Last week, the Trump administration proudly posted footage of the U.S. military carrying out the apparent extrajudicial execution of 11 unidentified men on a boat in the Caribbean. At the same time, masked government agents are stalking, beating, and abducting people on the streets of the nation’s capital with impunity. The president has deployed armed National Guard troops with armored combat vehicles to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., in a show of force, and he has promised to send more troops to Democrat-led cities that show insufficient deference.

This looks an awful lot like the arrival of the authoritarianism that many Democrats have been warning us about for the better part of the past decade. Now that even President Donald Trump himself is toying with title of “dictator,” why are so few Democratic leaders sounding the alarm?

Let’s consider what’s happening in the national capital. After declaring a “crime emergency” in D.C. on Aug. 11, Trump has deployed about 2,000 National Guard troops and 2,500 federal law enforcement officers to the city and asserted federal control over the city’s police department.

It is tempting, perhaps even reassuring, to dismiss the entire exercise as a made-for-TV performance for the MAGA base, a frantic attempt to change the subject from the Jeffrey Epstein files, or a distraction from economic woes. Battalions of National Guard members picking up trash and raking leaves in D.C. parks, the FBI and Secret Service teaming up with three other federal agencies to confiscate dime bags of marijuana, a guardsman ticketed for running a red light in Washington’s refined Capitol Hill neighborhood in a 14-ton armored vehicle (that nearly crushed an unsuspecting commuter) look more like scenes out of Veep than a threat to the republic.

But there’s nothing amusing about the disproportionate focus of the federal surge on immigration enforcement, which in practice means plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, often backed by other federal agents and the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, tackling suspected undocumented immigrants (i.e., residents who look, in the judgement of an ICE agent, like working-class Hispanic people). This is now a daily occurrence in Washington.

Is Trump’s D.C. takeover a publicity stunt; an immigration crackdown; or, as the conspicuous domestic military deployments against the will of local communities suggests, a genuine attempt to establish authoritarian rule? There’s no reason that it can’t be all three. While guard members in D.C. are relegated to cleanup duty for now, the Trump administration is working steadily to transform the military into an effective tool of domestic repression. The deployment reinforces a narrative that the military can and should fight crime, and by deploying the guard in concert with ICE, Trump is associating the military with his crackdown on immigrants. That association will likely rupture the high trust that the U.S. military currently enjoys among Americans. But for Trump, the reputational risk to the armed forces is a feature, not a bug.

Blurring the lines between the military and ICE lends the military’s prestige to unpopular immigration crackdowns and further solidifies Trump’s dominance over the national security state, which eluded him during his first term. Repeated domestic deployments will build consent within the military to carry out his illiberal domestic agenda; the more that the military bureaucracy is assigned responsibility for domestic law enforcement, the more reluctant it will be to relinquish a high-profile mission that earns the praise of the commander in chief.

Trump has been clear that he not only intends to expand combined National Guard/ICE deployments to other blue cities (with Chicago at the top of his list), but also aims to expand the role of the guard in upcoming crackdowns. His Aug. 25 executive order directs all state National Guards to be “trained and ready to assist in quelling civil disturbances nationwide” and for the national guard to maintain a “quick reaction force for rapid nationwide deployment.” Trump’s federal agents have already attacked and arrested migrants, U.S. citizens, and even a sitting U.S. senator, and he’s trying to get the armed forces in on the game.

Last week’s strike in the Caribbean followed months of threats to use the military against drug cartels, proving that the administration’s tough talk must be taken as deadly serious. The Trump administration has long ideated about launching drone strikes and special operations raids against cartels in Mexico, which have also been labeled foreign terrorist organizations.

A war game organized by the Win Without War Education Fund earlier this year found that not only would U.S. military intervention in Mexico fail to stem the cross-border drug trade, but also that it would offer the Trump administration political cover to begin arbitrarily accusing U.S. citizens of material support for a terrorist organization if they had purchased theoretically cartel-linked products ranging from marijuana to avocados. For 11 unidentified figures in a small boat, that accusation carried a sentence of summary execution by the U.S. military.

We are approaching the moment that former Vice President Kamala Harris warned of on the campaign trail in October 2024 when she said Trump would “use the military as his personal militia.”

Yet a few pugnacious Democrats—such as Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker—aside, most of her party is conspicuously silent. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries demurred and deflected last week when asked point-blank on CNN what his plan was to fight Trump’s guard deployments. Earlier last month, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer vowed to fight “tooth and nail” against Trump’s takeover of D.C. police, but then called it a “distraction,” echoing the assessment of leading “national security Democrat” Sen. Elissa Slotkin. A joint resolution to terminate Trump’s state of emergency in Washington has so far earned 83 co-sponsors—barely more than a third of house Democrats.

The problem is not only that Democrats embrace a right-wing framing of “law and order” politics, as policing expert Alex S. Vitale wrote last month in Current Affairs magazine. It’s also that they embrace the right-wing framing of national security in general, leaving them with little room for disagreement when the national security state is employed in illegal or illiberal ways.

When Trump bombed Iranian nuclear sites in June, bypassing the congressional authorization required for an act of war, leading Democrats focused on the unconstitutional nature of the strikes but rarely questioned the strategic recklessness or the international legality of bombing Iran. Jeffries’s first response was to declare that “Iran is a sworn enemy of the United States and can never be permitted to become a nuclear-capable power.” Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who now sits on the board of influential Democratic think tank Center for American Progress, penned an op-ed criticizing Trump’s rashness but was fine with the illegal, preventive strikes themselves (to the point of trying to claim credit for them if they worked).

Criticisms of Trump’s overreach at home have similarly focused on procedure over principle. Jeffries and even Pritzker have tried to push back against Trump by arguing that in Washington and Chicago, crime is on the decline—an argument that validates Trump’s framing and implies that deploying the military would be appropriate if those cities suffered from higher crime rates. MSNBC host Joe Scarborough recently took this reasoning to its logical extreme, suggesting that Pritzker should voluntarily partner with Trump to use the National Guard to fight crime in Chicago and that the Republican governors volunteering their troops for Washington or Chicago should instead deploy them to high-crime cities in their home states.

Common to the Democratic discourse on occupying U.S. cities and bombing foreign countries is the tacit acceptance that there is a dangerous threat out there and that it does need to be met with state violence. Absent is any substantial challenge to that paradigm of militarization and the corollary assumption that a heavily armed solution would be just and effective.

In the event of an actual foreign terrorist attack, we can only imagine how quickly the anemic resistance to this militarization would dissipate and how readily Democrats would embrace troops on the streets, even as Trump uses them to quash dissent.

Democrats should not dismiss people’s legitimate concerns about crime. Americans have a right to feel safe in their homes and communities. But they also have the right to know which approaches really work and which are just security theater. Instead of trying to calibrate the right number of badges and guns to inject into U.S. cities, Democrats should celebrate Baltimore’s stunning success in reducing homicides to a 50-year low over just three years by surging coordinated social services. And they should deride as unserious anyone who claims to be “tough on crime” while refusing to apply evidence-based strategies.

Likewise, instead of trying to find the most constitutional way to bomb Iranian cities, Democrats should state unapologetically that Trump’s policy has undermined our security, drawn us closer to large-scale conflict, and made the government of Iran more likely to decide to obtain a nuclear weapon.

Democrats chasing right-wing positions on security issues is nothing new. Former President Lyndon Johnson reluctantly expanded U.S. involvement in Vietnam because he was afraid that Republicans would call him weak. Indeed, the national security state that Trump is now wielding with abandon was perfected by the last two Democratic presidents, who expanded a brutal immigration infrastructure and established tenuous new legal precedents for dropping bombs on people—including U.S. citizens—all over the Middle East and Africa.

But with troops in the streets, the military prepared to blow up whoever Trump calls a terrorist, and Stephen Miller calling the Democratic Party itself a “domestic, extremist organization,” time is running out. Democratic leaders need to face reality, fight back, and abandon the logic of militarization before they become its next victims.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s chaotic agenda is taking a growing toll on American farmers, many of whom backed his return to office but are increasingly feeling the pressures of his unpredictable trade and deportation policies. 

It’s not just the shock waves of Trump’s trade war against much of the world that are hitting U.S. farmers hard, particularly in sectors that are highly dependent on trade with Chinese markets. Trump’s immigration crackdown, too, has injected new uncertainty into the broader farm labor force, around 40 percent of which has been made up of undocumented immigrants over the past three decades. 

U.S. farmers are facing a “very difficult” landscape, said Chris Barrett, an agricultural economist at Cornell University. “They’re getting pinched on multiple sides.” 

For farmers in the United States, working in agriculture has long been a difficult business, no matter who is in office. In normal years, most farmers lose money on farming and must cross-subsidize those losses with other, nonfarm earnings, Barrett said. 

