
Washington Post
Jan 19, 2026
Trump is addicted to military force. Congress knows what is missing.
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles told Vanity Fair that President Donald Trump, despite being a teetotaler, has an “alcoholic’s personality.” The president himself agreed that he has an “addictive type personality.” What Trump seems to be addicted to, at the moment, is the use of military force.
Washington Post
Jan 12, 2026
Maybe Trump the isolationist had imperial ambitions all along
Until recently, President Donald Trump had a reputation as a quasi-isolationist. In his first inaugural address, he complained, “We’ve ... spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay.” In his second inaugural address, he vowed to “measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”
Washington Post
Jan 3, 2026
Trump claims the U.S. will ‘run’ Venezuela. What’s the plan?
In recent months, President Donald Trump has assembled the largest U.S. naval armada in the Caribbean since the invasion of Panama in 1989. There were far too many forces simply to blow up some suspected drug boats — but not enough to invade Venezuela, a nation of nearly 30 million people. Now we know what all that naval might was for. The U.S. force was the perfect size for a commando raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Washington Post
Dec 29, 2025
Putin was the missing man at Mar-a-Lago
After their meeting at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday, President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky traded happy talk about the state of peace negotiations in Ukraine. “We have made a lot of progress on ending that war,” Trump said. “We had a really great discussion on all the topics,” Zelensky said, adding that there was “90 percent” agreement on a peace plan.
Washington Post
Dec 22, 2025
Trump is losing sight of America’s real terrorist threat
The Trump administration has been reallocating scarce federal resources to combating drug cartels (“narco-terrorists”), the Venezuelan state (“a foreign terrorist organization”) and leftist groups like antifa (a “violent fifth column of domestic terrorists”). Aside from obvious concerns about legality, these actions also raise serious questions about the administration’s priorities and distribution of resources.
Washington Post
Dec 15, 2025
Seizing Venezuelan oil tankers could backfire on Trump
The Trump administration strategy of blowing up suspected drug-smuggling boats, already criticized by many legal experts as illegal, became even more controversial after The Post reported that, during the first such strike, U.S. forces had killed survivors clinging to their boat’s wreckage. Congress is now demanding the release of unedited Pentagon footage of the attack — a request that the Trump administration is stonewalling.
Washington Post
Dec 8, 2025
Trump is sending a clear message to the free world
The 28-point “peace plan” for Ukraine that the Trump administration released last month drew heavily on an earlier Russian document. By contrast, the 29-page National Security Strategy released by the White House last week was entirely a made-in-America product. But the NSS will have the same effect: It will encourage Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and discourage America’s allies, particularly in Europe. There is nothing particularly surprising about this document in that it reflects the familiar MAGA worldview, but it is nevertheless deeply disheartening.
Washington Post
Dec 1, 2025
No wonder Trump is outraged by warnings about illegal orders
If you’re a law-abiding citizen and someone admonishes you that robbing banks is a crime, you would be inclined to laugh off the advice as obvious and unnecessary. If, however, you’re planning on carrying out a bank job — or have already done a few — you might react with feigned indignation that anyone could possibly ever imagine that you would ever commit such a terrible offense.
Washington Post
Nov 25, 2025
America has become a rogue nation. U.S. allies are looking elsewhere.
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia — The Halifax International Security Forum is an annual gathering of political and military leaders and security experts from democratic countries, with a mission “to strengthen strategic cooperation among the world’s democracies.” That was not hard to do in 2009, when the conference was founded. It has become nearly impossible now that the world’s most powerful democracy has turned into a rogue nation led by a president who is more sympathetic to dictators than democrats.
Washington Post
Nov 22, 2025
Ukraine needs Russia’s frozen $200 billion immediately, Europe
Russia’s barbaric assault on Ukraine continues: A single Russian drone and missile strike on an apartment block in western Ukraine last week killed at least 31 civilians. Meanwhile, Russia is ramping up its campaign of sabotage in Europe: Polish authorities blamed the Kremlin for a Nov. 15 explosion on a rail line used to transport supplies to Ukraine. As German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said recently, Europe “is not at war” but it is also “no longer at peace” with Russia.
Washington Post
Nov 17, 2025
I’m a huge sports fan. Gambling, especially prop bets, is ruining the fun.
Readers of this column may be surprised to learn that I don’t spend all of my time thinking about drones or diplomatic démarches. I’m also a huge — fanatical may not be inappropriate — sports fan. I devote a ridiculous amount of time to following my two favorite teams: the New York Knicks and the San Francisco 49ers. (Why New York and San Francisco? The former is my current home, and the latter is close to where I went to college.) I also follow, with lesser degrees of devotion, tennis (I never miss a U.S. Open), baseball, soccer, and college football and basketball (particularly the Cal Golden Bears).
Washington Post
Nov 10, 2025
Trump’s incoherent foreign policy defies explanation
Is President Donald Trump a peacemaker or a warmonger? An interventionist or an isolationist? The answer is: yes. He contains multitudes, and it’s nearly impossible to sort out or explain the disparate strands of his foreign policy.