Vladimir putin

When the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) expires tomorrow, the United States and Russia will, for the first time since the early 1970s, operate without a binding agreement limiting their strategic nuclear forces. That fact alone is striking. What is less obvious – and more consequential – is what the expiration reveals about the state of nuclear order in a world increasingly shaped by authoritarian ambition and multipolar competition. Signed in 2010, New START capped each side at 1,550 deployed strategic warheads and restricted the number of missiles and bombers that could carry them. Equally important were the verification provisions: inspections and data exchanges designed to reduce uncertainty

For the Kremlin, the US’s snatching of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro is a humiliation with a silver lining. True, little more than a year after the precipitous fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Russia has been shown to be completely hopeless when it comes to keeping its allies in power. In Caracas, US airborne forces breezed past Russian-supplied S-300 air defense systems, which were part of a $20 billion package of maybe not-so-great Russian military equipment that Moscow sold the Venezuelans. The Kremlin has lost a strategic bridgehead in South America which it could, potentially, have used to disrupt and challenge Washington’s regional hegemony – if Moscow weren’t so committed financially

No one ever tucked themselves up in bed to read a government document – at least not in the expectation of enjoying it. The standard format is one of hundreds of pages of impenetrable jargon yielding no more than nuggets of significant ideas. The Trump administration has admirably cut through that tendency to produce a National Security Strategy (NSS) that is worth reading: a coherent outlining of America’s strategic intentions on the world stage. Originally composed by Michael Anton, a brilliant mind who is sadly leaving the State Department, the document concisely lays out a Trumpian vision of America’s role in the 21st century. It stands as a corrective to

Believing that time and destiny are on his side, Putin is sticking to his maximalist war aims

Everything turns on security guarantees, which are so far undefined

He is now willing to stake all on victory in the field

The Ukrainian government aims to channel combat-seasoned veterans into regulated security firms

Diplomacy has stirred, however ineptly

The Kremlin has a strategic plan. Trump does not

The former Slovenian supermodel clearly has no great love for Vladimir Putin

The hawks in Washington are jubilant, the MAGA restrainers, as they refer to themselves, aghast