Three decades covering foreign policy has taught me one thing: the story is almost never as simple as your side wants it to be. That’s why I call balls and strikes without keeping score.

That means you get reporting and analysis that makes partisans on both sides a little uncomfortable. Clear-eyed, fact-based, and beholden to no one.

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Three years after October 7, Israel has killed Hamas’s top leaders and gutted its military wing in a war meant to ensure the group never governs Gaza again. Yet as Israelis prepare to vote Tuesday in their first national election since the massacre, the campaign has largely avoided the most consequential question about Gaza’s future: Will Israel allow Palestinians to govern the territory themselves, or reoccupy it?

The Trump administration’s Board of Peace has a plan to replace Hamas with a Palestinian government backed by international security arrangements. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected its phased roadmap in August, insisting Hamas must disarm before Israeli forces withdraw.

The impasse reflects an old dilemma. Israel insists it cannot relinquish control until Palestinians can guarantee its security. Palestinians argue they cannot govern meaningfully while Israel retains that control.

The Board proposes breaking the deadlock by making Palestinian governance and Israeli security part of the same transaction. It is a long shot. It is also the only plan on the table that offers Israel a way out of Gaza without reoccupying it, which makes it worth a serious try.

Nickolay Mladenov, the Board’s high representative for Gaza, described the approach to me as “zero trust,” a choreography for two sides that expect the other to cheat. Sector by sector, Hamas would surrender its weapons as international forces help vetted Palestinian police and administrators take control, while Israeli troops withdraw as each step is verified. Palestinian self-government would become a way to achieve Israeli security instead of waiting for it.

Palestinian institution-building is hardly new. George W. Bush made reform a condition of statehood, and Salam Fayyad, as prime minister, tried to build institutions that would earn it. Palestinians were asked to perform first, with Israeli withdrawal a distant reward. It stayed distant. The Board’s version asks Israel to move too, and neither side has to take the other’s promises on faith.

Hamas has accepted the framework in principle, but Israel says the group is already rearming, and even the Board expects it to test the limits. Friday’s Hamas-claimed attack near Hebron, which killed two Israeli soldiers, has only reinforced Israeli fears that Hamas is regrouping, not standing down.

A year after the ceasefire, none of the Board’s central steps has begun. Hamas still runs the parts of Gaza Israel does not hold. The Palestinian administration meant to replace it remains in Cairo, international troops have not deployed and reconstruction has stalled, while Israeli strikes continue almost daily.

The chicken-and-egg problem the plan was designed to solve is keeping it from starting. Israel rightly wants proof that Palestinians can govern Gaza securely before handing over control. Palestinians cannot provide that proof without the authority to try. A government sent in without trained police, resources or Israeli security commitments, Mladenov told me, would see its credibility “eaten up very quickly.”

Israel has even resisted letting Palestinian police recruits leave for training in Egypt. So Palestinians are expected to prove they can keep Gaza secure, while the people who would do the securing can’t get to class.

October 7 made the distinction between Hamas governing Gaza and Palestinians governing it far harder for Israelis to accept. Many of those who would staff a new government work for international agencies, including the U.N. relief agency for Palestinians, which Israel accuses Hamas of infiltrating; the agency disputes the charge. Whatever the merits, Israel regards those institutions with profound suspicion. Vetting can screen individuals, but it cannot guarantee what happens once they have power.

Nor can technocrats substitute indefinitely for political authority. An interim government needs real power and a credible path to elections, not another arrangement in which Palestinians are governed by people acceptable to everyone except the Palestinians themselves.

Mahmoud Abbas, now 90, is 21 years into a four-year term, and this month he postponed elections yet again, to September 2027. Critics say the delay protects the old guard, and few expect the date to hold. Whether Abbas will run is unclear, and Palestinians have every right to re-elect him if he does. But giving another term to the man who presided over two decades of political drift would be an odd way to ask fro change and demand leaders capable of delivering a state

Israel, for its part, has backed anti-Hamas clans, including the Popular Forces militia founded by the late Yasser Abu Shabab, a Rafah clan leader with a criminal past. That illustrates the danger of mistaking an enemy of Hamas for a credible alternative. Israel cannot demand legitimate Palestinian leadership while cultivating rival armed groups. After three years trying to dismantle Hamas, auditioning candidates for an Israel-friendly version of it would be a peculiar definition of victory.

It would be easy to blame Netanyahu and his election calculations for the foot-dragging. But Michael Eisenberg, an Israeli venture capitalist serving as Netanyahu’s envoy to the Board, suggests the election is delaying a decision Israeli society itself has not made.

“When you say politics, it’s not the politicians; it’s actually the body politic,” he told me. Israelis, he said, have not settled on an acceptable outcome in Gaza. Still, Eisenberg supports the Board, calling its work “critical” and “the best option for Gaza.”

The campaign bears this out. Netanyahu’s main challengers, Gadi Eisenkot and Naftali Bennett, also insist Hamas must disarm before Israeli forces withdraw. On Gaza, at least, the opposition is running on the incumbent’s platform. A recent Pew survey found that just 17 percent of Israelis believe peaceful coexistence with a Palestinian state is possible.

It is not hard to see why. Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005, only for Hamas to seize control two years later. For many Israelis, the lesson was simple: Whatever vacuum Israel leaves, Hamas fills. October 7 seared it in.

But Netanyahu’s demand for complete disarmament before withdrawal threatens to restore the familiar arrangement: Palestinians deliver first, Israel decides later, if ever. The Board cannot guarantee a Palestinian government will succeed. But without real authority, its premise cannot even be tested.

The Board has problems of its own. Hamas may resist disarmament, foreign troops may balk at confronting it and Israel may stall. Reciprocal commitments need enforceable benchmarks, not another collection of promises with flexible expiration dates.

Meanwhile, Israel is drifting toward occupation without the paperwork: Israeli military control over much of Gaza, Hamas influence in the rest and no Palestinian government capable of replacing either. Israel does not want to govern Gaza, but it is not prepared to let Palestinians govern it. The arrangement everyone says cannot continue is becoming the arrangement everyone is allowing to continue.

The next Israeli government will inherit that choice. It should start small: a monitored transfer of authority in one area, backed by trained Palestinian police and international forces, with Israeli withdrawal following verified progress. That would test the Board’s central proposition without betting everything on it.

