US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference demonstrated he is a better diplomat than Vice President J.D. Vance, although that’s not much of a hurdle to clear. Where Vance gave a bullying lecture, Rubio’s speech focused on emphasizing...
In my international relations classes, I encourage my students to not just express their (mostly negative) views of Trump’s foreign policy. I also ask them to reflect on the extent to which Trump’s...
The U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean is confusing the MAGA faithful. With rumors swirling of an imminent operation to topple Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, the president’s supporters are asking...
On November 1, 2025, President Donald Trump threatened to end all U.S. assistance to Nigeria and — if he deemed it necessary — launch a military attack against insurgents in the country. As National...
Back in March, I wrote a post at Lawyers, Guns and Money called “Remember ‘Great Power Competition?’ Lol.” As the “Grand Strategy” of Trump 2.0 comes into focus, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit and update it. In brief, the normie national-security advisors who dominated the first Trump administration needed a way to make Trump’s semi-coherent ramblings legible to the global foreign-policy community. That is, to synthesize his half-baked ideas into a “grand strategy” that fit within established frameworks. Their answer was “Great Power Competition,”...
How can we understand Tump 2.0 foreign policy? It’s the product of the fusion of two different forces: Christian Nationalism and Personalist Rent-Extraction.
I used to feel compelled to write something on 9/11. Some of this was just to participate in the discourse, some out of fear that failure to do so would mean moving on and forgetting. In 2009--back when I provided free labor for The Huffington Post--I wrote this on the shadowy but still serious threat posed by al-Qaeda. More recently, I wrote this on the failure of security studies to adapt in response to 9/11. But I wasn't sure what to say this year. It's partly an issue of sensory overload. I've started and stopped multiple posts in the past few weeks as new events come up before I have a...
The foreign policy world is still making sense of the Trump Administration's massive cuts to the US State Department last week. Under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, nearly 1500 employees--most of them civil servants--lose their jobs. In some ways, this isn't surprising, as Trump began his second term with a massive, Elon Musk-led, gutting of the federal workforce. But it's still catching some by surprise, given Rubio's reported clash with Musk over these reductions and the (maybe naive) belief that Rubio would be a more responsible official than the rest of the Trump cabinet. Given this,...
I dislike the term “soft power.” We owe the term to the late, great Joseph Nye. He popularized it in his 1990 book, Bound to Lead. Nye’s book was, first and foremost, an intervention in the “declinism” debates of the later 1980s. Japan was at the peak of its influence; some projected that its economy would overtake that of the United States by the early 2000s. Paul Kennedy’s 1987 bestseller, the Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, argued that the United States needed to adjust to its relative decline by reducing its overseas military commitments and reducing its defense spending. Politicians...
It’s hard to keep track of the problems confronting Americans these days. But, just in case a reminder is needed, climate change is still a thing. Casual observers may have noted that US climate policy has been…underwhelming, see-sawing between ‘Build Back Better’ aspirations and climate denialism. Now climate policy wunderkind Varun Sivaram has called for a rethink on US climate (foreign) policy. Noting the overall failure of US climate policy, Sivaram calls for ‘climate realism’. Claiming that “the very fact that climate has no political staying power is an indictment of the policy...
I published an article yesterday in Real Clear Defense. The title is “The Road to Securing European Cooperation on China Runs Through Ukraine”, but I suppose I could have called this piece, “How to Screw Up on Multiple Fronts at the Same Time.” That might have been harder to get past an editor. I spent a fair amount of time this past fall talking to people working in the EU institutions about China. The short version is that they are concerned about the PRC’s actions to the point that most of the people you talk to candidly at the European External Action Service (EEAS) or elsewhere in...
The buzzword of the first Trump administration was “Great Power Competition.” That was also a lie.