Colombia was once seen as a success story. Threatened by violent insurgents, the country regained stability and, in 2016, reached a peace agreement with the largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Spanish initials FARC). All this was accomplished with sustained US security and economic support.  Lately, Colombia seems to be moving backwards. […]

On March 11, Greenlanders voted in elections for their parliament, Inatsisartut. The big winner was Demokraatit (Democracy) party, which favors Greenlandic independence, though in a gradual and consensual process. The party, which won a plurality of the votes, used to support maintaining ties with Denmark. A party favoring immediate independence (Naleraq or Compass) also gained seats.   […]

Israel’s defense and security establishment has completed a series of internal investigations into the intelligence, strategic, and tactical failures of October 7, 2023. The findings are beginning to reshape the Israel Defense Force (IDF) approach to dealing with the terrorist armies on its borders. Among the findings: the concept of deterrence (originating in Cold War […]

In the early hours of March 18, the Israel Defense Forces began a round of airstrikes in Gaza targeting Hamas, the largest since a ceasefire that began on January 19 and ended on March 1.  The six-week ceasefire enabled the release of 33 Israeli hostages. Israel sought to extend it in exchange for the release […]

When I first met Elbridge Colby (known as Bridge), he was a young analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis, where I served as a senior advisor. CNA is the US Navy and Marine Corps think tank and one of the “Federally Funded Research and Development Centers,” along with the RAND Corporation, MITRE, the Johns […]

American diplomats are supposed to serve at least one tour on the visa line overseas, interviewing would-be visitors. It’s important work that has the side benefit of supplying some good stories. The Mahmoud Khalil case reminds me of a story from my first tour at Consulate General Jerusalem in 1990, interviewing mainly Palestinians on the […]

Trump has stunned Europe by following through on his pledge to force an end to the fighting in Ukraine, and making European allies take more responsibility for their own security. The Pentagon has reportedly been instructed to prepare to withdraw US forces deployed in Syria. Is the Trump administration in the early stages of actually […]

The six chords, each spaced with a rest of about a second, came crashing down in the resplendent home of Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. The audience sat transfixed. Seated in the rear balcony, I was listening to Santtu-Matias Rouvali conduct Jean Sibelius’ 1919 fifth symphony based, like Beethoven’s, around a four-note motif. The opening of […]

Israel-Egypt peace was carefully constructed in the 1979 treaty and has weathered numerous regional storms: the 1982 Lebanon War, two Palestinian intifadas, the upheaval of the 2011 Arab Spring, and even sixteen months of conflict in Gaza. Throughout, Israel and Egypt have sustained generally productive military and economic cooperation (despite persistent anti-Israeli sentiment in the […]

The spirit of Neville Chamberlain is haunting establishment foreign policy circles. Senior Trump administration officials have begun meeting with Russian counterparts and floating possible scenarios for a negotiated peace deal. Some American media commentators – including on the right – have accused Trump of “selling out” and “betraying” Ukraine in the same way that Chamberlain […]

What happens on the battlefields of Ukraine will not stay in Ukraine. As the Spanish Civil War was a laboratory for the Second World War, so the current war in Ukraine prefigures technologies to be used in the next one. The US and its allies – Israel, Taiwan, South Korea, the Baltic States and Poland, […]

The United States and Israel face fateful decisions on Syria. Israel appears to be moving towards some level of confrontation with the Damascus regime, which is seen as allied with Erdoğan’s Turkey and identified increasingly in Israel as a threat. The US position remains unclear. But if history is any guide (and the unfortunate analogy […]

Friedrich Merz, the leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union and likely the next chancellor of Germany, did not win a mandate in the federal elections on February 23. Instead, he earned what amounted to a four-year reprieve for the German political establishment. On February 28, he will start exploratory talks with the Social Democratic […]

American endeavors in Lebanon are a waste of time and money. Lebanon is largely devoid of accountability and agency, with a government under the effective control of an internationally designated terrorist group – Hizbullah. Years of communal and elite squabbling, coupled with foreign interference from Iran and Syria, have created a dysfunctional and dystopic state […]

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine three years ago was its first step towards reclaiming control over the lands between the Oder and the Don Rivers. Whether by means of coercion or invasion, Moscow’s successful subjugation of Central and Eastern European states would lead to a full-scale resumption of the Cold War. This can be prevented. First, […]

The Organization of American States will select its next secretary general on March 10. The OAS is a platform for collective problem-solving among its 35 members states, representing all the sovereign states in the Western Hemisphere except for Cuba and Nicaragua. Among the organization’s strengths are programs on citizen security (such as law enforcement training) and […]

Will President Trump agree to enter into renewed nuclear negotiations with Iran that allow Iran to avoid Israeli airstrikes? According to the Institute for Science and International Security, Iran is around six months away from being able to build a crude nuclear bomb, and likely several more months from having a nuclear warhead on a […]

From the first day of his return to the White House, Donald Trump has made a point of demonstrating that he intends to carry out his campaign promises. In addition to the flurry of executive orders that he began to issue within hours of his inauguration, Trump has also made waves internationally.  By threatening to […]

Robert Silverman: You are an American Jew who moved to Israel, with your wife, as a young couple shortly after the Six-Day War. Then you wrote a book in the 1970s that influenced a whole generation of American Jews. It was called Letters to an American Jewish Friend. And you were talking to your counterparts […]

Yossi Klein Halevi: In terms of my personal journey, it’s framed by my evolving, understanding of the Holocaust, my relationship to the Holocaust and my generation’s experience as opposed to my father’s experience. My father was a survivor from Hungary.  I grew up in a very charged Holocaust environment in Brooklyn, in the 1960s, which […]

Gadi Taub: I believed in Oslo [the 1990s Palestinian-Israeli peace process] because I imagined the Palestinians to be like us. I imagined their national liberation movement to be a national liberation movement just like ours. Then reality just exploded outside my window. Tel Aviv is small. So from where I lived back then, when a […]