Essays

Nayib Bukele has been reelected president of El Salvador. The Salvadoran constitution prohibits consecutive terms as president but Salvadorans looked past the legal prohibitions to elect their young, charismatic, and popular president to a second five-year term. Bukele’s new term in power has implications for El Salvador’s postwar democracy and other populist leaders in the […]

One of the conclusions from the Israel-Hamas war is the need for renewed, concerted action to address hostage taking. There are concrete diplomatic and law enforcement actions that the international community should take to delegitimize this practice and raise the cost to hostage takers, governments that also employ this tactic, and governments that provide safe […]

Four months into the war in Gaza and the cafés in Tel Aviv are full. It’s nearly impossible to find a spot in trendy restaurants on weekends. Yet no one should be mistaken. Israel is not back to normal.  A radio or television plays in the background of nearly every café and shop, and when […]

When the International Court of Justice in the Hague decided on January 26 not to issue an injunction to stop Israel’s war in Gaza, Israel’s media saw a temporary legal victory. However, the court did not dismiss South Africa’s claim of genocide. Rather it required Israel to report within 30 days on its compliance with […]

Poland’s democratic transition is proving to be turbulent and challenging.  The liberal center-right government led by Donald Tusk took office on December 13, 2023, after eight years of rule by “Law and Justice,” a nationalist right-wing party. The new government’s reform efforts face the kind of domestic opposition that may pose the biggest threat to […]

In January 2018, I traveled via armored convoy over 20 kilometers of bad roads from a regional airport to the Hirshabelle provincial state capital of Jowar in central Somalia. Protected by Burundian soldiers of the African Union peacekeeping force, we sped through countryside and villages controlled by the al-Shabaab terror group. In Jowar, the UN […]

Twice in the last fifty years, Israel sustained surprise attacks on a major scale. In the first instance, in October 1973, the IDF failed in fulfilling its mission of defending Israel’s frontiers, but partially compensated for this failure later in the war. Fifty years later, in October 2023, the IDF failed in an irreversible way […]

One lesson of the Russo-Ukraine War is the growing role played by private corporations, both through participation in or circumvention of economic sanctions and business decision-making that directly affects the course of the fighting. 

Cyberspace has become a major domain for organized crime as well as for statecraft in the twenty-first century. Israel has become a top global cyber power. But cyber offense is no silver bullet.  What Is a Cyber-Attack?  A senior JPMorgan executive made headlines at the recent Davos gathering: “people are trying to hack into JPMorgan […]

With support from Europe, the United States, and others, Ukraine has held off – and in part, beaten back – Russia’s campaign of conquest and subjugation. But Ukraine has not won, Putin seems determined to fight on, and the West seems beset by doubts as to whether continuing to back Ukraine is practical or worth […]

Self-deterrence is a defense concept that a state may be restrained from using its military power not by the fear of a counter strike but rather owing to reputational concerns arising from moral, legal or other considerations. This concept may partly explain US reluctance to escalate the current level of military conflict with Iran, though […]

When the war broke out in Gaza, observers made a number of comparisons to the challenges faced by the US-backed anti-ISIS coalition in the battle of Mosul. I was in northern Iraq when it began in October 2016, and I covered the battles leading up to the liberation of the old city of Mosul in March and April 2017. […]