Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s visit to Washington this week coincides with the re-emergence of a familiar threat: North Korea. On March 28, Russia vetoed what should have been a routine U.N. Security Council reauthorization of a panel monitoring sanctions on Pyongyang. Moscow’s veto reflected both unhappiness with the panel’s recent findings and a general fraying […]
Humiliation in international affairs comes in many forms, often unexpectedly. It buried President Joe Biden on Friday, piling mortification onto his administration’s foreign policy cowardice. First, the White House effectively abandoned Israel by sponsoring a Security Council resolution calling for an “immediate and sustained cease-fire” in Gaza. Then, unforeseen Russian and Chinese vetoes, cast almost […]
SADLY, FOR America and the world, neither candidate in this November’s election is fit to be president. Polling shows voters did not want a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, but that’s what they’re getting. A president’s most important national-security responsibility is to identify the risks and opportunities facing America, and to craft ways […]
President Biden’s dealings with Israel are increasingly incoherent. His objectives are confused and contradictory; he ignores Iran, the region’s biggest menace; he failed to secure a pre-Ramadan cease-fire-for-hostages deal; and his efforts to increase humanitarian aid to Gaza are ill-conceived and ineffective, tragically likely to aid Hamas more than the innocent. Biden should return to […]
Donald Trump’s assault on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization began in his first term and has continued as he campaigns for a second. NATO certainly has its problems, as Henry Kissinger argued in “The Troubled Partnership: A Re-Appraisal of the Atlantic Alliance” (1965). But it serves U.S. national-security interests. Undermining U.S. strength by eroding alliances hardly amounts to an America-first agenda. Further, Mr. Trump’s focus on NATO shields from scrutiny the United Nations and other international institutions that are much more inimical to America.
By John Bolton Alexei Navalny’s death in a Russian prison camp elicited widespread condemnation, and Western leaders demanded that Russian President Vladimir Putin be held accountable. A fierce Putin critic, Navalny returned to Russia in January 2021 after recovering from a 2020 attempted assassination by poisoning that was almost certainly ordered by the Kremlin. He […]
By John Bolton Foreign Secretary David Cameron recently suggested that the United Kingdom could recognise the state of “Palestine” before waiting for the conclusion of talks between Israel and the Palestinians. He said that recognition “can’t come at the start of the process, but it doesn’t have to be the very end of the process”. […]
Before Washington unleashed strikes against Iranian assets and Iranian-backed militias in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, media reporting highlighted the Biden administration’s concerns over potentially broader regional fallout. Fearful of escalating the current conflict and producing a wider war by crossing Tehran’s publicly declared “red line,” we heard, the United States would not attack inside Iran.
If returned to office, Trump will need others to carry out his directives. He will want White House staffers to follow his orders without asking troubling questions, as testimony in the classified-documents case demonstrates. These staffers will not be known for independent, creative thinking, just personal fidelity to Trump, for whom loyalty flows only one way.
The world undoubtedly was startled to learn that staffers of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency participated in Hamas’s barbaric Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres pledged a full investigation, and several countries, including the United States, suspended funding to UNRWA.