MUNICH—The stench of appeasement hung over the Munich Security Conference this past weekend, leaving more than a few European leaders making comparisons to September 1938. That was when a very different Munich meeting placated a murderous dictator—with disastrous consequences. It was then that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, meeting with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and
Of the four great geopolitical tests facing the United States this year—in Europe, in the Mideast, with China, and over tech leadership—it is war in Ukraine that holds the greatest urgency and is of the most immediate geopolitical consequence. To lose there—or even to settle for stalemate—would have influence on all other theaters. If Russia’s
The Washington Post’s David Ignatius asked the Qatari prime minister—a renowned hostage negotiator—the question that was on the minds of the three American-Israeli families who were in the audience at yesterday’s Atlantic Council event, hoping to hear any words of hope for their sons who, along with more than a hundred others, have been held
As tensions increase with Iran and its proxies in the Red Sea, it’s growing harder for Biden administration officials to avoid an ugly truth: The Iranian regime is pivotal to most of the Middle East’s worst problems, and US inattention will only make those problems worse. Hamas’s terrorist strike on October 7 wouldn’t have happened
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a trip this week to a dangerous and bitterly contested front line in Russia’s war with Ukraine, now into its twenty-second month. Yes, that would be Washington. His spirits were high and his mood buoyant when I met with him and a small group of others for a background chat
VILNIUS—Drafting NATO Summit communiqués is usually less the stuff of high drama and more mind-numbing bureaucracy. But that wasn’t the case this week. The NATO Summit in Lithuania will be remembered both for the public fireworks over Ukraine’s aspirations for Alliance membership and outcomes that included a breakthrough on Swedish membership, the most detailed and robust defense
VILNIUS—Here’s an easy way to judge the success of NATO’s summit here on Tuesday and Wednesday: Will President Volodymyr Zelenskyy join the traditional “family photo” of the Alliance’s thirty-one leaders? “The summit has only one essential outcome,” Doug Lute, a former US ambassador to NATO and member of the Atlantic Council’s board of directors, told
The air raid siren sounded at 3:00 a.m. on Thursday morning, several hours after the Atlantic Council’s meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in his well-fortified offices, sounding the arrival of ten Russian Iskander ballistic missiles in Kyiv airspace. Each of them—more than twenty feet long and weighing in at more than four tons—served as a further reminder that
The nature and scale of US support for Ukraine in the crucial months ahead boil down to one question: What sacrifices are the United States and its allies willing to make in the present to secure the future? Fourteen months into Russia’s full-scale invasion, that’s a question that hovers not just over Ukraine but also
