Outside the Beltway

The Russian leader is very unlikely to be hauled before the Hague.

Because you needed one more thing to worry about.

Turkish forces advance, American forces retreat, the Kurds seek new allies, and Syria and Russia come out the winners.

The United States is withdrawing its small force from Northern Syria, clearing the way for a Turkish invasion that will likely
aim to wipeout the Kurdish forces in the region.

President Trump has lost another one of his top advisers on the fight against ISIS.

President Trump is preparing to scrap a thirty-year-old treaty that marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War. It would be a foolish mistake.

Seventeen years ago, America was thrust into a war that seemingly has no end.

The President was up late last night sending an incredibly over-the-top tweet directed at Iran.

We still don’t know what President Trump and Vladimir Putin talked about or agreed to during their two-hour meeting on Monday.

There is no obvious strategy and even the expressed rationale makes no sense.

The United States can’t do any good in Syria, but we can do a lot of bad.

Even the United Nations has given up trying to maintain an accurate estimate.

Without Congressional authorization, any attack on Syria would be illegal, but don’t expect Congress to do anything about it.

Once again, President Trump’s foreign policy tweeting is causing problems.

President Trump took to Twitter this morning and decided poke a stick in the eye of the Russian bear.

The United States has several options in Syria. None of them are good and one of them would be disastrous.

A response to one of the most deadly chemical attacks in the Syrian civil war has come, probably from Israel. What’s next?

Just about a year after President Trump attacked Syria over the use of chemical weapons, the Assad regime has again used chemical weapons. There’s not much we can do about, nor should we.

President Trump is talking about pulling American troops out of Syria, but his own White House is contradicting him.

Even during an overseas trip, President Trump continues to try to undermine the Russia investigation.

Kurds in Iraq voted overwhelmingly for independence in a non-binding referendum, and the result is threatening to create a new conflict in the Middle East.

A night of carnage and depravity in the United Kingdom.

It’s been a bad week for U.S.-Russian relations.

A majority of Americans support last week’s airstrikes in Syria but are skeptical of any expansion beyond that.

It’s not at all clear that there is a useful strategy at work here.

The situation in the Middle East just potentially became much more complicated.

The United States and Russia have reached an agreement to end fighting in Syria, but it seems unlikely to succeed given that it doesn’t involve the parties actually doing the fighting.

The execution of a prominent Shi’ite cleric has led to a rapid deterioration of the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Some analysts are already suggesting that Russia’s two month old intervention in Syria is becoming a quagmire. That seems to be a premature judgment, but it’s not accomplishing much more than anything the West is doing.

The Director of the F.B.i. told Congress today that the San Bernardino shooters were apparently radicalized much earlier than previously believed.

France’s President has spent the week trying to forge and agreement on an anti-ISIS policy, but the two nations that matter the most also disagree the most.

Tensions between Russia and Turkey remain high in the wake of yesterday’s incident, but there are some signs that things are starting to cool down.

A potentially big complication in an already complicated situation.

A new poll taken in the wake of the Paris attacks finds Americans increasingly fearful of ISIS attacks in the U.S., opposed to the admission of Syrian refugees, and not very confident in President Obama’s ability to deal with the ISIS threat.

A collection of material that tries to separate the facts of the U.S. Syrian refugee screen process from the fear, myth, paranoia, and xenophobia.

In the wake of the attacks in Paris, there’s a strong impulse to do “something,” but that doesn’t mean we should do something utterly foolish. And a no-fly zone would be utterly foolish.

We are legally, morally, and practically obligated to respond. Let’s not do so stupidly.

Ben Carson displays incoherence and ignorance on foreign policy issues that disqualify him from being considered a serious candidate for President of the United States.

Another day, another military escalation in the Middle East.

The U.S. and Russia have reached a much-needed deal to avoid inadvertent confrontations over the skies of Syria.

With Russia now launching its own airstrikes in Syria, it’s become obvious that U.S. policy in the Syrian Civil War is irrational and contradictory. And Russia’s policy isn’t any better.

The U.S. is set to ramp up its contribution to dealing with the Syrian refugee crisis, but there’s a lot more we can do.

Explaining my ambivalence around the latest escalation in our intervention.

ISIS owns more territory than it did when the US bombing campaign began.

My latest for The National Interest, “Obama’s Paris Blunder: Part of a Much Bigger Problem,” has posted.

Who should own antiquity?

A massacre is about to unfold “a stone’s throw” from Turkey’s border.

Apparently, the buck doesn’t stop in the Oval Office these days.

Iran and the United States are on the same side in the fight against ISIS, whether they like it or not.