Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities, a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune and a foreign affairs writer for Newsweek.
Writing in his space last week, Jacob Heilbrunn quipped that President Donald Trump’s summit in Singapore with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un went so well for the North Korean fat man that Vladimir Putin must now be itching to meet the Donald as soon as he can. Given how little Kim gave up in Singapore and … Read more
Donald Trump means different things to different people. To his core supporters, he’s the man who will make America great again. To his diehard opponents, he is a dangerous juvenile with authoritarian tendencies. Ultimately, these descriptions are secondary to how Trump sees himself: a tough, dealmaking Svengali who has the experience and power of persuasion
The Attorney General was supposed to catch the snakes slithering into the White House.
May 17, 2017 started out as any other day in Donald Trump’s Washington. Men and women in suits with briefcases walked into work, ready to meet clients or do business. The day, however, proved to be the very beginning of Trump’s troubles, with the appointment of a special counsel to look into allegations of collusion … Read more
The midterm elections this November are bound to be a rough slog for a Republican Party desperately trying to keep its congressional majority. As former President Barack Obama would say, the Democratic base is “fired up, ready to go.” Democrats are giddy about their prospects; Republicans are for the most part gloomy. The GOP will … Read more
When it comes to military action against the Assad regime, the United States again confronts one of the most fundamental questions of the American constitutional republic: does the president have the authority to order U.S. military force without the expressed authorisation of Congress? If you ask most executive branch officials, you would probably hear an … Read more
From our UK edition
The United Nations Security Council has major responsibility in its job description: to maintain international peace and security. It is spelled out in Article 24 of the U.N. Charter, a tall task in normal circumstances but one that nonetheless underscores the core of the council’s very existence. Without it, the Security Council might as well be simply
Throughout the course of the inquiry on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, White House lawyers have attempted to drill a message into the president’s head. It is a simple one: whatever you do, don’t go after Robert Mueller personally or suggest in any way that you will shut down the investigation. You … Read more
Robert Mueller, the former Director of the FBI and special counsel in the soap opera that is the Russia collusion investigation, has been on the case for ten months now. His team of attorneys and Washington prosecutors has interviewed dozens of witnesses, scanned hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, sent an unknown number of … Read more
Only very rarely in today’s Washington, D.C. is a cause so strong that it brings together America’s most famous progressive with one of the country’s most ideological conservatives. But the nasty, bloody, and intractable proxy war in Yemen – and the U.S. military’s involvement in it – is one of those causes. Yesterday afternoon, Vermont … Read more
One of President Donald Trump’s chief political foils in the Republican Party — a party that increasingly resembles a Trump fan club more than a group of partisan but independent thinkers — is about to storm the national scene and send a jolt of energy to the dwindling and listless #NeverTrump movement. Mitt Romney, the former Governor
From our UK edition
The opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea was a miraculous site. The lights. The fireworks. The dancing. The choreography. It was everything we have come to expect from a world-class Olympic Games, a coordinated and ritzy show on behalf the entire planet. The Games in Pyeongchang, however, do stand out
From our UK edition
There was a time not so long ago when the political establishment of the Republican Party – the Mitt Romneys, Paul Ryans, and Lindsey Grahams of the world – were strong Donald Trump antagonists. Trump would utter a racially charged remark about a Mexican-American district court judge being biased against him because he was Mexican,
Donald Trump had a lot to prove during his first ever State of the Union address this week. He had to demonstrate to the millions of Americans watching on television that he could deliver a semi-unifying and presidential speech and stay in one place for more than an hour without diverging into tangents. He had to show
From our UK edition
Compared to previous instances in US history when political paralysis and dysfunction shut down Washington for weeks at a time, the three-day government shutdown that ended on Monday was a rather mundane and unremarkable occurrence. Indeed, unlike the 21-day saga in 1995-1996 between President Bill Clinton and House Republicans or the 16-day clash between House
