Articles
Mar 31, 2026
Why Ukraine is even more impressive in person
I just returned from a week spent in Ukraine with a delegation from the Renew Democracy Initiative, an NGO founded by former chess champion Garry Kasparov that has provided $15 million in humanitarian aid to that embattled country. (I serve on RDI’s advisory board.) It was my third trip since the war began, the previous two having been in 2023 and 2024. I’ve already written for the Washington Post about some impressions from my latest trip, mainly involving Ukraine’s kick-ass drone army. But I thought I would use this space to share some other thoughts on the look and feel of wartime Ukraine—and in particular why I always leave Ukraine even more impressed than when I arrive.
Substack
Mar 30, 2026
The Iran Conflict Is Becoming a Russia-Ukraine Proxy War
Both Russia and Ukraine are trying to use the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran to their own advantage. With Russia profiting from the war while backing Iran, and Ukraine arming the Gulf states, the Middle East has become a new front in the war between Kyiv and Moscow.
Council on Foreign Relations
Mar 30, 2026
Ukraine’s drone army has done the incredible
KYIV — When I first visited Kyiv in May 2023, Ukraine’s capital experienced what was then one of the largest air attacks of the war: Russia fired 25 missiles and nine drones. I could hear the blasts outside my hotel room as Ukrainian air defenses shot down all the projectiles. Last week, during my third visit to wartime Ukraine, Russia set another shameful record by firing 30 missiles and nearly 1,000 Shahed drones during a 24-hour period (March 23-24).
Washington Post
Mar 23, 2026
Don’t blame Trump’s stupid war on Israel
When a nation starts a war for dubious reasons and then suffers the consequences, there is inevitably a search for scapegoats. Conspiracy theories abound. It happened after World War I, when the favorite villains were “merchants of death” and international bankers. It happened again after the Iraq War, which some blamed on “neoconservatives” and Halliburton, the oil-services giant led by Dick Cheney before he became vice president.
Washington Post
Mar 16, 2026
The U.S. military’s greatest weakness in Iran is one it can’t fix
“War is the great auditor of institutions.” So wrote the British military historian Correlli Barnett. What, then, does the war with Iran reveal about the state of U.S. military power?
The first, and most obvious, lesson is the potency of U.S. precision-strike capabilities. Since the start of Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28, U.S. and Israeli forces have hit more than 15,000 targets without losing any aircraft to enemy air defenses. (Five U.S. Air Force planes were damaged on the ground in Saudi Arabia by an Iranian missile strike, while three were lost to friendly fire and one in a fatal accident.)
Washington Post
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.