President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem provides a timely opportunity for the new president to make a sharp break with President Barack Obama’s unwise, unjustified and ultimately ineffective hostility toward America’s closest ally in the turbulent Middle East. Especially after Obama’s recent decision to abstain from, rather than …
John Kennedy once said that “it is the president alone who must make the major decisions of our foreign policy,” and I have long thought he was right because, at moments of national peril, our presidents can’t as a practical matter share the conduct of foreign policy with a body like Congress. FDR couldn’t lead …
After taking white working-class voters for granted in November, the Democratic Party seems poised to do the same for Jews – and that could have important implications for the already troubled U.S.-Israeli relationship. Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who lead the party’s progressive wing, are backing Rep. Keith Ellison, an …
As President-elect Donald Trump walks back his most controversial campaign pledges on such issues as immigration and trade, the most important question is whether he’ll do the same on the all-encompassing issue of U.S. global leadership. At stake is nothing less than the liberal international order – the military, diplomatic and economic institutions, treaties and …
Want some good news? Beyond the gloomy prospects of renewed political polarization after Election Day, of House Republican vows to relentlessly investigate a new Democratic president – presuming, of course, that we avoid the nightmare of a Trump victory – hopeful signs of bipartisan progress are emerging in foreign policy. Across the foreign policy establishment, …
We now face the ironic, yet all-too-predictable, result of years of U.S. appeasement of Iran in order to secure a global nuclear deal: U.S. military involvement in a proxy war with the Islamic Republic in Yemen. In recent days, an exchange of missile attacks between Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the United States puts the …
The revelation of recent days that, back in January, President Obama agreed that the United Nations should lift its sanctions against two Iranian state banks which financed Iran’s ballistic missile development puts the lie to Washington’s claims – stubbornly maintained for more than a year – that it was determined to rein in the Islamic …