Buscador avanzado

U.S. soldiers patrol an area in the town of Tell Hamis, in Syria's northeastern Hasakah governorate, on Jan. 24. Delil Souleimann/AFP via Getty Images

Three U.S. service members were killed near the Syrian border in northeastern Jordan by a drone from an Iranian-aligned militia over the weekend. U.S. troops are in the area to support the ongoing campaign against the Islamic State while also monitoring Iranian activity along the land corridor between Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. As tensions escalate in the Middle East, the frequency of attacks on U.S. troops in the region by Iran-aligned militias places American soldiers at greater risk than they have faced in years. With over 100 attacks reported since the onset of the Gaza conflict, it is time to ask whether the risks of maintaining these outposts outweigh their remaining benefits.…  Seguir leyendo »

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s confidence must be shaken after leaving Washington without the approval of more US military funding for his country amid the ongoing war with Russia.

Although President Joe Biden has stressed the need for Congress to continue supporting Ukraine, Republican opposition to the administration’s request for more than $60 billion in emergency supplemental funding has been stiff. As the GOP demands the passage of stringent border policies from Democrats in exchange for backing the military aid package, the future remains pretty bleak for Ukraine. Even if the two parties end up striking a deal, it’s likely that each subsequent aid package will only face increasing resistance and more roadblocks.…  Seguir leyendo »

U.S. President Joe Biden delivers a statement urging Congress to pass his national security supplemental from the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 6. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

On Wednesday, U.S. President Joe Biden issued what sounded like a desperate call in his bid to help Ukraine sustain its all but stalemated war effort against invading forces from Russia. “This cannot wait”, Biden said in televised remarks. “Congress needs to pass supplemental funding for Ukraine before they break for the holiday recess. Simple as that”.

In fact, there has been nothing simple about the Biden administration’s most recent supplemental budget requests for Ukraine. From the outset, Biden seems to have calculated that by pairing a call to Congress for money for Ukraine with a request for additional funds for Israel, Republican skeptics of the U.S.…  Seguir leyendo »

Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), right, speaks with Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) during a House Armed Services Committee meeting on Feb. 2. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

As Washington turns its focus toward the 2024 presidential campaign, U.S. aid to Ukraine is becoming increasingly vulnerable to partisan politics and the culture wars. When the next tranche comes up for a vote in Congress, the number of Republicans voting no will be high. If the Biden administration wants to preserve the flow of support to Kyiv, it will need to mount a more robust, more honest case about the expected costs and length of the war effort to lawmakers and the American people.

Since the full-scale Russian invasion began in February 2022, the United States has committed $113 billion to military, economic and humanitarian aid for Ukraine and other countries impacted by the war.…  Seguir leyendo »

A TV screen at a railway station in Seoul shows an image of a North Korean missile launch during a news program on Thursday. (Ahn Young-joon/AP)

Seventy years ago, on July 27, 1953, military commanders from the United States and North Korea signed an armistice agreement that ended the hostilities of the Korean War. The two sides used diplomacy to end a bloody conflict that cost 3 million lives.

A renewed commitment to diplomacy is urgently needed to keep that peace today — even if it requires a unilateral concession of some kind by the United States to get it started.

The war itself did not end in 1953. A state of hostilities still exists on the Korean Peninsula, and the security situation right now looks increasingly dire.…  Seguir leyendo »

The Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, June 2018 Leah Millis / Reuters

Seventy years ago this week, the armistice that froze the Korean War was signed. During a year of savage battlefield maneuvering and two more of bitter stalemate, nearly 40,000 American troops gave their lives. Several thousand more allied troops also died, as did millions of Koreans, many of them heroically in combat against communist aggression, and even more as its civilian victims. The southern half of the Korean peninsula, now a thriving democracy, took decades to recover. The northern half never has, remaining impoverished, oppressed, and a source of instability.

The median age of surviving U.S. Korean War veterans is around 90.…  Seguir leyendo »

Unexploded cluster bombs collected by members of a sapper group of the Karabakh Ministry of Emergency Situations (Photo by ARIS MESSINIS/AFP via Getty Images)

On 7 July, days before the NATO summit in Vilnius, the US announced that it would supply Ukraine with cluster munitions – until it can ramp up production of other types of ammunition.

It is a controversial decision which is at odds with the views of NATO allies that have foresworn the possession and use of the weapons under the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions.