But the addition of Trump’s trade war and deportation crackdown is making business even harder for a group that was one of his key voter bases in the recent U.S. presidential election and helped ensure his return to office. The number of small-business bankruptcies filed by farmers and fishers recently surged to a five-year high, Bloomberg reported, and the Department of Agriculture expects farm debt to reach a record high this year. 

“This year is going to be tougher than most,” Barrett said. 

That’s in large part because the Trump administration’s policies are now squeezing both farmers’ production costs and overseas markets. On the production side, Trump’s aggressive deportation drive has intensified uncertainty in the sector and driven away some workers, compounding labor challenges on farms.

Read more

At a cabinet meeting last week, U.S. President Donald Trump celebrated a key milestone: The United States, according to him, was no longer funding Ukraine in its defense against Russia.

“We’re no longer involved with funding Ukraine, but we are involved with trying to stop the war and the killing in Ukraine. So we’re selling missiles and military equipment, millions and millions and ultimately billions of dollars to the NATO people,” Trump said. “So, they’re funding the entire war. We’re not funding anything. I think it’s an important point to make.”

Trump’s not entirely wrong—but he’s not exactly right, either, according to government reports and think tank analysts. On the military side, the United States is still set to spend billions of dollars on weapons for Ukraine, while on the civilian side, aid continues to flow, albeit with significant reductions.

The bulk of U.S. aid to Kyiv has come through five mammoth congressional appropriations bills totaling $175 billion in support, of which $128 billion goes to programs that directly support Ukraine’s military and civil society, according to the Council on Foreign Relations think tank. The rest goes to secondary goals related to Russia’s assault on Ukraine, such as supporting nearby countries and boosting the U.S. military presence in Europe.

Read more

Although there are striking similarities between the geopolitics of the Indian subcontinent and the Korean Peninsula, the international relations community rarely pays attention to their parallel trajectories. Recent events provide a useful starting point for a comparison: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s troubled dealings with U.S. President Donald Trump contrast sharply with South Korean President Lee Jae-myung’s smoother handling of the White House’s real and imagined peace diplomacy during his visit to Washington last month. Modi’s difficulties and Lee’s successes also offer insights into the prospects for Trump’s peace initiatives in Asia.

Read more

Much has been made of U.S. President Donald Trump’s rapid embrace of the tools of state capitalism. Yet while Trump has made clear his desire to emulate President Xi Jinping’s iron grip on China’s economy and citizens, Trump’s economy looks less like a centrally planned industrial strategy than a third-rate emerging market.

Whether embracing tariffs, demanding equity in private companies, conditioning market access on foreign investment and kickbacks, or attacking independent institutions such as the Federal Reserve, Trump is following a well-worn playbook. And it’s not a good one. These same measures have been deployed across Latin America, Africa, and Asia with remarkably consistent results: lower investment, less wealth, higher volatility, and higher prices.

Consider the elements of Trump’s emerging market program in turn. Most notable are tariffs. Trump has famously called tariffs “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” For decades, he has supported using them to close the goods trade deficit, completely disregarding the services trade, in which the United States is dominant.

Read more

This has been the case with conversations about how Donald Trump misuses and abuses presidential power. Often, the president’s supporters, as well as some conservative commentators who want to offer analysis without falling into “Trump derangement syndrome,” use historical comparisons as a way to show that what is happening today is not that different from before. In other words, that the republic will survive.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, an icon of 20th-century Democratic politics, has been the focus of this kind of discussion. During a recent episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Left, Right, and Center, the former White House communications director for Trump in 2017, Mike Dubke, told his colleagues during a discussion of Trump’s efforts to exert federal control over elections: “I go back in history and I look at the court packing that Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to do when the Supreme Court ruled against his New Deal. And he said, my solution is we’re just going to create new justices. We’re going to expand the court, and I’m going to nominate new justices that are going to vote.” The point being, the United States has had this happen before and been fine.

Read more

Listen to the full podcast

By attempting to fire Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook this week, President Donald Trump has broken with decades of precedent in American central banking. Governors are appointed for 14 years, specifically to insulate them from political pressure. Trump’s actions are now raising fundamental questions not only about the direction of Fed policy, but about the basic constitutional foundations of its work.

What practical effects does the Federal Reserve’s independence have on its monetary work? What effect does political pressure have on interest rates? And what would an explicitly politicized Fed look like?

Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.

Read more

U.S. President Donald Trump ramped up his efforts against the U.S. clean energy sector this week by taking aim at a giant wind farm, a move that experts warn will only widen the already glaring gap between Washington and Beijing in the race for the key energy industries of the future.

Trump’s decision to abruptly stop construction at Revolution Wind—a nearly completed giant wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island—is the latest in an avalanche of moves meant to gut the U.S. wind and solar industry and dismantle renewable energy projects championed by his predecessor. The United States is the world’s biggest oil producer and exporter of natural gas, and the Trump administration has wholly embraced those fossil fuels in its bid to achieve what it has called “American energy dominance.”

“The Biden administration put climate at the center of its energy policy and took a very transition-forward stance,” said Kevin Book, the managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, a consultancy. “The Trump administration is largely running the playbook in reverse.”

Trump’s energy playbook also stands in sharp contrast to that of China, which is the world’s biggest consumer of coal as well as its biggest carbon emitter. Yet Beijing has also poured immense resources into manufacturing renewable and clean energy technologies over the course of decades, allowing it to now command the global market for these cutting-edge systems. 

While Washington turns its back on renewable energy, Beijing has only been racing full-speed ahead—driving a widening technological gap that threatens to leave the United States on the back foot in key energy sectors in the years to come, energy and industrial policy experts said.

Read more

From the outset, one inescapable reality of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term has been its frenetic busyness. For those who support it, the sheer pace of Trump’s agenda has been a hallmark of its success.

For others, though, Trump’s rapid-fire proclamations, orders, and initiatives in pursuit of an increasingly radical economic and political agenda present a fundamental and unfamiliar challenge: No sooner than Trump dominates the news with one topic, he launches into another, routinely leaving his critics breathless.

To wit, think of Trump’s utterly improvised and fruitless summitry with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska, his attack on the Smithsonian Institution for its alleged focus on slavery, the rolling federal takeover of policing in Washington, and the Pentagon’s recent firing of the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency after it raised doubts about the impact of the U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear sites in June.

Think of Trump’s push for Texas and other Republican-led states to gerrymander their electoral maps, his weaponization of the attorney general’s office (as seen in the release of the transcripts of the interview between Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, his former personal attorney, and Ghislaine Maxwell about the Jeffrey Epstein case), and the FBI search of the home and office of Trump’s former national security advisor, John Bolton.

Read more

The United States is now the biggest shareholder in one of its biggest semiconductor companies.

U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Aug. 22 that the U.S. government has taken a direct stake in Intel worth around $11 billion, representing a roughly 10 percent stake in the chip-manufacturing giant. Intel will issue the requisite shares to the Commerce Department, according to a regulatory filing by the company announcing the deal.

The agreement with Intel is the latest instance of Trump cutting a deal with private companies in exchange for government action or regulatory relief. But it does so in a way that experts say is unprecedented and potentially troubling. 

Here’s what you need to know.

Read more

U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday followed through on so-called secondary tariffs of 25 percent on India to punish the country for buying large volumes of Russian crude oil. This is despite the fact that the United States previously encouraged New Delhi to buy Russian crude to stabilize global markets and meet India’s energy and economic objectives.

Global oil markets were nonplussed at the prospect of secondary tariffs on India, and greeted their actual arrival with a yawn. Brent crude, the global benchmark, rose by less than 50 cents a barrel. That indicates that traders do not expect Trump’s tariffs to change India’s oil-consumption habits in a big way, or take serious volumes of Russian oil off the market.

In theory, if the United States were serious about putting pressure on Russia’s main source of financing for its war in Ukraine, going after the big buyers of Russian crude could be a smart move. India is the second-biggest buyer of Russian oil, after only China, with a (legal) trade relationship with Russia that is worth billions of dollars a year to Moscow. The United Kingdom, the European Union, and the United States under the Biden administration went directly after Russian oil exports by sanctioning the vessels that carry the crude, so dissuading customers from buying it seems a reasonable step.

Except that Trump’s latest pressure move is against India, not Russia, and will not be likely to dent Russia’s energy revenues or materially weaken its ability to continue its war on Ukraine. And it has not sat well in India.

Read more

U.S. President Donald Trump’s threatened penal tariffs on Indian goods have now become a reality. As of Wednesday, Aug. 27, an additional 25 percent tariff—on top of the existing 25 percent levy—has gone into effect because, the White House says, India is purchasing Russian crude oil.

