It’s chilling when the leader of a nuclear power describes a potential nuclear conflict in terms one might expect from a suicide bomber. But the intellectual foundations of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest geopolitical utterances are even more unsettling: Putin’s policy wonks assume that the world can’t hope for reasonable coordinated action to prevent catastrophic war.Putin told a session of the Valdai Club, set up as a forum for Russian foreign-policy intellectuals to share their view

 The timing could not have been worse. While the majority of people in Indonesia had barely recovered from the horror of another massive earthquake and rescue workers were still digging through the rubble looking for survivors, people were sidetracked by a spectacle of shame that would live in infamy.It’s one of those moments when politics rears its ugly head and we are once again reminded that politicians will do the worst things imaginable to score political points.Political activist Ratna Sar

It took nearly two years, but President Donald Trump has finally said something unflattering about Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Rumors of the president’s unhappiness with Mattis date back several months, yet only last weekend did Trump himself express any, telling “60 Minutes” that he thinks the retired four-star Marine general “is sort of a Democrat.”In another era, when retired generals gravitated toward the center, being called a Democrat by a Republican president would be worth its wei

America continues be in a state of civil war. Not just a civil war, but the civil war. In the first round, back in the 1860s, the Confederacy lost. Yet now the Confederacy is temporarily on top. The United States remains one country divided by two cultures.From the start, the US has been a battleground of two competing visions. America’s founding credo was that “all men are created equal.” Yet the founding reality was that white males were far more equal than everyone else. White men owned slave

All eyes are on the United States as November’s Congressional elections approach. The outcome will answer many alarming questions raised two years ago, when Donald Trump won the presidential election.Will the US electorate declare that Trump is not what America is about? Will voters renounce his racism, misogyny, nativism and protectionism? Will they say that his “America First” rejection of the international rule of law is not what the US stands for? Or will they make it clear that Trump’s win

The disappearance of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi has precipitated a new crisis in US-Saudi relations. Yet that crisis has also revived a much older dilemma in American strategy: How to deal with allies that also happen to be morally abhorrent, even murderous, dictatorships.　The rapid spread of democracy from the 1970s through the early 2000s eased this dilemma, by aligning the frontiers of freedom more closely with the frontiers of America’s European and Asia-Pacific alliances. Yet the proble