Daniel DePetris

In a perfect world, lawmakers responsible for crafting defense policy would actually debate defense policy. Yet rarely does this occur when the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) works its way through Congress. If there is debate, it typically revolves around numbers: how much money does the Pentagon need to keep the United States safe and ahead of its strategic competitors? How many F-35 airframes should be purchased for the Air Force? How much cash should be appropriated for the various “assurance initiatives” the Defense Department runs on a daily basis? This year was no different. The Senate this week sent a compromise $768 billion NDAA to President Biden’s desk in a resounding vote after a multi-day hiccup over amendments killed the original version.

Nearly ten months after President Biden ordered defense secretary Lloyd Austin to undertake a comprehensive, across-the-board review of America's military overseas, the Pentagon finally concluded the study this week. And it landed with a loud thud of disappointment. So far as we can tell (the entire product won’t be released to the public), the results of the Global Posture Review (GPR) range from unimaginative to pitiful. Or, in the words of one congressional aide familiar with the findings, "No decisions, no changes, no sense of urgency, no creative thinking. Lots of word salad.” Of course, the GPR is hardly the first government report to be classified this way.

The United States Congress is divided on pretty much everything these days. But there is one agenda item that traditionally brings lawmakers together: the defense budget. Usually Pentagon funding amounts to a pro-forma love-fest with a result — higher military spending — that is basically baked in. The defense budgeting process is usually like a boring movie, where the conclusion is foreseen about 10 minutes into the flick. Last week, the House of Representatives passed its own version of the National Defense Authorization Act by a resounding 316-113 vote. It's a mammoth 1,362-page bill that piled an additional $25 billion onto what President Joe Biden had submitted in his own $753 billion budget request.

Nearly a week after the last American C-17 flew out of Kabul, the Biden administration remains in the middle of a firestorm. Lawmakers are shouting about what they consider a botched withdrawal and evacuation process from Afghanistan. Calls for oversight and accountability on Capitol Hill go beyond President Biden’s traditional opponents. Multiple Senate committees are planning to conduct investigations into why officials weren’t prepared for worst-case scenarios, why the administration believed the Afghan army could hold out longer than it did, and why tens of thousands of Afghans who assisted the US military during the war were unable to be airlifted out of the country.

It’s official: after eight years of a relatively pragmatic administration, Iran is now under new management. Ebrahim Raisi, a disciple of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the former judiciary chief, was inaugurated this week as Iran’s next president. Clad in a white shirt, black robe and thin-framed glasses, Raisi accepted a task that will likely prove to be his toughest assignment in a decades-long career serving the Islamic Republic system.  Protests over poor public services, like water shortages, are becoming more frequent. While the International Monetary Fund projects Iran’s economy to grow at 2.5 per cent this year, the country is in the midst of a highly fractious period.

The world doesn’t hear a lot from George W. Bush these days. The former president of the United States has spent his post-presidential life in a cozy, somewhat secluded existence on his Texas ranch in Crawford, about a two-hour drive south of Dallas. Other than issuing the occasional statement and urging Americans to get vaccinated, Bush largely spends his time painting or hanging out with his wife, former First Lady Laura Bush. Apparently, though, the nearly-complete US withdrawal from Afghanistan is too much for the ex-president to bear. Speaking to German television broadcaster Deutsche Welle, Bush all but excoriated president Joe Biden for pulling the troops out and ending the longest war in US history.

The meeting between U.S. president Joe Biden and Russian president Vladimir Putin in Geneva started cordially enough. A quick handshake, toothy smiles for the cameras, and some standard words of diplomacy. 'I would like to thank you for the initiative to meet today,' a slouching Putin told an attentive Biden. 'Still, U.S.-Russian relations have accumulated a lot of issues that require a meeting at the highest level, and I hope that our meeting will be productive.' Putin's words were something of an understatement. U.S.-Russia relations are scraping the bottom of the barrel and may very well be at their lowest point since the early 1980s, when Washington and Moscow were turning Europe into a parking lot for intermediate-range missiles.