The reverberations from Trump’s tariffs are already shaking what was long celebrated as one of the world’s most consequential partnerships, as I have previously written in Foreign Policy. For many Indians, this is not simply a matter of trade arithmetic. It is a sharp signal that the very foundation of the trust painstakingly built with Washington over two decades is at stake.

Commerce and strategy are often linked, but mistaking temporary sectoral frictions for enduring intent is poor statecraft. The effect of the tariffs is sweeping. They undermine investor confidence and unsettle exporters. Both economies stand to lose commercially—India perhaps more. Yet the larger casualty will be confidence in the partnership itself. At risk is not only the flow of goods but also the strategic convergence that drives India and the United States as pivotal partners in a rapidly shifting global order.

Read more

Let’s consider some relatively recent history. In 1999, NATO waged a 78-day war against Yugoslavia, aiming to halt a bloody ethnic cleansing campaign by Serbian troops in the restive province of Kosovo. The Serbs ultimately withdrew, and the Western alliance filled the resulting vacuum by dispatching peacekeeping troops. The number of forces deployed was 50,000—even though Kosovo is a tiny piece of territory, a bit smaller than the U.S. state of Connecticut or about one-third the size of Belgium. Today, 26 years later, there are still approximately 4,500 peacekeepers stationed there.

So now we turn to Ukraine—a country, it should be noted, that is 55 times the size of Kosovo. Since the recent flurry of diplomatic activity in Alaska and Washington, the discussion about ending the Russia-Ukraine war has turned to the notion of “security guarantees”—a strikingly fuzzy concept that means very different things to different people. The pundits in Europe and the United States are busily jawboning over what form it might take. But the entire discussion is permeated with a palpable sense of unreality.

Read more

U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest assault on the independence of the U.S. Federal Reserve, and by extension the stability of the U.S. and global financial systems, came in his attempted firing on Monday of Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor.

The move is his latest attempt to force the U.S. central bank to do his bidding—namely, to lower interest rates in a bid to turbocharge economic growth on his watch. And it comes after a yearslong campaign against Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, whom Trump himself named to the post. 

The move against Cook, the first Black woman to be appointed as a Federal Reserve governor, is unprecedented and legally dubious, since the president can only remove a Fed governor for cause. Trump and his administration officials say Cook had irregularities on a mortgage application before she joined the Fed—the same accusations that Bill Pulte, Trump’s appointee to lead the Federal Housing Finance Agency, made against New York Attorney General Letitia James, who previously investigated Trump, and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff, who led the House of Representatives’ investigation into Trump’s Russia ties while serving as a representative from California.

Read more

“I’ve ended six wars,” Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and several reporters in the White House on Monday. That became “I’ve solved seven wars” by the time that he dialed into Fox & Friends for an interview the next day. The White House did not respond to a request for clarification on which conflicts Trump was referring to.

But at least some of those deals—and Trump’s role in them—aren’t as clear-cut as the U.S. president makes them out to be as he unabashedly lobbies for the Nobel Peace Prize. And contrary to Trump’s claim that he “did not do any cease-fires” in his second term thus far, the president’s own posts about several of the peace deals that he claims to have negotiated have explicitly mentioned a cease-fire.

India and Pakistan

Trump’s claims of ending this year’s armed conflict between India and Pakistan began on May 10, when he posted on Truth Social that both countries had agreed to a “FULL AND IMMEDIATE CEASEFIRE” following “a long night of talks mediated by the United States.” Trump has continued to take credit for ending that conflict.

Pakistan enthusiastically co-signed that statement, even nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize for what it called his “decisive diplomatic intervention and pivotal leadership” during the conflict.

But India has consistently downplayed and disputed Trump’s role in securing the cease-fire, repeatedly saying that an end to the conflict was negotiated directly with Pakistani officials.

Read more

As U.S. President Donald Trump conducts his chaotic Ukraine diplomacy, characterized by a seeming unwillingness to stand up to an aggressor or to defend the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity, Europeans are not the only ones who are getting nervous. Indeed, if any one population should be worried about its place in a world of growing disorder, where U.S. security guarantees no longer seem as solid as they once were, it is the 23 million people of Taiwan.

Taiwan, of course, is not even recognized as a country by most others, and any steps it takes toward that end could result in an invasion by its Chinese neighbor. Even short of that worst-case scenario, China has been relentlessly increasing political, diplomatic, and military pressure on Taiwan with the aim of eventual unification. Beijing is conducting an active propaganda and infiltration campaign and is undergoing what many consider to be the biggest military buildup in history, in part to develop the capability to seize Taiwan.

Over the past several years, Beijing has normalized once-controversial military tactics in the Taiwan Strait, with air and naval crossings of the median line more frequent than ever, naval exercises of encirclement operations, additional live-fire drills, and unprecedented ballistic missile tests directly over the island. Few expect Chinese President Xi Jinping to launch an unprovoked invasion of the island anytime soon. But few doubt he would do so if he felt Taiwan slipping away or if he saw an opportunity to do so without excessive costs, which could become the case if he came to doubt the U.S. commitment to support Taiwan’s defense.

Read more

At a summit in Alaska last Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly told U.S. President Donald Trump that Ukraine must cede control of the country’s eastern Donbas region as a condition for ending the war.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly said that he will not make territorial concessions in exchange for a peace agreement, while underscoring that it’s not within his constitutional authority to do so.

Zelensky earlier this month warned that Russia would use the Donbas as a “springboard for a future new offensive” if Ukraine fully handed it over. “If we leave Donbas of our own accord or under pressure, we will start a third war,” Zelensky said. Recent polling also shows that a strong majority of Ukrainians (75 percent) oppose formally ceding land to Russia.

The Donbas, which is short for “Donets Basin,” is an industrial and mining region that borders Russia. It’s made up of two oblasts, or provinces—Donetsk and Luhansk—that are home to roughly 4 million people.

Here’s what you need to know about the Donbas—why it has been a flash point in the Ukraine war from the start, and why it is poised to remain at the center of tensions between Kyiv and Moscow for the foreseeable future.

Read more

In recent days, senior members of the Trump administration have made a strange accusation against India. Writing in the Financial Times on Aug. 18, Peter Navarro, the White House counselor for trade and manufacturing, claimed that India’s “Big Oil Lobby” was profiteering on discounted Russian crude, selling it to Europe, and “shielding India from sanctions scrutiny.” U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent echoed that view in an interview with CNBC on Aug. 19, saying that “India is just profiteering … which is unacceptable.”

Yes, refined Russian crude is reaching Europe. It comes through multiple routes, including Turkey and India. But Europe’s imports from India come mainly from just two private companies, not public sector ones. These are business decisions, not acts of state. Calling them the conduct of India confuses private commerce with national policy.

Even if the profits of these firms anger Western capitals, the response matters. An additional 25 percent tariff on Indian goods, which is set to go into effect on Aug. 27, would be a blunt hammer. It would punish thousands of unrelated Indian exporters with no link to Russian oil, damage goodwill in a partner country, and make cooperation harder when it is most needed.

Read more

U.S. President Donald Trump’s fixation with securing access to rare earth minerals is creating the conditions for a poor strategic decision in Myanmar. According to a recent report, the Trump administration is considering a range of options to access rare earths in Myanmar—the world’s third-largest producer of such—despite the ongoing civil war, including supporting the rebel Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and engaging in direct peace talks with the military junta led by Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing.

Neither of those options are intrinsically bad, and both may even be necessary to end the conflict that has been raging in Myanmar for more than four years. But the Trump administration has shown, by its early actions, that it’s willing to soften its stance on the regime, which the Biden administration accused of genocide and crimes against humanity. Although this could be the opening salvo of peace negotiations, Washington’s repeated emphasis on accessing critical minerals suggests a singular purpose for these talks. What’s more, recent shifts by the U.S. State Department to downplay democracy and human rights concerns going forward make it difficult to give Washington the benefit of the doubt.

Read more

The U.S. State Department’s recent designation of five Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) may well be a prelude to U.S. military action against them, something that President Donald Trump first threatened in November 2019. A few months after that, he proposed missiles strikes against drug labs in Mexico, according to then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Now, with the FTO designations in place, Trump has secretly directed the Defense Department to develop plans to attack the drug trafficking organizations, according to reporting in the New York Times.

While the terrorist designation may provide statutory authority for U.S. military action in Mexico, it does nothing to lessen the Mexican government’s adamant opposition to any such unilateral intervention. Mexico lost 55 percent of its land mass to the United States in the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War, so the idea of U.S. military operations on Mexican soil provokes strong nationalist antipathy. Anything of the sort would gravely damage overall counternarcotics cooperation and bilateral relations in general.

There is a way, however, in which designating the cartels as terrorist organizations could harmonize rather the fracture U.S.-Mexican cooperation in the war on drugs and make a real dent in the level of violence in Mexico. The U.S. gun dealers, straw buyers, and smugglers who have flooded Mexico with made-in-the-USA weapons of war can now be prosecuted for providing material support for terrorism.