Mladenov is blunt about what happens otherwise. Israelis, he told me, “need to let the Palestinians govern themselves,” because the other option is “full reoccupation.” That would mean governing more than two million people in a devastated territory, with a likely insurgency and no clear exit.

“You will end up with what you had before,” Mladenov warned. “It’s not going to be called Hamas. It’s going to be called something else.”

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Skepticism about the Board’s plan is expected and, frankly, reasonable. But the alternatives on offer are reoccupation or more waiting, and neither is a plan.

Israel went to war to ensure Hamas could never govern Gaza again. Three years later, it still has no answer to who should govern instead. By refusing to let a Palestinian alternative take hold, or to invest in the Palestinians who could lead one toward elections, Israel is already making the very choice it says it doesn’t want to make.

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President Donald Trump says Russia and Ukraine have agreed to stop attacking each other’s energy infrastructure.

How does he know? “They agreed because I said they agree,” he told reporters this week.

Apparently nobody told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who learned about his own ceasefire on social media. Or Vladimir Putin, whose forces continued launching missiles and drones at Ukrainian cities and power plants, killing civilians and leaving hundreds of thousands in the dark.

That’s the logic of Trump’s latest push to end the war: lean on the side that’s listening. He has demanded that Kyiv stop hitting Russian oil refineries, threatened to restrict American intelligence-sharing and suggested Ukraine find itself a new president, one more willing to make a deal.

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Ukraine has spent this war outmanned and outgunned. But its campaign against Russian refineries has made Russians feel the war. It has caused lines at the pump and forced one of the world’s biggest diesel suppliers to suspend exports. Russia’s oil and gas tax revenues have also fallen 17 percent this year, although refinery strikes are only part of the explanation.

Kyiv can’t outfight Putin, but it can make the war more expensive. That’s called leverage. Trump is stripping the Ukrainians of what little they have, while handing Moscow every reason to wait them out.

Then came the missiles. For two straight nights since Zelenskyy disclosed the threat to suspend intelligence-sharing, Russian ballistic missiles have hit Kyiv. Each time, he says, Ukraine got no warning from its partners. He didn’t name Washington. He didn’t have to. Trump insists intelligence is still flowing, and a senior Ukrainian official blamed a “failure,” possibly the weather, rather than a deliberate cutoff. Maybe so. But early warning is exactly what Washington is supposed to provide.

Declining to help Ukraine hit targets inside Russia is one thing. Whether Washington is still reliably warning Ukraine about incoming missiles that threaten civilian lives is another question entirely.

So why squeeze Kyiv? The war with Iran has disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and pushed diesel to $6.27 a gallon, up more than 70 percent in a year, three weeks before the midterms. Trump needed someone to blame. He chose Ukraine.

His fix is to ease sanctions on Russian diesel exports, including shipments to the United States. Last week he undercut a sanctions law he signed just last month, one championed by his late friend, Senator Lindsey Graham. Twelve senators from both parties want the deal scrapped, warning it bankrolls Putin’s war. Economists say it won’t do much for American drivers, either. One estimate puts Russia’s November pledge at about one day of U.S. diesel demand.

Putin, in other words, is profiting from two wars at once. The Iran war pushed oil from around $60 a barrel to over $100 and drained the Patriot interceptors Ukraine needs to protect its cities. Ukraine’s refinery strikes were one of the few things cutting into that windfall. Now Trump wants them stopped, too.

Then there’s the ceasefire that wasn’t. Zelenskyy offered a simple trade: Ukraine stops hitting Russian energy if Russia stops hitting Ukraine’s. The White House wants Ukraine to go first. Trump’s truce also reportedly covers only oil refineries. Russia has plenty of those. Ukraine has one major refinery, and Russia knocked most of it out years ago. So Kyiv gives up its best weapon and Moscow gives up... nothing.

Ukraine says it has stopped striking Russian refineries. Russia keeps pounding the power plants that will keep Ukrainians warm this winter. Only one side, it seems, got the memo.

Not to worry. “Bottom line, it’s going to work out,” Trump posted. “You know why? It always does.”

Trump has enormous leverage over Kyiv, which depends on American weapons, intelligence and diplomacy. He has leverage over Moscow too, starting with the sanctions he is now easing. He is using the first and shelving the second. He can pressure Zelenskyy to comply, but he cannot simply declare that Putin has agreed and expect Moscow to fall in line.

You don’t need to divine Trump’s motives to see who benefits from his approach. Right now, it’s Putin.

Sanctions relief is only the start. Trump plans to host Putin in December at the G20 summit at his own golf resort in Doral, Florida, potentially giving the Russian leader his first multilateral summit in a Western country since the invasion.

And for an America First president, Trump has been remarkably quiet about Russian strikes on Ukrainian facilities tied to American companies, including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and McDonald’s. The American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine sought a meeting with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner but says it never heard back.

To be fair, Washington hasn’t abandoned Kyiv. For now, Ukraine still gets American intelligence and weapons. But Trump is holding them over its head, and the threat alone weakens Kyiv’s negotiating position.

There is a legitimate case for ending this war. No one wants the fighting to stop more than Ukrainians. But wars don’t end because an American president says so. They end when the side who started them decides the fight costs more than it’s worth.

Putin is betting he can outlast Ukraine and its Western backers. Economic pain, battlefield setbacks and the prospect of more losses are among the few things that might change his mind.

Stripping Ukraine of the means to inflict them isn’t how you build leverage over the Kremlin. It’s how you give it away.

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Three decades covering foreign policy has taught me one thing: the story is almost never as simple as your side wants it to be. That’s why I call balls and strikes without keeping score.

That means you get reporting and analysis that makes partisans on both sides a little uncomfortable. Clear-eyed, fact-based, and beholden to no one.

If that’s the kind of coverage you want to read- I hope you will support my work by subscribing.

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For an event that turned the Middle East upside down , the anniversary of the October 7 attacks barely registered beyond Israel this year.

The world was too busy worrying about Iran, gas prices and what another Middle East war might mean for the American midterms to dwell on how we got here.

Here’s the thing: The world hasn’t moved on from October 7. It’s just moved on to everything October 7 unleashed.

Three years later, Israel has done what few thought possible. It has decimated Hamas and Hezbollah, battered Iran and emerged as the undisputed military heavyweight of the Middle East. The wars unleashed by Hamas’s attack have shaken governments, upended alliances, disrupted the global economy and even rewritten the politics of Israel’s closest ally, the United States.

