President Donald Trump’s decision to attack Iran may weaken the U.S. ability to deter great power rivals. But not because the recent U.S.-Iranian memorandum of understanding (MOU) to end the conflict makes the United States look weak. The damage had already...
For Western Christians, Holy Week—the most important time of the church calendar—just finished. Like many other Christians, it is a powerful and challenging time of the year. We are meant to reflect...
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) recently published results of a survey of historians on the best and worst foreign policy decisions in U.S. history. There are few surprises—wars in Vietnam...
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...
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 actions are in line with the history of US foreign policy. Some see the United States as adhering to liberal international norms, with Trump a major break. Others argue the United States was always domineering and aggressive, so Trump shouldn’t be much of a surprise. I thought of that as I read the news about the US intervention in Venezuela this weekend. I started out shocked; this feels like a...
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 what happened to “America First”? Tucker Carlson recently remarked it was a “little strange” that the U.S. was telling another country, “we don’t like your leadership — leave or we’ll kill you.” Trump’s former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, asked on his podcast, “Is this just a breeding ground for neocon 3.0?” Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has warned that if Trump pursues regime change, “a lot...
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 Public Radio reported: “If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities,” Trump posted on social media. “I am hereby instructing our...
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...