Read more

When Russian forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022, then-Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida warned that the war and its outcome would be a harbinger of Asia’s future. His message was clear: Just as Europe faced Russian territorial expansionism, Asia was confronting the challenge of China’s growing assertiveness—each with potentially profound consequences for the respective continent.

Three years later, Kishida’s warning has acquired a more ominous meaning. U.S. President Donald Trump is pressing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to cede territory in exchange for peace of an uncertain duration, while demanding that European allies fall in line. For Asia, Trump’s high-handed diplomacy raises troubling questions about whether America will remain a reliable security guarantor in the Indo-Pacific.

Read more

The initial meetings are over. Now the meetings about the meetings have begun. 

Nearly three dozen leaders met virtually on Tuesday, hours after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and a delegation of European leaders met with U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., to discuss the outcome of the meetings in Washington and coordinate next steps. Those next steps could involve a bilateral meeting between Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin—and/or a trilateral meeting that would see Trump also attend.

The call was convened by what has been dubbed the “coalition of the willing,” a group of 31 countries that are committed to defending Ukraine against Russia. The group is led by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron, both of whom were among the seven European leaders backing Zelensky up in Washington on Monday.

According to a statement from Starmer’s office, the virtual meeting focused heavily on plans to provide “robust” U.S. and European security guarantees for Ukraine as part of any future peace deal with Russia, which could include “the deployment of a reassurance force if the hostilities ended.” They also “discussed how further pressure – including through sanctions – could be placed on Putin until he showed he was ready to take serious action to end his illegal invasion.”

Read more

After a strange, made-for-television summit in Washington on Monday meant to bring Russia’s escalating war on Ukraine closer to the conclusion that U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to achieve even before taking office, nearly all the big questions remain unanswered. Here are just a few of the major issues that the United States, Ukraine, its European backers, and Russia will be grappling with in days and weeks to come.

Read more

Remember when U.S. President Donald Trump declared that Russia would face “severe consequences” if it didn’t agree to a cease-fire in Ukraine? When he threatened to impose draconian sanctions if Russian President Vladimir Putin didn’t agree to peace? When he told Fox News that he wouldn’t “be happy” if Putin didn’t stop the fighting?

All these things happened just before the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska on Aug. 15. Then, the U.S. media was full of feverish reports on Trump’s supposed vexation with Putin and alleged shift toward Ukraine. Since the U.S.-Russia mutual admiration event last week, all that has vanished down the memory hole, melted away like the snows of yesteryear. As many of the same reporters once again gush about the positive vibes emerging from Trump’s meetings with Zelensky and other European leaders at the White House yesterday, let’s keep their previous mistakes in mind.

Read more

If nothing else, Donald Trump doesn’t shy away from high stakes meetings. Always supremely confident in his own abilities to bend others to his will, the U.S. president spent the past few days engaging with leaders on both sides of the war between Russia and Ukraine to try to end the most destructive war in Europe since 1945.

For all his efforts, however, the prospect of finding a resolution to the conflict remains as distant today as it was before Trump threw the diplomatic effort into full gear a couple of weeks ago. The fundamental reality confronting Trump is that Russia and Ukraine are pursuing irreconcilable objectives. Ukraine wants to be secure, sovereign, and independent. Russia wants to subjugate Ukraine and control its destiny.

Read more

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—backed by an extraordinary delegation of seven European leaders—traveled to the White House on Monday to discuss possible terms for a Russia-Ukraine peace deal with U.S. President Donald Trump, following Trump’s meeting in Alaska last week with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Several notable conditions for ending the yearslong war were discussed. Among those, all nine leaders in attendance stressed the importance of holding a trilateral summit with Zelensky, Trump, and Putin, though French President Emmanuel Macron added that a quadrilateral meeting that also included the Europeans would likely be necessary as a follow-up.

Trump also expressed an openness to potentially providing Ukraine with U.S. security guarantees as part of a final peace deal, which Trump said Putin had agreed to during their summit in Alaska last week. It is unclear what these guarantees may look like; however, several European leaders referred to them as “Article 5” in style (in reference to NATO’s mutual defense clause). When asked if he would be willing to send U.S. troops to help provide security for Ukraine, Trump did not rule it out.

But in a statement on Monday, Moscow vehemently condemned the idea of NATO troops in Ukraine.

Such a concession is just one of many points of contention between Trump and team Europe. Zelensky and his European allies remain adamant that a cease-fire must first be secured before peace talks can be held. However, Putin has insisted that negotiations can occur without a truce deal—and Trump appears convinced. “I don’t think you need a cease-fire,” Trump said on Monday. “I’d like them to stop [fighting], but strategically, that could be a disadvantage for one side or the other.”

Read more in today’s World Brief: Trump, Zelensky Strike Optimistic Tone at White House Talks.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington on Monday alongside a large cohort of European leaders. This comes after Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday as part of an ongoing push for a deal to end the war in Ukraine.

After the Alaska summit, Trump has been accused of aligning with Putin by abandoning previous calls for a cease-fire. Trump over the weekend said that instead of pursuing a “mere ceasefire,” the warring parties should “go directly” to a peace agreement.

In Alaska, Putin also reportedly demanded that Ukraine cede Donetsk and Luhansk, the two territories that constitute the industrial eastern Donbas region, as a condition to end the war—and offered to freeze the conflict along the rest of the front line.

Trump is apparently supportive of this proposal and is raising pressure on Zelensky. In a Truth Social post on Sunday, Trump said Zelensky could end the war “almost immediately, if he wants to” and suggested that doing so will require Zelensky to accept that Ukraine will never regain Crimea (which Russia illegally seized in 2014) or join NATO. Zelensky has repeatedly stated that he will not give up territory as part of a peace agreement. But as Ukrainian forces continue to face myriad challenges along the roughly 600-mile front line, Zelensky is in a tough position.

To get a clearer picture of what’s being asked of Kyiv, here’s a quick breakdown of where things currently stand on the battlefield in Ukraine.

Read more

The scene was familiar—U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sitting in the Oval Office, with U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the couch to Trump’s left. But unlike the last time this particular scene unfolded, there was no shouting match and even a few moments of levity.

Here’s what you need to know.

Less fireworks

Zelensky headed off one particular flashpoint from February’s meeting even before a word was said, by wearing a suit this time. He even had a good-natured exchange with Brian Glenn, a correspondent with right-wing news outlet Real America’s Voice whose question about the Ukrainian leader’s more casual attire back in February further stoked an already contentious argument. “You look fabulous in that suit,” Glenn quipped on Monday, before apologizing to Zelensky for his previous attack. “You are in the same suit,” Zelensky shot back, to laughter from Trump and others in the room.

Zelensky also thanked Trump for his continued support on multiple instances, blunting the other infamous attack by Vance that kick-started their disagreement during the last meeting.

Trump also appeared to be in a more gracious mood this time around. “We’re going to have a meeting. I think if everything works out well today, we’re going to have a trilat,” he said, referring to a proposed trilateral meeting with Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin. “And I think there will be a reasonable chance of ending the war when we do that.”

Read more

Did the highly anticipated meeting in Alaska alter the trajectory of the war in Ukraine? Or was it just pageantry? As the dust settles on the summit, and as Kyiv, Brussels, and other interested parties react, FP’s Ravi Agrawal assesses the meeting with Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a former CIA analyst focused on Russia.

U.S. President Donald Trump, fresh off his Alaska meeting last week with Russian President Vladimir Putin, seems to have cooled on the idea of pressuring Moscow to end the war it started in Ukraine, despite Trump’s recent threats of “severe consequences” if Putin didn’t agree to a cease-fire.

Late Sunday, Trump appeared to revert to his default position of blaming Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for getting invaded by its larger avaricious neighbor. “President Zelenskyy of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight,” Trump said on his social media network. 

But Europe has plenty of cards to play in this conflict even if the Trump administration has opted for appeasement. The supporting cast joining Zelensky in the White House Monday includes the heads of NATO and the European Union, the Finnish Trump-whisperer-in-chief, and four of the most prominent national leaders in Europe. That raises the prospect that Ukraine and its biggest backers could inject some backbone into the United States’ approach, if not show some spine itself.

“I think the United States and Europe have all the cards. They are just not willing to play them, and that is nowhere more evident than in the realm of economic warfare,” said Tom Keatinge, the director for finance and security at the Royal United Services Institute in the United Kingdom.

“From the start, the G-7 allies have talked a tough game but have never gone all in on sanctions. We have, at every step of the way, fallen short of what we would need” to inflict sufficient economic pain on Russia to force Putin to recalibrate, he said.