Quite a return on three years of war.

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For decades, Iran built a network of armed proxies to keep Israel under threat while keeping the fighting away from its own doorstep. Israel turned that strategy on its head. Hamas and Hezbollah lost their leaders and much of their fighting power, giving Lebanon’s government its best opportunity in decades to wrest control from Hezbollah. And the war finally reached Iran itself. Tehran spent decades building a regional deterrent. Israel dismantled much of it in three years.

But Israel’s victories have consequences far beyond the battlefield. Unable to match Israel or the United States militarily, Tehran has demonstrated that it can still wreak havoc on the global economy. Threats to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, coupled with Houthi attacks near the Bab el-Mandeb, have disrupted energy markets and trade routes around the world.

Gulf powers, increasingly wary of depending on Washington to protect them from a conflict they didn’t start and couldn’t control, are forging new security partnerships. The upheaval has also created openings for Russia and China as American allies reconsider their security.

So yes, Israel did what it set out to do: It transformed the regional balance of power. What it hasn’t figured out is how to turn that military dominance and the tectonic geopolitical shifts it unleashed into lasting security — or how to keep winning wars without losing friends.

In some ways, it’s moving in the opposite direction. The devastation in Gaza and Israel’s policies in the West Bank have made it increasingly difficult for even its closest partners to defend its actions. Arab governments may be quietly celebrating Iran’s humiliation, but they’re hardly lining up to embrace an Israel that seems increasingly willing to use force whenever and wherever it deems necessary.

For decades, Israel could count on bipartisan American support almost as reliably as it could count on its own military. Not anymore. On the left, criticism has moved well beyond Netanyahu to questions about the occupation, Palestinian rights and whether American military assistance should come with conditions. On the America First right, Israel is increasingly being asked to justify why it deserves special treatment when every other foreign commitment is under scrutiny.

The military alliance remains exceptionally strong. But the political consensus beneath it is cracking, and Israel would be foolish to assume that American support is an inexhaustible resource.

October 7 also unleashed a wave of antisemitism that had clearly been lurking much closer to the surface than many of us wanted to believe. As the war in Gaza unfolded, outrage over Israel’s actions became entangled with old prejudices about Jews. Jews thousands of miles from Israel were held responsible for the decisions of an Israeli government they never elected, while accusations of antisemitism were increasingly used to dismiss legitimate criticism of the devastation in Gaza.

Somewhere along the way, acknowledging the suffering of Israelis became, for some, a betrayal of Palestinians. And acknowledging Palestinian suffering became, for others, a betrayal of Israel. Compassion has become a zero-sum game in a world of selective humanity.

Trump’s Board of Peace offers the first serious opportunity in years to give Palestinians control over their own future. But it’s hard to build a future in Gaza when there’s barely anything left to build on, or to talk about Palestinian statehood while Israel steadily makes it less possible in the West Bank.

Palestinians also have a responsibility to shape what comes next — to build accountable leadership capable of governing, rejecting violence and offering their people a future defined by more than resistance to Israel.

Israelis have paid an enormous price to feel safe again; Palestinians have paid an enormous price for a war that has left them further from freedom. Three years later, both are still waiting for something that looks like peace.

For all the extraordinary changes October 7 unleashed, one stubbornly ordinary fact remains: Israelis and Palestinians still have to live next to each other. Neither is going anywhere. Neither can bomb, blockade or wish the other out of existence.

Israel has never been more capable of imposing its will on the Middle East. Whether it can build a future in which it doesn’t have to keep doing so is another matter.

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Three decades covering foreign policy has taught me one thing: the story is almost never as simple as your side wants it to be. That’s why I call balls and strikes without keeping score.

That means you get reporting and analysis that makes partisans on both sides a little uncomfortable. Clear-eyed, fact-based, and beholden to no one.

If that’s the kind of coverage you want to read- I hope you will support my work with a paid subscription.

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Linda Robinson thinks we are missing the bigger story. In her new book, Women in Power: Fighting for Democracy in an Age of Authoritarianism, Robinson, a senior fellow and director of the Women and Foreign Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that two troubling trends are converging. Democracy has been losing ground around the world, while decades of progress bringing women into political leadership have stalled – and that, she argues, is not a coincidence.

In our Cosmopolitics conversation, Robinson identified three forces hitting women particularly hard: the rise of a more paternalistic strain of authoritarianism that seeks to push women back toward traditional roles; the normalization of violent misogyny; and a digital ecosystem — increasingly turbocharged by artificial intelligence — that makes it easier to target women with sexualized attacks, threats and disinformation.

But Women in Power isn’t just a book about what is happening to women. It’s about what women are doing in response.

Robinson takes us to some of the world’s most vulnerable democracies, where women have found themselves facing some of the world’s most powerful authoritarian leaders. Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen stood up to pressure from Xi Jinping. Estonia’s Kaja Kallas and Moldova’s Maia Sandu confronted Vladimir Putin and Russian efforts to weaken their countries from within.

Sandu told Robinson something that stayed with me: Moldovans didn’t elect her because she was a woman. They elected her because they thought she was honest. In a country plagued by corruption and outside interference, she represented something different. And, Robinson argues, that pattern repeats itself: women emerging from movements demanding reform and then broadening the coalitions supporting them.

Then there is Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley, who demonstrates another kind of power. The leader of a tiny Caribbean nation, Mottley has managed to force some of the world’s biggest financial institutions to rethink how vulnerable countries deal with debt and climate disasters. Her influence doesn’t come from military or economic might, but from ideas, persistence and an ability to build coalitions.

The backlash can be brutal. Former Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin was subjected to gendered attacks while leading her country into NATO. Death threats against New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern tripled during her final two years in office. Women politicians increasingly face sexualized deepfakes and other forms of digital abuse largely unique in their intensity and character.

The United States has had women serve as vice president, secretary of state, congressional leaders, governors and generals, yet has never elected a woman president. Now Robinson sees a broader struggle over women’s place in public life, including inside the U.S. military. She was particularly blunt about the removal of senior women under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, arguing the effects on the leadership pipeline could last for years.

Meanwhile, after 80 years and nine men, the United Nations is choosing another secretary-general, with several highly qualified women in contention.

Robinson is careful not to argue that women are inherently better leaders, or even necessarily democratic ones. Women can be authoritarians too. Her argument is more interesting than that.

