Russia
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There are certain events in the foreign policy realm that simply take the breath away. The scenes from Damascus, Syria on the 8th of December, signalling the fitting end to a half century of brutal familial dictatorship in the heart of the Middle East, fall into the breathtaking category. Fourteen years after the start of
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Thirty-five years ago the iron curtain collapsed. So ended a brief but tragic period in the European story first defined by Winston Churchill in a 1946 speech; “From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” As communist regimes fell from Budapest to Berlin to Prague
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This is the sixth, and penultimate, in a series of articles on key foreign policy challenges for the next U.S. president. The articles will continue between now and the general election on 5 November 2024. The focus of this series of articles has been on specific foreign policy challenges – China, Russia, the Middle East,
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This is the fourth in a series of articles on key foreign policy challenges for the next U.S. president. The articles will continue between now and the general election on 5 November 2024. In a 2023 essay in the journal Foreign Affairs, Jake Sullivan, the U.S. National Security Advisor, described America’s current relationship with China
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Fifty years ago this month Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace as President of the United States, before likely being impeached in the wake of the Watergate scandal. The corruption at the highest level of the American government contributed to a nascent loss of trust by a significant portion of the populace in their elected leaders,
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This is the third article in a series on key foreign policy challenges for the next U.S. president. The series will continue between now and the elections on 5 November. In his influential 1992 work – The End of History and the Last Man, on the logical progression of social and governmental structures to the
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With the shocking assassination attempt of a leading American public figure at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on 13 July, the United States joined a growing list of western democracies falling victim to the scourge of political violence. Just over two years ago, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated by a lone gunman
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This is the second in a series of Viewpoint articles focused on key foreign policy challenges for the next U.S. President. The articles will run between now and the general election on 5 November. In an interview with NBC News in 1998, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called the United States “the indispensable nation.” The
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Imagine a scenario in which the major powers of Europe and North America had come together in a political-military alliance in the early 1930s, pooling their diplomatic, economic, and defense resources to counter the rising menace of Nazi Germany. Under this storyline, it is highly unlikely that Hitler’s utopian plans for world domination would have
Bob Beck's Foreign Policy Blog 