Read more

When U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Anchorage, Alaska, on Aug. 15, Putin was greeted by a flyover of an American B-2 strategic bomber. Such flyovers can be a show of respect for a visiting statesperson, but Putin’s reptilian brain likely also registered fear as the stealthy aircraft roared overhead. He knows better than anyone that the world’s most advanced nuclear bomber could end his life within seconds.

This show of nuclear force followed closely on the heels of Trump’s order to reposition nuclear submarines to the “appropriate regions” in response to threats against the United States made by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

Some analysts have criticized Trump’s nuclear saber-rattling as dangerous. But in fact, Trump can and should ramp up nuclear threats as part of a successful negotiation strategy to bring Russia’s war in Ukraine to an end.

Read more

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky arrives in Washington on Aug. 18 for pivotal talks over the future of Russia’s war in Ukraine, he will be backed by several of his European allies. 

That may be because when Zelensky was last in town for talks in February, a highly watched diplomatic meeting—which was supposed to draw Kyiv and Washington closer together—rapidly devolved into an explosive shouting match with U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance. 

It’s a reflection of the two leaders’ tumultuous and shifting relationship as the Russia-Ukraine war stretches past its third year and Trump vacillates between Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

Their stormy history goes all the way back to Trump’s first term in office, when the U.S. leader withheld nearly $400 million in military aid from Ukraine and then urged Zelensky to investigate Trump’s then-political rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter—ultimately leading to his first impeachment. 

But since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and since Trump made quickly ending the war a central goal of his second presidency, his relationship with Zelensky has become even more important.  

Here is a brief timeline of some of the two leaders’ most turbulent moments since Trump returned to office. 

Read more

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is coming back to the White House, and this time, he has a phalanx of European leaders backing him up. 

Finnish President Alexander Stubb, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz all announced that they would accompany Zelensky when he meets with U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington on Monday. 

The first three names on that list will be particularly important when it comes to making a case for Ukraine’s best interests to Trump, whose emphasis on interpersonal relationships drives much of his decision-making.

Read more

U.S. President Donald Trump’s stated goal in meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska was to secure a Russia-Ukraine cease-fire. Putin stiffed him on a cease-fire and got him to instead accept an “understanding” that strikingly advantages Russia. It would require Kyiv to pay with land just to start negotiations of an overall settlement and leave Russian forces far better positioned if talks broke down.

The more we learn about this meeting, the more disastrous it sounds.

Read more

U.S. President Donald Trump drew a lot of flak for inviting Russian President Vladimir Putin onto U.S. soil for the first time in a decade, complete with a red carpet, a bright “Alaska 2025” sign, and a joint news conference. That was despite getting little from the Russian leader beforehand, save a pledge to continue killing Ukrainians and seizing their territory if the summit didn’t go precisely his way.

And as quickly became clear at the news conference the two leaders held Friday, Trump came away with less than the minimum he had hoped for, which was a temporary cease-fire. Despite Putin’s gracious words to Trump—and Trump’s description of him as a “fantastic” partner—the Russian appeared to give no ground whatsoever on his fundamental position that Ukraine is Russian territory and that he will not compromise.

Trump put his best spin on it all nonetheless. “We didn’t get there, but we have a very good chance of getting there,” Trump said, declaring that the talks were “extremely productive” and that “many points were agreed to.” But he acknowledged there was no progress on one that was “probably the most significant,” which may have been a cease-fire in Ukraine. The two walked out of the news conference without taking questions.

Read more

All eyes were on Anchorage, Alaska, on Friday as U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met for pivotal talks over the future of the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine—without their Ukrainian counterpart at the table.

In the days leading up to the summit, Trump appeared to downplay expectations for the talks and any potential diplomatic breakthroughs. But he struck a tougher tone hours ahead of the talks, telling reporters aboard Air Force One: “I want to see a cease-fire rapidly. I don’t know if it’s going to be today, but I’m not going to be happy if it’s not today.” 

Once in Anchorage, the two leaders appeared cozy, with Trump literally rolling out a red carpet for the Russian leader and even allowing him to ride in Trump’s presidential limousine, known as the “Beast.” The warm reception stood in sharp contrast to the fiery and hostile exchange that occurred when Trump hosted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House in February. 

While Trump and Putin were initially expected to meet for one-on-one talks, the two leaders were ultimately accompanied by several top advisors in a last-minute change of plans. Trump was joined by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House envoy Steve Witkoff, while Putin brought Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Kremlin advisor Yuri Ushakov. The group met for 2 hours and 45 minutes, according to the Kremlin. 

But even after a press conference with both leaders afterward, it’s not entirely clear what the two leaders agreed to, if anything. “There’s no deal until there’s a deal,” Trump said, later adding: “We didn’t get there, but we have a very good chance of getting there.”

Below is the full rush transcript of Trump and Putin’s press conference.

Read more

U.S. President Donald Trump rolled out the red carpet (literally) for Russian President Vladimir Putin when the two men arrived in Alaska on Friday for their closely watched summit on the Ukraine war. Between Trump’s warm welcome to his Russian counterpart and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s notable absence from the talks, it is unclear just how much progress will be made toward securing a peace deal.

Trump and his lineup of top U.S. officials hosted Putin and his own senior delegation at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. Upon landing in Anchorage, Trump gave Putin a first-class greeting: ordering a military flyover, applauding Putin as he approached, and even sharing the presidential limousine (known as the “Beast”) to ride through the U.S. military base. This was starkly different treatment from the open hostility that Trump expressed toward Zelensky during their White House summit in February.

Ahead of the meeting, the White House also announced an eleventh-hour change of plans. Trump and Putin were initially supposed to speak one-on-one without additional advisors present beyond their respective translators. But ahead of their arrival, the Trump administration notified reporters that the meeting format had been changed to a three-on-three, with Trump being joined by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House special envoy Steve Witkoff and Putin being accompanied by Lavrov and Kremlin advisor Yuri Ushakov. No explanation for the format change was given.

This is the first in-person Trump-Putin summit since the former began his second term in January, and it is the first time in a decade that the Russian leader has stepped onto U.S. soil. At the time of writing, the two world leaders—along with their last-minute additions—had entered hour three of talks.

Read more in today’s World Brief: Trump Rolls Out the Red Carpet for Putin in Alaska.

The Russian government is many things, but subtle is not one of them. Ahead of a highly anticipated summit on the Russia-Ukraine war in Alaska on Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov engaged in some blatant trolling.

Lavrov arrived in Alaska wearing a CCCP sweatshirt. Those are the Russian initials for “USSR,” which stands for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (aka the Soviet Union). Experts say that Lavrov, who has been Russia’s top diplomat for roughly two decades, knew exactly what he was doing by wearing that sweatshirt. “He wouldn’t do this just by chance,” former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt said of Lavrov’s sweatshirt via X.

The war in Ukraine—a former Soviet republic—is widely viewed as a product of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nostalgia for the Soviet Union and imperialistic ambitions.

A post on X by the Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov includes a video that shows Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov walking from a car into a building wearing a CCCP shirt.X screengrab

Putin once referred to the collapse of the USSR as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” And, after ordering the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he compared himself to Peter the Great—effectively portraying himself as a righteous conqueror who’s fighting to restore control over what he views as Russian lands (much of Ukraine was also previously part of the Russian Empire).

The Russian president, a former KGB officer, has also repeatedly suggested that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people” and said in June that “the whole of Ukraine is ours.” Putin has falsely claimed that Ukraine, which gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, isn’t a real country and was created by Russia.

Along these lines, Lavrov’s choice of attire garnered a fair amount of attention in terms of the message it appeared to send about Russia’s mentality heading into the Alaska summit between Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump.

Read more

U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are both arriving at their summit in Alaska accompanied by sizable delegations.

Trump’s delegation, shared by the White House on Friday morning, includes some expected names—Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Also traveling with Trump is his special envoy Steve Witkoff, whose meeting with Putin in Moscow last week set the stage for the Alaska summit. 

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will travel to Alaska separately, the Defense Department confirmed, accompanied by Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the supreme allied commander for U.S. forces in Europe and the head of U.S. European command, is also reportedly attending the summit.

There are also a couple of inclusions that appear surprising, considering that the main goal of the meeting is purportedly to negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war. U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will also be traveling with Trump, opening up the possibility that trade concessions or sanctions relief could be put on the table as part of discussions with Putin. Trump noted that several Russian businessmen are accompanying Putin, as well, but the U.S. leader downplayed suggestions of any economic discussions at the outset. “I noticed he’s bringing a lot of business people from Russia,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on the way to Alaska. “And that’s good, I like that, because they want to do business, but they’re not doing business until we get the war settled.” 

The absence of Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, is notable on paper but perhaps less surprising for Trumpworld observers. Kellogg has repeatedly been sidelined by Trump in his engagements with Putin, with most of those duties falling to Witkoff.