At a moment when authoritarian movements are challenging democratic institutions, some of the most compelling examples of resistance are coming from women who have learned how to build coalitions, strengthen their societies and exercise power even when the odds are stacked against them.

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Three decades covering foreign policy has taught me one thing: the story is almost never as simple as your side wants it to be. That’s why I call balls and strikes without keeping score.

That means you get reporting and analysis that makes partisans on both sides a little uncomfortable. Clear-eyed, fact-based, and beholden to no one.

If that’s the kind of coverage you want to read- I hope you will support my work with a paid subscription.

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Xi Jinping arrived in Washington this week for his first state visit in more than a decade, and President Trump is rolling out everything but the ballroom. The president greeted him personally on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews. Next came a military review and a flyover, and tonight, a state dinner stocked with tech titans.

The official agenda is crowded: artificial intelligence, rare earths, tariffs, Iran and, looming over all of it, Taiwan. The Trump administration is competing hard with China, restricting its access to advanced technology, working to loosen Beijing’s grip on critical minerals and trying to build an American-led AI ecosystem.

For all the pageantry, the story dominating the headlines is which American reporters got to cover it. Take a snapshot of America today, assuming you’re allowed to, and Xi has to like what he sees.

The United States is still more powerful than China. It has the stronger military, the bigger economy and a network of alliances Beijing has never come close to replicating. But many of those advantages look less commanding than they did a year ago. And some of the behavior Washington spent decades warning about in Beijing is getting harder to explain at home.

Five years ago, as Joe Biden braced the country for a long-term competition with China, I argued that Washington was fixating on the tangible parts of the contest: infrastructure, factories, chips, carriers. Those things mattered, and they still do. Trump is competing on much the same terrain. But the deeper competition was always over something China couldn’t buy or build. It was over what America represented.

That was never as sentimental as it sounds. The United States came out of World War II with overwhelming military and economic power, then multiplied it by building alliances and institutions other countries actually wanted to join. American democracy was messy and its record uneven, but there was a reason dissidents looked to Washington and not Beijing, why countries lined up for American security guarantees, and why the world’s most ambitious students and entrepreneurs wanted to come here.

Military and economic might mattered, but so did the power of the example. Today, it’s all looking a little shakier.

After September 11, Chinese strategists watched the United States pour blood and treasure into Afghanistan and Iraq and declared the arrival of a period of strategic opportunity. While America was busy elsewhere, China could build.

Twenty-five years later, Beijing is enjoying the sequel.

The war with Iran has burned through advanced American munitions and pulled ships and missile defenses out of Asia at precisely the moment Washington insists China is the main long-term challenge. Whatever the war is costing China, it is costing America far more in money, weapons and attention.

Taiwan makes the diversion harder to shrug off. Many of the weapons being fired in the Middle East are the same ones that would be needed in a fight over the Taiwan Strait. And Beijing is pressing Washington to hold off on a $14 billion arms package Trump has publicly called a “bargaining chip.” The chips in question are Taiwan’s ability to defend itself. The message to every American ally is that its security is now a line item in someone else’s trade deal.

For most of the postwar era, one of America’s great strategic luxuries was that its closest friends never had to wonder whether they needed to hedge against the United States itself. Now they do.

Canada has rebuilt ties with Beijing and moved closer to Europe. Europeans are also spending heavily on their own defense. In the Middle East, nations unsure about U.S. support are thinking about finding an accommodation with Iran.

Alliances initially built to contain Moscow and Tehran are now being rethought to survive Washington.

In Asia, China’s coercive behavior still gives Japan, South Korea and the Philippines powerful reasons to want the United States around. But America’s advantage has always been the confidence behind those alliances, the assumption that Washington would be there. Increasingly, America’s friends are building insurance policies.

American institutions were long the envy of the world, the thing foreign officials cited, sometimes grudgingly, as the real difference between Washington and everyone else. For years, Beijing and Moscow poured money into disinformation campaigns designed to convince Americans that their elections were rigged, their courts were political and their government was out to get them.

Now our government is doing some of that work for them. As Trump sat down with China’s communist leader at the White House Thursday, American news organizations he had barred because he objected to their coverage were still outside, despite a court order, while Chinese state media were inside. Instead of showing Xi the messy example of the First Amendment at work, Trump was treating the American press as the enemy.

And at the United Nations this week, Trump defended America’s claim to Venezuela’s oil after the ouster of Nicolás Maduro in four words: “To the victor belong the spoils.” Take out America and Venezuela, and you’d think Vladimir Putin was talking about Ukraine.

These are the sorts of things the State Department once cited in its annual human rights reports about other countries.

But America’s institutions are still pushing back. A federal judge ordered Trump to restore access to CNN, MS NOW and Politico. The courts have continued to check the administration, and the Fed has continued to set interest rates independently of Trump’s pressure to lower them.

That matters. America’s argument was never that its institutions were perfect, or that its leaders always respected them. It was that the system had the capacity to check them.

America always had one advantage China could never manufacture: people wanted to come here. They watched American movies and hummed American songs. Immigrants waited years in line for the privilege of becoming American. Parents dreamed of sending their kids to American universities.

China has spent years trying to lure its scientists home with money, shiny campuses and increasingly sophisticated technology. America never needed a recruitment strategy. It had the Statue of Liberty.

In a competition increasingly decided by AI, biotech and other fields where the scarcest resource is human talent, that pitch was worth more than any subsidy. Foreign students ended up staffing American labs, filing American patents and founding American companies.

Now Washington is squeezing universities through federal funding and making it harder for foreign students and skilled workers to come. It is the rare arms race in which one side is voluntarily disarming.

The shift is showing up abroad. A Pew survey this summer found China viewed more favorably than the United States in 25 of 36 countries surveyed. The United States led in just six.

Xi has adjusted his pitch accordingly, crisscrossing the globe to present China as the grown-up in the room: doing deals, courting governments Washington has alienated and offering Beijing as a global mediator. Reliability is now part of the sales package, and the bar has rarely been lower.

That doesn’t make China benign or trustworthy. But it doesn’t have to be for Xi to benefit from what he sees happening in the United States.

Let’s keep some perspective. China has not discovered liberal democracy. Xi runs an authoritarian state that censors the internet, jails critics and menaces Taiwan. Its economy is sputtering, and a leader who has purged half his top generals is not presiding over a system at peace with itself.

