As Russia’s war in Ukraine becomes increasingly costly with no end in sight, the Kremlin has kept tightening its grip over Russian society. Along with expanding repression, including of some officials ...

In a 1987 New York Times advertisement, long before he became president, Donald Trump insisted that “America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves.” This has been ...

The Chinese call these abandoned structures lanwei lou, a phrase that literally means “rotten-tail buildings,” signifying a project gone awry, a plan in suspension. The inhabitants of rotten-tail ...

The debate about American grand strategy has long been shaped by familiar schools of thought: restraint, liberal internationalism, and primacy. But the intellectual movement that provided the ...

Over the past decade, there has been a growing consensus that democracies around the world are facing a crisis from within. According to a 2025 Pew survey, nearly 60 percent of respondents in 23 ...

President Donald Trump, in his second term, has severely tested the U.S.-Indian relationship. The president has slapped tariffs on India, threatened to impose secondary sanctions, gotten considerably ...

For 47 years, the Islamic Republic has bedeviled U.S. presidents. The 1979 Iran hostage crisis helped doom Jimmy Carter’s reelection bid. The Iran-contra scandal in the mid-1980s badly tarnished ...

On August 19, the Ukrainian parliament voted overwhelmingly to confirm Ukraine’s new defense minister, ending weeks of uncertainty at a crucial phase of the war. For more than a month, Ukrainians had ...

How many nuclear weapons is enough? The question has haunted policymakers and scholars for 80 years. Early in the Cold War, the United States expanded its nuclear arsenal rapidly in response to the ...

The Middle East has oil, China has rare-earth elements,” Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping declared in the early 1990s. This quote has been repeated a lot lately as Beijing has used its near monopoly on ...