Putin will eventually leave office, whether by death, illness, or—against all observable inclinations—stepping aside. But what happens then is unclear. It could be a rushed passing of the guard, a ...

In May, China’s Ministry of Commerce took an unprecedented step: it ordered Chinese firms to disregard U.S. sanctions against five domestic refiners processing Iranian crude oil. Weeks later, China’s ...

This war is the latest consequence of a series of U.S. policy choices over the last 35 years that have made the United States less safe and intensified conflict across the Middle East. Those failures ...

And where Trump went wrong.

It’s been nearly 15 years since Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned of a “cyber–Pearl Harbor.” Since then, most people have become fairly inured to such a risk. That’s true even as there’s been a ...

In his second term, U.S. President Donald Trump has outlined grand diplomatic ambitions. He has promised to bring peace to Ukraine and Gaza, sought to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb, pursued ...

Browse all articles written by Michael Carpenter for Foreign Affairs.

Sever the head of the octopus in Tehran, the theory went, and the axis groups—the octopus’s many arms—would shrivel and die, too. Two decades ago, a military campaign motivated by the so-called ...

JOSEPH R. BIDEN, JR., was President of the United States from 2021-2025. He served as Vice President from 2009 to 2017 and as U.S. Senator from Delaware from 1973 to 2009.

Yet over the past 30 years, the system established by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and free-trade agreements has led to the opposite. Economic inequality and insecurity have worsened in most ...

A third option is suppression: the United States would forgo development of ASI and stop anyone else from building it on the basis that superintelligence is just too dangerous to be unleashed on the ...

As the United States’ quagmire in Iran makes clear, wars are almost always much harder to stop than they are to start. Over the past 80 years, less than 20 percent of the roughly 300 wars tracked by ...