But in this great-power competition, America is increasingly playing away from its strengths. Xi doesn’t need to outmaneuver Washington. He only has to sit back and watch Washington outmaneuver itself.

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Three decades covering foreign policy has taught me one thing: the story is almost never as simple as your side wants it to be. That’s why I call balls and strikes without keeping score.

That means you get reporting and analysis that makes partisans on both sides a little uncomfortable. Clear-eyed, fact-based, and beholden to no one.

If that’s the kind of coverage you want to read- I hope you will support my work with a paid subscription.

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When Washington chose to fight Iran, it didn’t get to choose how the regime — and the forces aligned with it — would fight back. Increasingly, the answer is simple: hit the ally, not the patron.

That’s the elephant in the room waiting for President Trump when he sits down with Gulf leaders this week on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. How Washington handles it could help determine something much bigger than this crisis: how much American leadership — and leverage — survives the war.

A month ago, I warned in The Washington Post that Washington risked focusing on Hormuz until it was too late to protect the backup route. We are getting closer.

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Saudi Arabia is under direct attack. The Houthis have swept down Yemen’s Red Sea coast and now sit astride Bab el-Mandeb, the gateway between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. They’ve hit Saudi cities and energy sites, and this weekend claimed strikes near Riyadh’s main airport. They also damaged the East-West Pipeline, the one Saudi Arabia built specifically as insurance, so its crude could reach the Red Sea whenever Hormuz got too dangerous to use. Aramco has already started cutting shipments to Europe.

Iran has already shown it can squeeze the world’s oil supply through Hormuz. Now the Houthis are squeezing the other side of the peninsula, sitting on the exact route Saudi Arabia was counting on as its backup.

The Houthis aren’t marionettes. They have their own war with Riyadh and their own reasons for fighting it. But autonomy and alignment aren’t opposites. A Houthi missile can serve Houthi interests and Iranian interests at once, hurting Tehran’s adversaries without putting a single Iranian asset in American crosshairs.

Riyadh wants more direct American intervention. It’s gotten high-level visits, intelligence and targeting support, but little else, because Washington is treating the Houthis as a separate war.

U.S. officials also talked directly to the Houthis in Oman, where the group reportedly promised to leave American and other commercial vessels alone while continuing to target Saudi shipping. Trump seemed satisfied with the distinction. The Houthis, he told reporters, “don’t want to fight with us.”

Say what you want about a group that spent years being dismissed as a ragtag militia — the Houthis have a sophisticated understanding of exactly where Washington’s lines are and how to stay on the safer side of them.

There are legitimate reasons America doesn’t want another Yemen war. The military is already stretched fighting Iran, with interceptor stocks now strained. A decade of military campaigns never made the Houthis disappear, and no serious expert thinks another one would end differently.

That’s a strong argument against launching another air campaign. But it doesn’t exempt America from what happens in the Red Sea. And it definitely doesn’t mean Washington can dodge the cost.

Bab el-Mandeb isn’t a Saudi waterway. It connects the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean and, through Suez, Europe to Asia. When ships avoid it, voyages take longer. Insurance climbs. So does freight and, eventually, the price of whatever is sitting in the container.

America drills plenty of its own oil. It doesn’t set its own oil price. Brent closed the week near $104 a barrel. And that’s just the gas bill. The bigger cost may be to something Washington is still trying to build in the region.

Less than a year ago, Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman rolled out a sweeping economic and security partnership. Nearly a trillion dollars in Saudi investment commitments. F-35s. Hundreds of American tanks. And at the center, a “historic” Strategic Defense Agreement meant to “fortify deterrence” and cement the United States as Saudi Arabia’s primary strategic partner.

The agreement never promised anything like NATO’s Article 5. But the fine print doesn’t matter much right now. Saudi cities, refineries and shipping are under attack and, whatever the letter of the agreement says, I’m pretty sure this isn’t what fortified deterrence is supposed to feel like.

It’s also not what the economic bargain assumed. A kingdom burning through its own interceptor missiles and worrying whether its oil can reach its customers has different priorities from one pouring billions into American chips and data centers.

So Riyadh is doing what countries do when they become less certain about the security architecture around them. It’s finding a Plan B.

Last month, Saudi Arabia signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement with Turkey and Pakistan, with language reportedly resembling NATO’s Article 5 — an attack on one is an attack on all.

When the Houthis hit a Saudi Aramco refinery in Jazan 48 hours after the signing, neither new partner rushed to help. Now, the Mecca pact may be starting to gain weight. Turkey said this weekend it is ready to help meet Saudi military needs, even while pushing for a diplomatic end to the fight with the Houthis.

Steven Cook at the Council on Foreign Relations thinks focusing on the specifics of the agreement misses the point. Mecca’s importance, he argues, “does not lie in its security guarantees.” It is a signal of something larger: a “change underway in the Middle East’s regional order—one that reduces the United States’ decades long leadership role.”

This isn’t the birth of an Islamic bloc. Saudi Arabia has spent much of the past decade trying to move away from religion as the organizing principle of its foreign policy. Still, strategic necessity can make for interesting company, and it can’t be ignored that three major Muslim powers are building a defense relationship with neither Washington nor Israel at the table.

Riyadh isn’t stopping there. This month it asked China to lean on Iran and get the Houthis to stand down, and Beijing quietly did, because a war choking two major oil chokepoints at once is terrible for an economy that runs on Middle Eastern crude. China also has something particularly useful right now: leverage in Tehran. It is Iran’s largest trading partner and the main buyer of its oil. And it brokered the 2023 deal that restored relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran in the first place.

None of that means Saudi Arabia is leaving Washington behind. Turkey, Pakistan and China can’t replace decades of American arms sales, intelligence-sharing and military cooperation. The shift is more subtle: Riyadh is building more places to turn.

Washington has spent years telling its Middle Eastern partners to carry more of their own security burden. That’s a fair ask. But burden-sharing only works to America’s advantage if Washington is still providing the leadership that holds the pieces together.

That doesn’t mean another war in Yemen. It means treating Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, Saudi air defenses and Iran’s economic leverage as one strategic problem — and organizing a regional response before everyone starts improvising their own.

That’s the choice waiting for Trump this week: Lead a security order in which America’s allies carry more of the burden, or watch them shape one where America has less say.

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Three decades covering foreign policy has taught me one thing: the story is almost never as simple as your side wants it to be. That’s why I call balls and strikes without keeping score.

