The advisers with a stake: Hegseth’s Pentagon board and the Trump-linked fund
The Defense Policy Board does not award contracts. That is the first thing its defenders say, and it is true. The board advises the secretary of war on strategy, force structure and the future of warfare; it signs nothing and spends nothing. Which is exactly why the question raised this week matters. A seat on […]
Partners, not protectorates: the fine print of America’s Asia promise
The American message to Asia this week was two sentences long, and it contained the whole argument in miniature: we are not leaving, and you must pay more. Both statements are true, and the second one is the policy. The messenger was Elbridge Colby, the under secretary for policy at the Department of War, speaking […]
Five Hundred Wine Jars, One Shipwreck: A Roman Cargo That Maps an Economy
About five kilometers (three miles) off the coast of Mazara del Vallo in western Sicily, in 46 meters (151 feet) of water, lies a Roman merchant ship that has not moved in roughly 2,100 years. Its cargo is still on board: about 500 amphorae, the sturdy clay jars of antiquity, packed for a voyage that […]
The Tiger’s first blood: Colombia’s new war begins in the first week
The war that the inauguration promised began before the week was out. Three days after taking the oath in Cali, the country’s new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, reported that operations over the weekend had left six members of armed groups dead. The dead include a commander of a FARC dissident faction; the announcement, delivered […]
The dead regime’s uranium: a quiet deal to empty Syria’s secret site
The last secret of Bashar al-Assad’s nuclear program is being packed up and carried out of Syria, under an agreement almost nobody was told about. The news service Axios reported on Monday, on the word of Israeli and American officials, that inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency are about to carry nuclear material out […]
The apple is off the ballot: Russia silences its last anti-war voice
Nobody expected the September elections to be fair. That was never the question. The question was whether the state would keep up the forms of fairness long enough to be worth pretending about, and on Monday the Supreme Court answered: no. The court barred Yabloko from the parliamentary ballot, striking the only registered party that […]