The first meeting of the summit, originally expected to be just the two leaders with their translators, is now set to be a three-on-three. Trump will be joined by Witkoff and Rubio, while Putin will reportedly have alongside him Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Yuri Ushakov, a former diplomat and key government advisor.

The U.S. trio will reportedly be joined after that meeting by Hegseth, Bessent, Lutnick, and Wiles for a broader working lunch.

Update, Aug. 15, 2025: This post was updated to reflect the latest news.

Last month, the U.S. State Department carried out its largest single-day layoffs ever—more than 1,300 employees gone overnight in a sweeping shake-up. Diplomats, consular officers, and foreign affairs specialists woke up one morning ready to serve and found themselves locked out of their emails by day’s end. The Trump administration said the dismissals were part of a “comprehensive reorganization plan.” But those familiar with the institution and its mission know that the White House’s moves are a dangerous mistake.

In a recent Foreign Policy piece, columnist Matthew Kroenig argued that the State Department cuts were a smart, long-overdue streamlining that would make the department more focused, agile, and strategically relevant. After 37 years in the U.S. Foreign Service and now as president of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), I can state emphatically that the reality looks very different.

AFSA is a professional association and union representing members of the Foreign Service from six foreign affairs agencies, including the State Department. While AFSA has long worked productively with both Republican and Democratic administrations, never has it experienced such a complete disregard for the expertise and perspective of those who know the U.S. diplomatic workforce best.

Read more

The Israeli cabinet’s recent approval of a plan to take military control over all of Gaza left many observers puzzled because it made so little sense. The Israeli government claims that it needs to go in and “finish the job” of dismantling Hamas and freeing Israeli hostages. But even its most ardent defenders are struggling to explain how and why a group that has been decimated by 22 months of bombing and ground operations still poses a strategic threat to Israel, how an ideology and political movement can ever be eliminated with force, and why a further invasion and occupation is not more likely to lead to the hostages being killed—either by Hamas or the operation itself—than freed.

Even more puzzling is that the Israeli government is making the case for a further invasion of Gaza despite the likely monumental costs of such an operation. Sending large numbers of Israeli forces into Gaza City and beyond will almost certainly lead to many more months of conflict, kill and displace many more Palestinian civilians, and aggravate an already intolerable humanitarian situation. It will mean more suffering and deaths among the remaining Israeli hostages, cause further casualties among Israeli soldiers, require more costly call-ups of overworked reserve forces, exacerbate Israel’s image as a pariah state in the eyes of much of the world, further undermine Israeli relations with its Arab neighbors, and jeopardize the strategic relationship with the United States, where support for Israel is cratering.

Read more

When the United States purchased the territory of Alaska from the Russian Empire in 1867, newspaper editorials mockingly referred to it as “Seward’s Folly” and “Walrussia.” But when U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet in Alaska on Aug. 15, for their first summit since 2016, the symbolism will be clear: a U.S. territory—and later a state—purchased and transferred peaceably in negotiations, now hosting talks focused on territorial boundaries in Ukraine.

Editorials today might as well refer to the summit as “Trump’s folly.” Indeed, many commentators have expressed open distaste for the idea of talking to Russia at all. And it’s certainly true that the summit could be pointless—or even actively detrimental to resolving Russia-Ukraine war. But it doesn’t have to be. There are scenarios in which this summit could yield small results that enable further talks over time.

U.S. President Ronald Reagan, in a 1986 radio address to the people of the Soviet Union, talked about the arduous process of finding common ground. “The United States,” he said, “stands ready to support all serious efforts to find peaceful solutions to regional conflicts. And we’re ready to work with the Soviet Union and any other country to that end. There are many complex issues to be discussed between the United States and the Soviet Union. Resolving them will not be easy, but the things most worth doing seldom are.”

Read more

U.S. President Donald Trump’s seeming change of tune on Russia and Ukraine has perplexed his critics, myself included. Throughout his time in power, Trump offered little but praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin, often defending him in the face of domestic political furor. In contrast, Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky have drawn only scorn from Trump, which culminated in an abrupt end to their meeting at the White House in February.

That posture appeared to shift last month after a phone call with Putin that, in Trump’s telling, left him “disappointed.” Referring to Russia’s continued assault on Ukraine, Trump said, “I’m just saying I don’t think [Putin’s] looking to stop, and that’s too bad.”

The weeks following that phone call had the feeling of a liberal internationalist fever dream. The White House reversed the Defense Department’s decision to halt weapons transfers to Ukraine. Trump, sitting beside the NATO secretary-general in the Oval Office, pledged to send weapons worth billions of dollars to Ukraine. He even vowed to impose sweeping tariffs and sanctions on Russia unless it ended the war—a demand that he first framed as a 50-day ultimatum but then shortened to less than two weeks.

Read more

U.S. President Donald Trump has an unsurpassed talent for pulling surprises on the weary world. But even by Trump’s rigorous standards, the announcement last week of his forthcoming summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin has dumbfounded audiences worldwide. The last time that anyone was so perplexed, horrified, or excited about any summit was when former U.S. President Richard Nixon visited communist China.

“This was a week that changed the world,” Nixon said of his 1972 trip. For better or worse, this week could also change the world.

It sometimes seems that summitry with bloodthirsty dictators is Trump’s distinct contribution to U.S. diplomacy. But this isn’t totally unprecedented. At different times, different American presidents shook hands and struck deals with some of the world’s most murderous tyrants. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, for example, parleyed with “Uncle Joe” Stalin. Presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford met with Mao Zedong, who was not only responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese citizens but also, through his involvement in the Korean War, tens of thousands of Americans.

Read more

U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America’s AI Action Plan” breaks from AI policies of the past. The goal is AI acceleration by any means possible to beat America’s nemesis: China. The White House claims that the plan was immediately hailed across the technology industry. If so, the industry needs to take a closer look. Considered in the context of the Trump administration’s broader policy mix, the AI Action Plan represents a strategy at war with itself. The plan’s ends are unclear. With deregulation, tariffs, and immigration restrictions further undermining the means to those unclear ends, the plan promises to force on the world a bundled American AI stack—a bundle developed guardrails-free and politicized in a way that, oddly, mimics China’s state-driven controls. To add to the noise, Trump last week announced a staggering 100 percent tariff on a critical component of AI—semiconductors—unless the companies producing them are “building in the U.S.,” but he hasn’t clarified the extent of “building” required to escape the levy and whether it is the semiconductor or the end product containing it that will be taxed. Even the plan’s laudable features, like accelerating AI innovation and infrastructure and promoting open models, are systematically undermined by other features.

Consider, first, the plan’s stated intention. Trump wants to ensure that children aren’t condemned to a planet controlled by “algorithms of the adversaries.” As our experience with social media has demonstrated, American children need not fear the algorithms of adversaries; there is no dearth of homegrown algorithm-makers in the United States capable of contributing to body image crises, cyberbullying, online predation, misinformation, and an epidemic of teenage depression and anxiety. Unlike a race to complete the world’s tallest building, or more complex rationales such as mutually assured destruction in a nuclear standoff, the goals of an “AI race” are unclear. AI has applications in national security, no doubt, which provides a solid rationale for national competitiveness, but its widest and most profitable uses will be in numerous other areas that benefit from varied innovations, talent, and datasets crossing borders.

In order to “lead the world” in AI, the plan assures freedom from federal regulations. To ensure that American AI developers are also freed from pesky restraints from the states, AI-related federal funding would be steered away from states with AI regulations deemed burdensome.

Read more

Israel is likely to launch another war with Iran before December—perhaps even as early as late August.

Iran is expecting and preparing for the attack. It played the long game in the first war, pacing its missile attacks as it anticipated a protracted conflict. In the next round, however, Iran is likely to strike decisively from the outset, aiming to dispel any notion that it can be subdued under Israeli military dominance.

As a result, the coming war will likely be far bloodier than the first. If U.S. President Donald Trump caves to Israeli pressure again and joins the fight, the United States could face a full-blown war with Iran that will make Iraq look easy by comparison.

Israel’s June war was never solely about Iran’s nuclear program. Rather, it was about shifting the balance of power in the Middle East, with Iranian nuclear capabilities being an important but not decisive factor. For more than two decades, Israel has pushed the United States to take military action against Iran to weaken it and restore a favorable regional balance—one that Israel cannot achieve on its own.

Read more

Remember the COVID-19-era shortages? Store shelves were stripped of toilet paper. Face masks were rationed. A global scarcity of semiconductors forced automakers and others to curtail production. Ford stashed unfinished Super Duty trucks in the Kentucky Speedway parking lot while waiting for crucial chips to arrive.

For a few months this year, it looked like Americans were in for another round of shortages, this time caused by U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff war. But it appears that most products will continue to be available, albeit at higher prices (and with a few serious exceptions, which I’ll get to). That’s a rare bit of good news in a sea of bad news surrounding Trump’s tariffs, which are fraying long-standing commercial ties between the United States and its closest allies.