The Biden administration said it had received assurances from Ukraine that the munitions will not be used in areas populated by civilians, that Ukraine will keep records and maps of where they are used, and that it will conduct a post-war clean-up.…  Seguir leyendo »

This is the ‘America First’ case for supporting Ukraine

As Ukraine begins its spring counteroffensive, a 60 percent majority of Republicans say we should stand with Ukraine until Russia is defeated, according to a Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll conducted in March. But GOP support is softening. The share of Republicans who say the United States is providing too much aid to Ukraine has steadily increased from 9 percent right after the Russian invasion to 40 percent today, according to a Pew Research Center poll in January.

Many wavering Republicans are frustrated by the lack of a clear strategy for victory from the Biden administration. They hear Ukraine skeptics on the right arguing that the war is costing too much, depleting our military readiness, increasing the risk of nuclear confrontation with Russia and distracting us from the larger threat posed by Communist China.…  Seguir leyendo »

As Russia prepares for an imminent Ukrainian counteroffensive, and America’s 2024 presidential race takes shape, it is becoming increasingly apparent that Russian President Vladimir Putin believes one possible path to victory in his so far unsuccessful war runs through the US election.

The latest evidence that Putin may just expect Western support for Ukraine to end – if only Russian forces hold on until there’s a new president in the White House – came tucked away in a blistering announcement from Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Friday, declaring entry into the country would be “closed for 500 Americans”.

The blacklist, Moscow explained, targets individuals “involved in the spread of Russophobic attitudes and fakes”, as well as principals in companies supplying weapons to Ukraine.…  Seguir leyendo »

A rally for unification of the Korean Peninsula in Paju, South Korea, near the border with North Korea, last year. Ahn Young-joon/Associated Press

Not many people know how to wage nuclear war. I’m one of them.

As a young U.S. Air Force fighter pilot in the late 1970s, I was trained to carry out nuclear strikes in a rigorous process designed to ensure that no contingencies — mechanical or ethical — deter your mission. Certain things remain burned into my memory: maps and photos of my target and the realization of the Armageddon I would leave in my wake. Training culminated with a sworn pledge to vaporize that target without hesitation.

Much of my 33-year career was spent as a nuclear warrior — I later oversaw the U.S.…  Seguir leyendo »

U.S. President George W. Bush announcing the start of the Iraq War, Washington, D.C., March 2003. Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Twenty years ago this month, President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, the most important foreign policy decision of his eight years in office and, arguably, the most significant since the end of the Cold War. The U.S.-led invasion—and the insurgency, counterinsurgency, and sectarian strife that followed—led to the deaths of over 200,000 Iraqis and the displacement of at least nine million. More than 9,000 U.S. soldiers and contractors sacrificed their lives in the war and it cost U.S. taxpayers over $2 trillion. The invasion besmirched the United States’ reputation, fueled a sense of grievance among Muslims, complicated the "global war on terror”, divided the American people, and sundered trust in government.…  Seguir leyendo »

Opaque Transparency on the Use of Force: Observations on the 2022 “1264” Report

On March 1, 2023, the White House released the annual so-called  “1264” report on legal and policy frameworks guiding the United States’ use of military force. The terse, three-page report for 2022 is a congressionally mandated successor to a comprehensive,  61-page document issued in late 2016 by the outgoing Obama administration and referred to within the executive branch as the “transparency report”. Indeed, the importance of transparency was the focus of a  fact sheet summarizing the original 2016 report, which asserted that the “sustainability and legitimacy of [the use military force and related national security] operations are best served through the clear and public articulation of the legal and policy frameworks under which such operations are conducted”.…  Seguir leyendo »

A U.S soldier walks in Baghdad, April 2003. Goran Tomasevic / Reuters

Twenty years ago, the United States invaded Iraq. It spent a decade breaking the country and then trying to put it back together again. It spent another decade trying to forget. “We have met our responsibility”, U.S. President Barack Obama told the nation in 2010 while declaring a short-lived end to the U.S. combat mission in Iraq. “Now, it is time to turn the page”.

For Obama, moving on meant taking the fight to al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan through a surge of U.S. troops. Obama’s critics, for their part, soon found another reason to tell Americans to “get over Iraq”: the debacle was, in their view, making the president and the public too reticent to use military force, this time to sort out Syria’s civil war, which erupted in 2011.…  Seguir leyendo »

A War With China Would Be Unlike Anything Americans Have Faced Before

A major war in the Indo-Pacific is probably more likely now than at any time since the Second World War.