That means you get reporting and analysis that makes partisans on both sides a little uncomfortable. Clear-eyed, fact-based, and beholden to no one.

If that’s the kind of coverage you want to read- I hope you will support my work and subscribe.

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It’s still the one question that unites almost everyone on this anniversary, no matter where they stand on anything else: where were you when the planes hit? Who did you call? That’s about the only thing left we all still ask each other the same way.

I decided to sleep in the morning of September 11 because Secretary of State Colin Powell was in Peru. I was walking out the door when the assignment desk called about the first plane, and my first instinct was that it had to be some kind of air traffic control failure - the idea that something so monumental could be happening simply hadn’t occurred to me. I heard about the second tower in a cab on the way to work. By the time I reached the State Department, people were evacuating, and because I was a reporter, I did what reporters do: I ran toward the building everyone else was running out of, until Diplomatic Security practically carried me out.

I spent hours trying to walk the half mile to the Foreign Press Center as the security perimeter around the White House kept expanding, then spent the next 24 hours there with the State Department press corps. We knew almost immediately that America had changed. We couldn’t know that a quarter century later, Americans would look at each other with more suspicion than they look at the country’s actual enemies.

The government’s response built an enormous security architecture - the TSA, intelligence reform, hardened cockpit doors, expanded surveillance, two wars, a homeland security bureaucracy - all of it requiring legislation, money and years of bureaucratic effort. The collective national response required far less: strangers trading knowing looks on the street and the subway, flags on houses that had never flown one, Bush’s approval rating hitting 90 percent within weeks, a level no sitting president has reached since.

We spent the next quarter century institutionalizing the security lessons of September 11, but never tried to institutionalize the resilience of September 12, and that resilience has since drained away. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken just before this year’s anniversary found 61 percent of Americans now see domestic extremists as the bigger ideology-driven threat, versus 34 percent who point abroad - a sharp flip from a decade ago, when foreign terrorism still outranked domestic. The same poll found most Americans still regard 9/11 as a unifying moment, even as they say the country has grown less unified since.

Polarization and terrorism are not the same thing, and treating them as interchangeable is intellectually lazy - domestic terrorism is one ugly symptom of a much bigger disease. The real vulnerability is that Americans no longer trust each other, or their own institutions, enough to agree on what’s true, which makes political violence easier to justify and foreign manipulation almost effortless to execute.

In the days after the attacks, Bush went to a mosque in Washington and said Islam was a religion of peace, that the terrorists had perverted it - an effort to draw a line between the attackers and the millions of Muslim Americans who had nothing to do with it.

That instinct largely held for years. It holds less cleanly now. Rhetoric that treats an entire faith as suspect, once confined to one party’s fringe, is turning up closer to the mainstream, and so is rhetoric, mostly from the other direction, that flirts with the idea America had it coming. Neither view was remotely acceptable in 2001; now both get argued about rather than simply rejected, depending on who’s talking. This year, with the midterms approaching, that same partisan lens has been applied to the anniversary itself, with part of the official commemoration used to draw a line from September 11 to the current, contested war with Iran.

That drift is real. In 2001, most Americans processed the day through a shared American identity first. In 2026, a lot of us run it through a political filter first, and get to the American identity second, if we get there at all.

Abraham Lincoln asked, in his 1838 Lyceum Address, where America’s destruction could possibly come from. Not from a foreign army, he argued, since no power on earth could cross the oceans and march to the Ohio or the Blue Ridge. If America was ever destroyed, it would have to happen from within: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

Former Defense Secretary James Mattis has been a little obsessed with that warning. He spent four decades thinking about how America’s enemies might defeat it, commanded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ran the Pentagon - and keeps coming back to the possibility that the country he spent his life defending might do the job itself. In 2020, he invoked Lincoln to describe an America where “suspicion or contempt” was replacing trust and politics was paralyzing the country. A year later, on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, he returned to the problem from a national security angle: America had gotten better at defending the homeland even as the collapse of trust inside it created a vulnerability our adversaries could exploit.

We had a strategy for Al Qaeda and Afghanistan, reorganized the intelligence community, and built an entire cabinet department to protect the homeland - but never a strategy for the homeland turning on itself. That’s where the hand-wringing about national unity stops being sentimental and starts being strategic: societal resilience is a component of national power, not just a civic nicety.

Ukraine had roughly 196,000 soldiers before Russia’s full-scale invasion and, within a few years, nearly 900,000 including reservists, while civilians kept power plants running and companies built drones and fought off cyberattacks. Israel was tearing itself apart politically before October 7; after the attack, it called up 360,000 reservists, some of whom showed up before they were even summoned. Neither country stopped arguing with itself - they just didn’t let the arguments keep them from showing up when the country needed them.

None of this argues for a rerun of September 12. That unity was bought with 2,977 lives, and no one sane should wish for the invoice to come due again. Americans didn’t agree before the attacks or after them; democracy was never supposed to mean unanimity, and anyone selling that version of unity is selling something else too.

We are far better than we were on September 10, 2001, at hardening a cockpit door and tracing terrorist money. But every American who becomes convinced that half the country is stupid, evil or dangerous becomes that much easier to manipulate, and that is the harder question Lincoln left us with, the one Washington doesn’t much want to answer: what protects a nation from itself? Not enforced consensus, and not a grief-soaked memory of unity that catastrophe manufactured, but the discipline to argue fiercely, lose elections, shrug off propaganda and still know we’re on the same side.

Oceans don’t protect us anymore, not when a laptop in Shanghai or a troll farm outside St. Petersburg travels faster than any army could. But Lincoln’s point hasn’t aged: our adversaries don’t need to create America’s divisions, only to find the fault lines, press on them, and let us do the fighting.

We built a fortress after September 11 to keep America’s enemies out. Twenty-five years later, we need to remember that America’s greatest strength was always what’s inside it.

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Three decades covering foreign policy has taught me one thing: the story is almost never as simple as your side wants it to be. That’s why I call balls and strikes without keeping score.

That means you get reporting and analysis that makes partisans on both sides a little uncomfortable. Clear-eyed, fact-based, and beholden to no one.

If that’s the kind of coverage you want to read- I hope you will support my work and subscribe.

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Nine months after U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro, Trump announced what he’s calling the “biggest oil deal in world history,” giving Americans majority control over a venture involving some 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan crude. When American oil companies considered Venezuela too risky and failed to move, the administration apparently decided the U.S. government could become the investor itself, with the Pentagon helping to finance the venture.