The latest round of tariffs went into effect on Aug. 7. Including both new and old levies, the rates are 50 percent on Brazil, 35 percent on Canada, and 25 percent on Mexico. The current rate on China, which briefly reached 145 percent earlier this year, is a still-high 55 percent under a negotiated truce between the world’s biggest economies. The high tariffs will raise costs for American consumers and businesses, while squeezing the economies of the United States’ trading partners.

Read more

In July, the Trump administration enacted the most sweeping reorganization of the U.S. State Department in a generation, and the reaction from the mainstream media was overwhelmingly negative. But the State Department was badly in need of reform. The reorganization is the first step toward reinvigorating the department to advance U.S. interests for a more contentious period of geopolitics.

There was a time when the State Department developed and implemented U.S. policy for its most important global challenges. The legendary policy planning teams under George Kennan and Paul Nitze, for example, were intellectual powerhouses often driving the United States’ Cold War strategy.

Over successive administrations, however, strategy and policy development and implementation have been absorbed by National Security Council (NSC) staff, relegating the State Department to managing foreign relations (literally interacting with foreign counterparts) and playing an undersized role in the formulation of strategy and policy. As one former policy planning director told me, “There is not a strategic bone in the entire department.”

Despite this reduction in responsibilities and importance, the size of the State Department has grown in recent decades.

Read more

Russian President Vladimir Putin and White House envoy Steve Witkoff held “useful and constructive” talks in Moscow on Wednesday, according to Kremlin foreign-policy aide Yuri Ushakov. The roughly three-hour session aimed to secure a last-minute breakthrough to end the Russia-Ukraine war before threatened U.S. sanctions go into effect on Friday.

Still, officials suggest that Wednesday’s meeting was not enough to prevent U.S. President Donald Trump from imposing these measures on Moscow. “The Russians are eager to continue engaging with the United States,” a White House official said after the dialogue. But “the secondary sanctions are still expected to be implemented on Friday.”

Three weeks ago, Trump gave Russia 50 days to make progress toward securing a peace deal with Ukraine or else face further U.S. sanctions. But the U.S. president’s patience appears to be dwindling, and last week, he shortened that ultimatum to Aug. 8.

“It is extremely important that Moscow is beginning to feel the pressure of the world, the pressure from the United States, the threat of tougher sanctions for continuing the war,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky posted on X on Tuesday following a phone call with Trump, during which the two leaders discussed how U.S. sanctions could damage the Russian economy.

However, experts warn that Russia is unlikely to bow to U.S. threats when it feels that it is winning the war. Since Russia and Ukraine resumed direct peace talks in May, Moscow has conducted its heaviest air attacks yet, killing at least 72 people in Kyiv alone.

Read more in today’s World Brief: U.S. Sanctions on Russia Still Loom After Putin-Witkoff Meeting.

U.S. President Donald Trump has given Russian President Vladimir Putin a lot of rope over the past eight and a half years, but his patience now appears to be rapidly diminishing as he grows frustrated with Putin’s refusal to end Russia’s war in Ukraine. 

Trump cut short a 50-day deadline that he had given Russia to arrive at a deal to end the war or face additional sanctions—including secondary tariffs on countries such as India and possibly China that continue to purchase Russian oil—saying during a visit to Scotland last month that he would only give Russia 10 more days, or until Aug. 8. 

On Wednesday, two days before the deadline, Trump pulled the trigger on secondary tariffs aimed at India, issuing an executive order that would raise the U.S. tariff rate on India to 50 percent—25 percent for Trump’s trade ire and 25 percent for India’s reliance on Russian oil, with the latter increase beginning in 21 days.

In the first year of his second term in office, Trump has gone from shouting down Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office to promising him more Patriot missiles. Last week, Trump responded to a veiled threat from former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev by claiming to reposition two “nuclear” submarines closer to Russia (though it remains unclear whether Trump meant nuclear-armed or nuclear-powered submarines, as the United States has both). 

Read more

In April 2024, U.S. President Donald Trump convened a group of oil and gas executives at Mar‑a‑Lago. According to multiple accounts, he offered them what he called “a deal”: donate $1 billion to his reelection campaign, and the second Trump administration would dismantle U.S. climate policy.

The fossil fuel industry delivered plenty of cash, although untraceable dark money makes a full accounting impossible. Since January, Trump has moved with startling speed to keep his side of the tainted bargain. The administration has launched an all‑out assault on climate action: repealing clean-energy tax incentives, freezing funding for renewable programs, dismantling America’s climate science capacity, unwinding clean air regulations, and even scrapping the legal foundations that enable future administrations to regulate greenhouse gases.

Internationally, Trump pulled the United States from the historic and widely supported Paris Agreement, cut off climate aid to developing nations, declined to send American diplomats to U.N. climate talks (even those outside the Paris Agreement), and shuttered the State Department’s climate office—firing all its professional staff in the process.

Read more

As Eswatini becomes the second African country after South Sudan to accept third-country migrants deported by the United States, Nigeria is charting a sharply different course. Africa’s most populous nation has rejected Washington’s immigration policy, with Nigerian Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar bluntly stating in early July that the country has “enough problems of our own” and will not cave to U.S. pressure to take in deportees with no ties to Nigeria.

Nigeria’s stance is not just about immigration. It is a broader rejection of the transactional logic that has long shaped U.S.-Africa relations. Nigeria isn’t just defending borders—it is defending its sovereignty.

This quiet but consequential standoff comes as U.S. President Donald Trump revives his controversial policy of third-country deportations, which he introduced on a smaller scale in Latin America during his first term. Now, his administration is expanding those efforts and actively courting African nations—a shift signaled at Trump’s mini-summit with African leaders at the White House in July, where he alluded to progress on such deals without offering details.

Read more

As Gaza’s humanitarian crisis escalates to famine-level warnings and foreign powers announce their intention to recognize a Palestinian state, U.S. President Donald Trump is struggling to balance preserving the close U.S.-Israel relationship with mounting public pressure to end the Israel-Hamas war.

“The fastest way to end the Humanitarian Crises in Gaza is for Hamas to SURRENDER AND RELEASE THE HOSTAGES!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday, reiterating his administration’s past position. His post came shortly after White House envoy Steve Witkoff arrived in Israel to push Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to salvage cease-fire talks.

This week, dozens of ministers convened at the United Nations to revive the long-touted goal of a two-state solution. Namely, they drafted the New York Declaration, which states that Hamas “must end its rule in Gaza and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority,” which governs parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. However, the conference’s efficacy was undermined by two key absences: Israel and the United States.

Both countries remain reluctant to give the Palestinian Authority governing control of Gaza. On Thursday, the U.S. State Department announced sanctions against the PA and the PLO, accusing them of “continuing to support terrorism” and undermining current peace efforts. It is unclear if the sanctions would bar Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas or other senior PA officials from traveling to the U.N. General Assembly in September, when France, the United Kingdom, and now Canada have said they intend to recognize an independent Palestine.

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has condemned these countries’ announcements, calling them a “reward for Hamas.” And on Thursday, Trump denounced Canada’s decision, warning that recognizing Palestine will make it more difficult for Washington and Ottawa to secure a new trade agreement to reduce a planned 35 percent tariff, to go into effect on Aug. 1.

The United States will impose a 25 percent tariff on India beginning Aug. 1, U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday. Despite five rounds of negotiations, India has so far been unable to secure a better deal. And with the new rate being a mere 1 percentage point less than the original amount threatened in April, Washington is demonstrating that it seeks an aggressive strategy to help curb the United States’ trade deficit with India.

“Remember, while India is our friend, we have, over the years, done relatively little business with them because their Tariffs are far too high, among the highest in the World, and they have the most strenuous and obnoxious non-monetary Trade Barriers of any Country,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Wednesday. In 2024, India was the United States’ 10th largest trading partner, and the U.S. trade deficit with the country was $45.7 billion.

Alongside a 25 percent tariff, Trump threatened on Wednesday to impose an additional “penalty” for India’s continued purchasing of Russian oil, energy, and military equipment. It is unclear what that penalty might be, but experts believe that it may consist of the 100 percent secondary tariff that the White House has threatened to place on some of Russia’s biggest trading partners, including China, India, and Brazil.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, Moscow has become India’s largest oil supplier. And between January and June of this year, Russia accounted for about 35 percent of India’s total oil supplies, according to Reuters data. As Trump’s efforts to end Russia’s war in Ukraine have failed and the U.S. president has begun to lose patience with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intransigence, there has been a growing appetite in Washington to cut off that vital source of revenue to pressure the Kremlin to get serious about peace.

