Geopolitics & international affairs
For five months, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq has done what its government promised: it stayed out of the war. It refused to take sides between Washington and Tehran and refused to let its territory be used to strike Iran. It kept its head down and hoped the conflict would pass it by. Instead, the […]
The State Department’s annual fiscal transparency report, published on Tuesday, came with a new rule: any government that lends money abroad must now make the terms of those loans public, including the liabilities and the collateral behind them. Then the report turned to the world’s largest sovereign lender and found it wanting. The two moves […]
Washington’s offensive against the war-crimes court in The Hague was designed to make life impossible for the court and everyone who works with it. On Tuesday, four of the oldest human rights organizations in the United States went to court to say the campaign is making life impossible for Americans too, and that the law […]
On Monday, the president signed an executive order recommending that American children receive fewer vaccines, that some shots be reserved for children judged to be at risk, and that the combined measles-mumps-rubella shot be broken apart into three separate injections. He signed it in the Oval Office, to applause, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his […]
On Tuesday, the Fourth Criminal Court in Damascus condemned Bashar al-Assad and eight more officials of the fallen regime to death, finding them guilty of crimes against humanity and of war crimes. The verdict was delivered in the country he ruled for twenty-four years, in a courtroom he will never enter. Assad and his brother […]
On July 8, at the close of the Ankara NATO gathering, Donald Trump boarded Air Force One in full view of the cameras. The plane took off. The president was not on it. According to reporting by The Washington Post and The New York Times, confirmed across US media this week, Trump had been secretly […]
On August 5, police at Leipzig/Halle, one of Europe’s busiest air-cargo hubs, found a drone fitted with explosives in the cargo area and defused it. Germany’s interior minister, Alexander Dobrindt, called it a new level of danger and said investigators were treating the incident as a professional hybrid threat scenario. Someone built a bomb, strapped […]
On Monday, a drone strike hit Merewa, a town in southern Tigray, close to the line with the Amhara region, and the settlement that was meant to have ended the war four years ago lurched again toward collapse. Tigray’s rebel authorities say the strike was carried out by the federal government’s forces and that it […]
China has taken into custody a number of Japanese citizens, among them senior executives of firms that operate inside the country, on suspicion of breaking export rules on dual-use goods, the Mainichi Shimbun reported on Tuesday, citing several sources. The detentions took place as the executives entered China, according to the report carried by the […]
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 […]
