Category: Security & Defense

Prospects for US-Turkish convergence on Syria

Syria has been a point of deep contention in US-Turkish relations for the past decade, despite the fact that the two NATO allies have cooperated on diplomatic pressure campaigns against Bashar al-Assad’s regime, humanitarian relief, and refugee assistance. History offers relatively few examples of two countries committed to the same outcome of a war but

Give Africa’s peace delegation for Ukraine a chance

A delegation of African presidents and diplomats—from Senegal, Uganda, Egypt, Republic of Congo, Zambia, and South Africa—will soon present Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in Moscow and Kyiv respectively, a peace plan for ending Russia’s war on Ukraine. The initiative is rare enough to draw some sarcasm about African presidents who

Should NATO extend Stoltenberg’s term as leader?

As NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg meets with US President Joe Biden at the White House on Tuesday, there is a lot for them to discuss. Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive has just begun, and key decisions will face allies at the NATO Summit in Vilnius less than a month away. One of those decisions may be

Has Ukraine’s counteroffensive really begun?

JUST IN Will we know it when we see it? Ukrainian forces are probing front lines and attacking multiple Russian positions, even as leaders in Kyiv remain cagey on whether Ukraine’s much-anticipated summer counteroffensive has begun. Russia is sending its own signals. After digging in along the front line, Russian forces have ramped up air

Three questions (and expert answers) about the dam collapse in Ukraine

It’s set off a cascade of problems.  Early Tuesday, large sections of the Nova Kakhovka dam and hydroelectric power plant in southern Ukraine gave way. Since 1956, the dam has pinched the Dnipro River, creating a massive reservoir upstream as far as Zaporizhzhia and, downstream, a succession of towns and villages along the river terminating

Dispatch from Kyiv: Ukraine deserves NATO membership and even more robust weapons

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