But there have been a few deals—seven, to be exact (eight if you count a temporary detente with China on tariffs that the two sides continue to negotiate). South Korea was the latest to sign, with Trump announcing an agreement in a Truth Social post on July 30.

Read more

President Donald Trump has spent two weeks struggling to dig himself out of the scandal that’s become known as the “Epstein files.” Allegations of a conspiracy involving high-ranking government officials, Democrats, and wealthy financiers to cover up how Jeffrey Epstein died—and to conceal a supposed list of the powerful clients who participated in his sex trafficking and pedophilia—have been a major theme in MAGA circles for years.

When Trump appeared to be blocking the release of the Epstein files, and even denied that there was anything substantive to reveal, significant portions of the MAGA world turned against him. Tensions have escalated to the point where Trump has called his own supporters “stupid” and “foolish.”

The story continues to unfold. For now, it appears Trump might survive the fallout through a series of political maneuvers and by pressuring enough Republicans on Capitol Hill to back him. Speaker Mike Johnson went so far as to start the August recess early, in July, to make sure that Democrats wouldn’t have an opportunity to propose legislation that would require the Department of Justice to release all of its information.

Whatever the outcome, the Epstein files controversy remains one of the most difficult internal political challenges that Trump has faced, and a stark reminder of the strength of right-wing conspiratorial politics within the Republican Party.

Read more

The headlines covering his overhaul of the federal government have largely focused on a few earthquakes, such as the demise of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the dismantling of State Department bureaus dealing with human rights and refugees. But Trump’s cuts have also battered scores of civil society organizations and policy centers that received funding from the U.S. government.

These institutions—including the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, Freedom House, and refugee resettlement groups—have been shuttered, shriveled, or mired in existential legal challenges. Career professionals have had to abort projects, betray trusted global partners, abandon vulnerable populations, and seek new ways to make a living.

Many of those affected by Trump’s moves have gone through the stages of grief: denial, outrage, and efforts to bargain with legislators and courts, followed increasingly by depression. Now, they must move toward acceptance—not seeing the administration’s choices as justifiable but rather admitting that many are unstoppable and likely irreversible. In short, idealists need to become realists to ensure that the values they treasure survive to fight another day.

Read more

Although U.S. President Donald Trump has said little or nothing in public about defending human rights and freedoms abroad, both of his administrations have taken steps to reform the way that the United States defines and upholds those rights. At the same time, cuts to foreign aid and other international outreach programs—as well as Trump’s attacks on constitutional governance and the rule of law—threaten to undermine the United States’ most effective means of promoting and defending basic rights and freedoms: its soft power and the power of example.

The first Trump administration denounced the United Nation’s hypocrisy on human rights, withdrawing from the U.N. Human Rights Council when the call for reforming its autocracy-heavy membership was rejected. The U.S. State Department defended basic freedoms by confronting China, Venezuela, Syria, and other countries about abuses; leading a major international push for religious freedom; and promoting women’s economic empowerment.

Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo established a Commission on Unalienable Rights, charging it with “providing the U.S. government with advice on human rights grounded in our nation’s founding principles and the principles of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and creating a “serious debate about human rights that extends across party lines and national borders.” In announcing the project, Pompeo distinguished between fundamental rights enshrined by the country’s founders—including the famous right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—and a subsequent proliferation of “ad hoc rights granted by governments,” especially since the end of the Cold War.

Read more

Donald Trump “really gets it.” This is according to no less an authority than Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, who was commenting on the U.S. president’s understanding of AI and ways to maximize its potential.

Surely, the fact that Trump blocked time on his very first full day in office to line Altman up along with other tech luminaries in the White House’s Roosevelt Room to announce a half-a-trillion-dollar AI infrastructure project tells us that Trump gets AI’s national significance.

What about the president’s executive order facilitating AI’s energy needs by expanding America’s nuclear energy capacity, followed up by a presidential “AI and Energy Summit”? Don’t these actions show Trump gets which levers the U.S. government must pull to power the rapid build-out of AI infrastructure?

Or what about scuttling former President Joe Biden’s executive order calling for guardrails on AI in order to make way for new executive orders greenlighting acceleration of American AI? What does this show if not Trump understanding the urgency to advance AI innovation?

Read more

Buckle your seat belts for the wild ride that Israelis, along with the Trump administration, are about to experience between now and year’s end as the prime minister, a man whose almost every move is tethered to his determination to remain in power, plans and plots his reelection bid, most likely for early 2026. As former U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Neill famously said, “All politics is local”—a truth that holds in Israel as well. Just look at the issue of ultra-Orthodox conscription, which has rocked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition of late.

But one element of Netanyahu’s bid for reelection isn’t local: Donald Trump. Indeed, the U.S. president may not be the only factor shaping Netanyahu’s political future, but he certainly is an important one. That gives Trump, whose relationship with Netanyahu has been rocky at times, significant leverage. He can either help or hurt Netanyahu’s bid to extend his domination of Israel’s political scene. So, how will Trump play his part, and will he continue his propensity to be more supportive of Netanyahu than not?

Read more

Eight months after the fall of the Assad regime, Syria is still a source of instability in the heart of the Levant. The horrifying violence that took place in the southwestern Syrian province of Suwayda last week is the latest in a pattern of sectarian, ethnic, and tribal violence that has plagued the country since Bashar al-Assad’s flight to Moscow. It belies the feel-good stories and testaments of politicians and officials about self-anointed President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s professed desire to build a “Syria for all Syrians.” Bad habits die hard. Assad was once believed to be a reformer in the years before he presided over industrial-level slaughter in a bloody effort to save his regime.

No one knows how Sharaa, who led an extremist group and once had a U.S. bounty on his head, will govern, though healthy skepticism is in order. And no one has an answer to the divisions within society that actors in the Syrian drama have exploited violently in pursuit of power. These circumstances make it an inauspicious moment for the United States to wade into Syria. But there are things Washington could do that would increase the chances for Syrians to enjoy some modicum of peace both at home and along their borders.

To make that happen, President Donald Trump needs to leverage his unique standing with Middle Eastern leaders. He must set limits on Syria’s neighbors and incentivize them to provide Syria with a pathway for reconstruction, development, and reintegration in the region. This does not require an American commitment to transform Syria. That would be foolish given Washington’s abysmal record with international political and social engineering. Rather, it requires the judicious use of the extraordinary diplomatic and political capital Trump has accumulated with the region’s players. The idea of leverage is overblown, but if any president has ever had it, it is Trump, and he should use it in Syria.

Read more

Last week, U.S. chip designer Nvidia announced that it would resume sales of one of its best-selling artificial intelligence chips to China after obtaining the go-ahead from the U.S. government. In April, the Trump administration had blocked exports of the chip, known as the H20, but after months of lobbying from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, it has reportedly agreed to lift the ban. Some Trump officials have described the move as a part of the recent trade truce between the United States and China, through which China agreed to resume exports of rare-earth minerals. Beijing has described it as a unilateral concession by Washington.

Whatever the true sequence of events, the move has huge implications for both the future of the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) industry and the Trump administration’s ability to control advanced technology sales to China in the future. Right as powerful AI reasoning systems are emerging, the administration has chosen to allow companies to sell China the AI chips suited to running them. And by linking, at least rhetorically, chip sales to the trade talks—talks in which the United States has shown a striking desperation to reach a deal—U.S. officials have revealed to their Chinese counterparts that national security policies that were once off the table are now up for negotiation. In doing so, they may have hamstrung their ability to impose new chip export controls without reigniting a losing trade war.

Read more

Recent shifts in U.S. President Donald Trump’s foreign and national security policy herald a more vigorous use of Washington’s military power and deeper engagement in the world. From the missile attacks on Yemen’s Houthis and the bombing of Iran’s nuclear production facilities to successful U.S. pressure on European NATO allies to prepare for the Russian military threat and this week’s decision to provide Kyiv with additional weapons—all this and more signal Trump’s increasing willingness to shape the global arena.

This is a far cry from the inward-looking tone of Trump’s presidential campaign, during which foreign affairs took a back seat to domestic issues such as inflation and immigration. Indeed, Trump’s focus before taking office was on criticizing what he characterized as a trigger-happy, out-of-touch foreign-policy establishment that had needlessly launched costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Read more

Over the past two decades, a distinctive kind of color-coded map has become a staple of economic journalism. These maps were designed to show the leading commercial partner of countries around the world. Gradually at first, and then in an onrush of change, they filled up with a new color—usually red—as China surpassed the United States as the top bilateral trader with almost every nation on Earth.

As China became the globe’s dominant trade superpower, largely on the strength of its manufacturing prowess, leaders in the West and Asia wondered how much—and how quickly—Beijing would be able to convert its recent commercial strength into geopolitical advantage. That process has been much slower and more limited than many expected. It turns out that patterns established decades ago, when colonial rule was still widespread, are hard to displace.

Read more