This isn’t Chevron, currently the only major U.S. oil company actively producing in Venezuela, signing another production contract. The administration created an arrangement involving a private Venezuelan company through which the U.S. government would obtain a majority stake and access to oil from 17 strategic fields.

Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, said the agreement runs 25 years, with an initial goal of pushing production above 1.5 million barrels per day and turning the country “into an oil-producing power, for the benefit and happiness of the Venezuelan people.”

The federal government doesn’t normally own stakes in foreign oil ventures, nor does America have a national oil company the way Saudi Arabia has Aramco or Mexico has Pemex. The Trump administration reportedly turned to the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, an entity designed to finance national-security priorities, to help solve the problem.

So our president isn’t merely asking American companies to return to Venezuela. His government is trying to make Venezuela investable by putting the power and money of the American state behind them.

But reserves aren’t inventory. Trump talks about 65 billion barrels as though somebody just discovered a gigantic Strategic Petroleum Reserve beneath Caracas. The oil has to be drilled, pumped, transported and refined. Venezuela’s infrastructure has deteriorated after years of mismanagement, underinvestment and sanctions, and will require billions in investment to significantly increase production.

The consensus among oil analysts is that meaningful production gains are measured in years, not months, and the barrels capable of actually moving U.S. pump prices could be five to 15 years away. All of this is awkward because Trump needs cheaper gasoline before November, not sometime during the second term of President Whoever-Comes-Next.

There’s also the Iran problem, which Trump started and now needs Venezuela to help him solve. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve has fallen sharply amid supply disruptions from that very conflict, and Trump now says Venezuelan crude will help refill it. Call it vertical integration: start a war that drains the reserve, then launch a separate intervention to top it back off. It’s the foreign policy equivalent of borrowing from one credit card to pay off another - except the collateral is a foreign country’s oil fields.

Frankly, whether the oil ever arrives isn’t the deal’s biggest problem to me. I need gas and am going to fill my car regardless. I’m more concerned about whether America has the authority to take the oil and who in Venezuela had the authority to give it away.

Delcy Rodríguez wasn’t elected president - she became interim leader after U.S. forces removed Maduro. Yet before Venezuelans have elected his replacement, her government is locking in an enormous economic arrangement governing the country’s defining national resource, potentially for decades, with the country that put her in power.

That’s what makes the deal so revealing. We were told Maduro had to go because of drugs, security, authoritarianism and the threat his government posed. Well, Maduro is gone, but much of his governing apparatus isn’t. Rodríguez was his vice president; now she could arguably be considered Washington’s partner. And before Venezuelans have had a chance to choose their next president, the government left behind by Maduro has struck one of the largest resource agreements in modern history with the country that removed him.

The opposition understands the problem. You can’t build a durable oil economy without elections, rule of law and legitimate institutions. Why should the next government honor a generational agreement negotiated by an unelected predecessor, no matter how much has already been invested?

Now let’s widen the lens. The Pentagon becoming financially invested in foreign oil production raises another question entirely. The institution responsible for applying American military power would now potentially have a financial interest in an industry located in a country where American military power just removed the president. Meanwhile, our own secretary of state has emerged as the de facto power broker overseeing Venezuela’s transition, with the old president’s deputy serving as Washington’s partner on the ground. That doesn’t really need much editorializing.

For something Trump calls the largest oil deal in history, an astonishing number of basic legal and contractual questions remain unanswered - about how it was awarded under Venezuela’s constitutional framework and about the absence of a competitive process or meaningful transparency. We are still waiting for the administration to convincingly answer those questions.

Two years ago, I wrote that Latin America had become Washington’s overlooked wallflower - noticed only when migrants arrived at the border or cocaine arrived in Miami, while China understood that infrastructure, commodities, technology and trade made the region strategically important. Trump apparently agrees with me. I just wish he hadn’t taken the lesson quite so literally.

This is being sold as an energy deal, but it’s really another window into his emerging doctrine for the Western Hemisphere. Trump is correcting decades of American neglect of Latin America by resurrecting an equally old American mistake: confusing engagement with dominion. It’s the same spheres-of-influence logic Washington condemns when Russia applies it to Ukraine or China applies it to Taiwan.

Maybe Venezuelan oil eventually does flow in huge quantities to American refineries, and American investment helps rebuild a country whose leaders spent decades destroying its greatest economic asset. That would be good for Venezuelans and good for the United States.

But if Washington really wants Venezuela to become a stable American partner, the one commodity more important than oil is legitimacy. And we can’t drill our way to that.

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Three decades covering foreign policy has taught me one thing: the story is almost never as simple as your side wants it to be. That’s why I call balls and strikes without keeping score.

That means you get reporting and analysis that makes partisans on both sides a little uncomfortable. Clear-eyed, fact-based, and beholden to no one.

If that’s the kind of coverage you want to read- I hope you will support my work and subscribe.

Subscribe now

Donald Trump wants another date with Kim Jong Un, but not a channel through the State Department or months of working-level talks. He wants a summit, with cameras rolling and a red carpet somewhere in frame.

Eight years after Singapore, Trump is returning to a familiar delusion that his personal chemistry with an authoritarian leader can produce what co…

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Since the war began, Hormuz has been the fear everyone named. The quieter threat is playing out …

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No filing and very little doom-scrolling. Just sand, old friends, wine and cake.

Today is my birthday. And for whatever reason, this one has me thinking a little more than usual about how I got here.

Earlier this week, I did an interview with my friend for her excellent podcast How She Led To Me. Thankfully, Kate didn’t want to talk about Iran or Trump or whatever crisis was breaking that morning. She wanted to talk about the women who shaped me.

Most of you who know me know I’m much more comfortable asking the questions than answering them. I’ve never really talked about myself publicly. And honestly, preparing for this wrecked me a little, but in a good way. Attached is the recording. If you ever wanted to know more about me, here is your chance!

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I didn’t grow up around people who were particularly interested in foreign affairs. My obsession with the world came later, thanks largely to a high school teacher who talked about places like Kazakhstan as if they mattered, back when most kids my age probably couldn’t have found it on a map.

But the people who built me weren’t diplomats or journalists or any of the presidents and secretaries of state I would later spend my career chasing around the world.

My grandmother Libby took me in when I was in my twenties. I was broke, making about $12,000 a year at a little local newspaper and wondering whether I had any business trying to become a journalist.

