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.
Trump’s Foreign Policy and the Purpose of the MAGA State
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Trump Administration
The Folly of Trying to Trade Russia for “Europe”
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...
Textbook Reactionary Populism
I recently posted a piece at Lawyers, Guns and Money about Jonathan Swan’s two-part series on Trumpworld’s plans for a second term. The gist is that Trump and his inner circle intend...
Did Biden Really Abandon Nigerian Christians?
The US State Department recently released the lists of Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) on religious freedom, part of its responsibilities under the International Religious Freedom Act (IRF)....
More Trump Administration Posts
Disentangling the Disaster in Afghanistan
This is a tragedy, but not for the reasons some think. The day after the Taliban seized Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, I received a few media inquiries. I said it's horrible that the Taliban have taken over the country, but it was also inevitable; it's unlikely a sustained US presence would have led to any other outcome. At the same time, there is no excuse for the Biden Administration's apparent failure to plan for the withdrawal, especially concerning the safety of Afghans who had worked with the United States. I got the sense that wasn't what they were expecting to hear. They wanted to...
Why you should care about Biden’s new Religious Freedom Picks
A (very small) corner of the policy world got excited Monday afternoon: the Biden Administration announced its picks for top international religious freedom positions. This is an area I've worked in for over ten years alongside my academic work, but it's one that few policy experts pay much attention to. The reason for our excitement is the the same reason everyone should be excited about Biden's picks. International religious freedom policy: The forgotten floor of Foggy Bottom US international religious freedom (IRF) policy officially started with the IRF Act of 1998. This law created an...
Deconstructing the blob
"The blob" has become a common term during the Democratic Primary. The DC foreign policy establishment, so the argument goes, has an overwhelming effect on all who engage with it, sucking them in and spitting them out as appendages to its militaristic, status quo policies. There is some truth to this idea, but it has come to encompass too much, and the term is losing its value. It may be worth deconstructing what we meant by "the blob" and having a real, direct, debate on Demcratic foreign policy. The Rise of THE BLOB One of the more popular phrases flung around in the Democratic Primary (at...
An American died in an Egyptian jail. Why didn’t this well-connected human rights community speak out?
Earlier this week, Mustafa Kassem, an American held in Egypt, died. The Trump Administration did little to help him. That wasn't surprising. What was surprising was that the international religious freedom movement (IRF), a community that has gained close access to this Administration, seemed to have done little as well. The reason behind this should make this movement think seriously about its approach to the human rights. Let me tell you two stories. In October 2016, Andrew Brunson--a US pastor who had worked for a long time in Turkey--was arrested for alleged connections to the coup...
The biggest losers from the Suleimani strike may be America’s Gulf allies
Depending on your Twitter addiction, you either went to sleep or woke up with the news that America had assassinated Qassim Suleimani, the commander of Iran's Quds force. Suleimani was one of the most powerful men in Iran, and the driver of its activities in the Middle East, so this is a big deal. People are debating whether this was just and necessary, and what happens next. But I wanted to raise a different point: what this means for America's Persian Gulf allies. Many would suspect these states--particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)--to be the biggest winners in...
Chain-ganging in reverse? Gulf states and US hostility towards Iran
I had a piece in the Washington Post's "Monkeycage" over the weekend, which you can read here. I noted that many worry Saudi Arabia and the UAE will pull America into war with Iran. But it actually looks like they're the ones restraining us. The piece was inspired by the famous "chain-ganging" dynamic in IR scholarship, but there was little discussion of that as it was geared towards a broader audience, so I wanted to expand here. I suspect most readers of this site had to read Christensen and Snyder's "Chain gangs and passed bucks" at some point. In case you didn't, the argument is...
Is religious freedom just for the faithful?
Yesterday, Michelle Kosinki of CNN reported via Twitter that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was holding a special briefing for "faith-based media" only. She later relayed that the State Department was refusing to release the list of invited media or a transcript of the event. And we've now learned that the topic of the briefing was the state of religious freedom around the world. This creates a dangerous precedent and raises some serious issues about the manner in which conservatives define religious freedom. It also highlights why progressives need to engage with, rather than write off,...