American foreign policy

Donald Trump doesn’t take office for another week, but the Trump show starts in earnest this week with a confirmation hearing for Pete Hegseth, followed shortly by Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Doug Burgum, Doug Collins and others.While some drama is to be expected, Trump’s current nominees have mostly run the gauntlet unscathed. Not all were so lucky, however. Former congressman Matt Gaetz quickly withdrew his name from consideration to be attorney general once he felt that he no longer had a foreseeable path forward; another Florida man, Hillsborough County sheriff Chad Chronister, withdrew his name from consideration due to concerns from the right about his record during Covid-era lockdowns.

Jimmy Carter will be remembered as a decent, honorable man of faith, who lived a productive life according to those high standards, both publicly and privately.  He was an outlier in his forging of a productive life after leaving office. Instead of grifting and selling access to policymakers, like so many former politicians do today, he had a distinguished second career promoting and monitoring democratic elections around the world. That legacy will live on in the work of the Carter Center in Atlanta. So will his work with Habitats for Humanity, building homes for the poor.  He will be remembered, too, for his long, loving marriage to Rosalynn, whom he married in 1946, when he was a young naval officer. She died only a year ago.  It was a remarkable life.

Donald Trump’s triumphal return to the White House is the end of more than just the Joe Biden era. Since Bill Clinton’s presidency, Democrats had adhered to a formula they thought unbeatable: They would be socially progressive, economically centrist and staunchly internationalist. Republicans, they thought, had staked their future on demographics that were in decline — whites and the most conservative Christians. Democrats were the party of twenty-first-century America, an ethnically diverse and more secular, or at least religiously liberal, land. What went wrong? When Trump won in 2016, Democrats dismissed it as a fluke.

What on earth is Donald Trump thinking? That’s what many realists and restrainers inside and out of Washington are asking themselves after news broke late last night that Marco Rubio, the senior senator from Florida, is set to be tapped as secretary of state in the next administration.  The reactions haven’t been uniformly bad, mind you. Other candidates rumored to be under consideration, such as Vivek Ramaswamy, caused many in the US foreign policy elite to wretch in fear. Others, like former national security advisor Robert O’Brien and Senator Bill Hagerty, who served as US ambassador to Japan during Trump’s first term, would have been predictable choices with whom most could live.  Rubio, however, is one of the most hawkish options Trump could have picked.

There is no sign marking the entrance to Barman Dictat. The bar under 44 Khreshchatyk Street in Kyiv boasts the largest mezcal collection in Eastern Europe. On a typical night you can find it by noting the crowd of people wafting cigarette smoke into the evening air. Inside, you’ll find shelves of more than 400 glowing bottles perched above a steel bar stretching more than thirty feet. You’ll find bespoke cocktails — Kraken, Smoky Voice and Tickle Balls. And, on one particular May evening, you’ll find the seventy-first secretary of state of the United States of America at center stage. Clad in black and wielding a scarlet electric guitar, Antony Blinken seemed less enthused about the moment than his staff had perhaps anticipated.