She fed me. She poured me wine. After dinner, I’d take the bottle into her bedroom and we’d watch TV while I complained about whatever terrible job or boss I had at the time. My grandmother always had a show tune, a pep talk and a home-cooked meal ready to make me — and everyone around her — feel special. She passed away in 2003, but left me with the lesson that you can be tough and still be funny and kind, and that it costs you nothing to look out for someone else.

My mother taught me something else. She has lived with MS for decades, and I’ve watched it steadily take things away from her. She just refuses to let it take everything. For her 60th birthday, I saved every point and airline mile I had and took her on a blowout trip to Paris. Then I saved up for another ten years and asked where she wanted to go for her 70th.

She wanted Vegas. She wanted the Bellagio. She wanted the shows. And she wanted to go to Chippendales. So we did.

At the end, she couldn’t get out of her wheelchair to go onstage for the photo, so the Chippendales came down to her. This is a fabulous picture of my mother surrounded by half-naked men that probably says more about resilience than anything I could write here.

Kate and I also talked about my friends who sustain me. You know from Hot Takes Happy Hour. I know her as my rock, who knows where all my bodies are buried — and even helped me bury some of them.

And there are the Diplobabes — the women who covered the State Department with me all those years ago. We traveled the world together and somewhere along the way became family. We’ve since been through layoffs, marriages, new jobs, grief, kids and now grandkids. We still get together and do a ridiculous white elephant Christmas every year.

Talking to Kate made me realize something I probably should have figured out years ago. When I think about the people who got me here, I don’t really think about my career. The people I think about now are the ones who picked me up, made me laugh and told me to keep going.

Maybe that’s why this birthday feels a little different. I’m building something again. Cosmopolitics is still a work in progress. Some things have worked better than I imagined. Others haven’t. I’m learning what you want more of, what I want to spend my time doing, and how to make the whole thing sustainable without turning it into something I never want it to be.

Which brings me to a quick update on my slightly crazy birthday experiment.

The $25 annual membership has been such a hit, I am extending it until tomorrow. If you sign up this weekend, that’s your rate for good.

That’s just over $2 a month. I honestly can’t think of much you can still buy for $2. And judging by how much you read, watch, share and argue with me, I’m pretty sure you’re getting your two bucks’ worth.

I still hate asking for money. But I do love the idea behind this experiment: maybe good journalism doesn’t need another expensive paywall. Maybe less is more. Maybe it just takes enough people who value the work to kick in a few dollars.

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I’m heading home tan, rested and, for once, actually glad I stepped away for a few days. I’ll be back on Monday. Hot Takes Happy Hour will be back too, with Danielle ready to debate me, cocktail in hand, about something before the week is out.

Thank you for being part of this — for reading, watching, arguing, pushing back and sticking around.

And here’s to another trip around the sun.

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I’ve written to you before about the community we’re building at Cosmopolitics. So I want to be straight with you about where things stand.

I’m not taking what I’m about to say as some verdict on the quality of this publication. I know Cosmopolitics is resonating. I can see it in the open rates, the engagement, how many of you watch the interviews and jo…

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Strategists have a shorthand for the instruments a state uses to compete and coordinate abroad - diplomatic, information, military and economic power, or DIME. It’s a framework built for embassies, broadcasts, battalions and trade - the same one that, as I’ve recently written, now applies almost line for line to the space economy. Turns out it applies j…

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Three decades covering foreign policy has taught me one thing: the story is almost never as simple as your side wants it to be. That’s why I call balls and strikes without keeping score.

That means you get reporting and analysis that makes partisans on both sides a little uncomfortable. Clear-eyed, fact-based, and beholden to no one.

If that’s the kind of…

Read more

For half a century, Israel was the water’s edge issue — the one place bipartisan consensus actually held, even as everything else in Washington came apart. That’s over. And what’s ending isn’t support for Israel. It’s the assumption that support for Israel could sit outside the realignment reshaping everything else in American politics.

Michigan is the c…

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That means you get reporting and analysis that makes partisans on both sides a little uncomfortable. Clear-eyed, fact-based, and beholden to no one.

If that’s the kind of coverage you want to read- I hope you will support my work by subscribing.

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NATO summits are supposed to be historic. This one was, in the words of , “a nothing burger.”

That’s exactly why it mattered. After years of Trump-era drama, Ankara was carefully designed to produce...almost nothing. No blowups. No walkouts. No alliance-ending crisis. Success.

But underneath the carefully managed boredom, something much bigger is happening.

Daalder, who served as U.S. Ambassador to NATO under President Obama, argues the real story isn’t whether Europe is finally spending more. It’s that Europe is gradually taking on more responsibility—and, inevitably, more influence. For decades, Washington wanted burden-sharing without power-sharing. That bargain is getting harder to sustain.

We also talked about why Trump deserves some credit—but perhaps not for the reasons his supporters think; why Ukraine has gone from NATO’s student to one of its most important teachers; whether Turkey is becoming indispensable again; and why a more European NATO should not be confused with an American exit.

The summit itself may have been boring. The future of the alliance isn’t.

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and I hope to see you TODAY for Hot Takes Happy Hour at our new summer time 5p ET.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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NATO turns 77 this year, and the coverage out of Ankara reads like another obituary in progress: Trump doesn’t believe in the alliance, Europe can’t defend itself, the whole arrangement is coming apart. This genre shows up every few years, usually around a spending fight, and it’s usually wrong.

It’s wrong this time too, but not for the reason the optimi…

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As America marks its 250th birthday, I’m also celebrating the community we’re building here at Cosmopolitics. This has always been a place for people who want to think beyond the headlines and have smarter conversations about America’s role in the world—where we’ve been, where we’re headed, and why it matters. In honor of America 250, I’m offering 25% o…

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Every few years, someone declares the U.S.-Israel relationship broken. Usually they’re wrong. This time I’m not so sure—though not for the reason you think.

The media is treating this as a personality clash—with Trump and Netanyahu at odds over Iran, and Vance reminding Israel it has one friend left and should act like it.

I’ve sat through enough of these…

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There’s a fiction being maintained in Washington right now, and it’s getting harder to sustain by the week.

The fiction is this: that the Lebanon-Israel talks happening in Washington this week - the fifth round since April - are somehow separate from the broader U.S.-Iran framework. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said as much on Tuesday, arguing that the…

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