The most probable spark is a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. President Xi Jinping of China has said unifying Taiwan with mainland China “must be achieved”. His Communist Party regime has become sufficiently strong — militarily, economically and industrially — to take Taiwan and directly challenge the United States for regional supremacy.

The United States has vital strategic interests at stake. A successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan would punch a hole in the U.S. and allied chain of defenses in the region, seriously undermining America’s strategic position in the Western Pacific, and would probably cut off U.S.…  Seguir leyendo »

El triunfo de Estados Unidos

En economía existe una ley conocida como 'ley de las consecuencias inesperadas': una acción A, que se supone que desencadena un resultado B, que conduce a un resultado C, que no es deseado ni deseable. Parece que la ley en cuestión es válida para las relaciones internacionales, como ha aprendido Vladímir Putin por las malas. Difícilmente podía imaginar y, a decir verdad, nadie imaginaba, que su deseo de conquistar Ucrania hace un año tendría como consecuencia principal la restauración del imperio de Estados Unidos. Ni los propios gobernantes de Washington lo previeron. Resulta, recordemos, que Joe Biden sabía de antemano la hora exacta de la invasión rusa.…  Seguir leyendo »

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden meet for a US-Russia summit in Geneva on June 16, 2021. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Almost exactly one year ago, I sat in my office at the US Embassy in Moscow, reading reports of Russia’s brutal military assault on Ukraine. I was numb – but not surprised – by the gravity of what was unfolding.

For weeks, I had been telling everyone I could reach that Russian President Vladimir Putin was going to launch a war on the continent of Europe, the scale of which had not been seen since World War II.

Although confident in my pre-war assessment, I was disconsolate. For two years, I had worked hard as US ambassador to make even modest progress in the few areas in which any dialogue was possible with the Russians.…  Seguir leyendo »

Growing public opinion evidence and uncertainty about the future of the war suggests that continued American support for aiding Ukraine should not be assumed.

One year into Russia’s war on Ukraine, fears that American support for Kyiv would rapidly wane have proven demonstrably wrong. Western financial and military backing has been robust thanks to allied unity and an unexpectedly mild winter. But, as financial analysts constantly remind us, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

People like to back winners. If the anticipated Russian spring offensive looks successful or the counterpart Ukrainian offensive is uninspiring, expect louder US voices calling for a negotiated settlement. The warning signs are already here.

American officials privately express growing apprehension that there will be an early resolution of the conflict.…  Seguir leyendo »

An American M1 Abrams battle tank during a NATO military exercise in Latvia last year. Ints Kalnins/Reuters

The United States’ recent promise to ship advanced M1 Abrams battle tanks to Ukraine was a swift response to a serious problem. The problem is that Ukraine is losing the war. Not, as far as we can tell, because its soldiers are fighting poorly or its people have lost heart, but because the war has settled into a World War I-style battle of attrition, complete with carefully dug trenches and relatively stable fronts.

Such wars tend to be won — as indeed World War I was — by the side with the demographic and industrial resources to hold out longest. Russia has more than three times Ukraine’s population, an intact economy and superior military technology.…  Seguir leyendo »

U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Cody Brown, with the 436th Aerial Port Squadron, checks pallets of 155 mm shells ultimately bound for Ukraine on April 29, 2022, at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. (Alex Brandon/AP)

The United States and its NATO allies are engaged in an intense debate over security assistance to Ukraine. The issue at hand is whether they should provide Kyiv with modern, Western-made heavy tanks — weapons that would greatly boost the Ukrainians’ battlefield power, especially for maneuver warfare of the type needed to retake much or most of the roughly 17 percent of Ukrainian territory that Russia still holds. (Britain has announced that it plans to send an unspecified number of its Challenger 2 main battle tanks.) But the larger debate remains unresolved.

If this kind of debate sounds familiar, that’s because it is.…  Seguir leyendo »

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a Dec. 20 award ceremony for servicemen in Bakhmut, Ukraine. (AFP/Getty Images)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s bold Wednesday visit to Washington is an epic piece of theater designed to motivate multiple audiences — in the United States, Europe, Russia and Ukraine itself. The message is simple: With its own bravery in battle and the world’s help, Ukraine will prevail.

By embracing President Biden and addressing a clamorous joint session of Congress, Zelensky will send a riposte to Moscow that’s more potent, in some ways, than the Russian drones and missiles pounding his country. Ukraine has allies; it has staying power; NATO isn’t cracking; even in a polarized America, support for Kyiv is bipartisan and sustained.…  Seguir leyendo »