Thomas Wright

Donald Trump offered perhaps the clearest summation yet of his worldview in an otherwise discursive address to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday. Defending the American takeover of Venezuelan oil, he invoked an old maxim: “To the victor belongs the spoils.” He then presented Iran with a choice between accepting his terms and being driven “into hell with no chance of survival.”
These remarks are the latest sign that world politics is entering an era when might makes right.

The Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia Act, which the House will likely vote on this week, looks like a no-brainer for supporters of Ukraine who have been calling for President Trump to get tougher on Russia.
A large majority of America’s existing sanctions on Russia, which target thousands of government officials and companies, are currently enforced by executive order, meaning that the president can remove them whenever he wants.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s brief trip to Moscow yesterday was unannounced but hard to miss: He flew in a C-17A, a large heavy-transport plane, that open-source analysts quickly identified and tracked. Within hours, he was already on his way home.
The purpose of Ratcliffe’s visit remains unknown. In an interview with Glenn Beck this morning, President Trump described it as “sort of semi-routine,” but such trips are rare.

In 1971, Richard Nixon announced his plan to visit Beijing—marking a geopolitical turning point, as the trip would be the first for a U.S. president in 25 years. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield offered an observation that has since become a Washington commonplace. “Only a Republican, perhaps only a Nixon,” he told U.S. News & World Report, “could have made this break and gotten away with it.

Marco Rubio offered a more supportive message to Europe at the Munich Security Conference yesterday than J. D. Vance did a year ago. Wolfgang Ischinger, the chair of the conference, thanked him for the message of reassurance, adding, “I’m not sure you heard the sigh of relief in this hall.” This despite the fact that Rubio, like Vance, clearly misunderstands Europe and is in denial about the threats facing the United States and the transatlantic alliance.

Yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump announced that he had “formed the framework of a future deal” with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, raising hopes in Europe that the Greenland crisis may have reached an end. The framework reportedly respects Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland and focuses instead on beefing up America’s military presence in the territory, reaching a deal on crucial minerals, and increasing cooperation on both Arctic security and Trump’s Golden Dome missile-defense system.

Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy reveals an administration that is preparing for the wrong dangers and in denial about genuine threats. What the White House presented on Friday as a hardheaded, realistic assessment of the geopolitical landscape more closely resembles France’s Maginot Line—a massive fortress built before World War II to stop a German attack that never came while failing to anticipate the one that did.

Last night, President Donald Trump announced a “total and complete” cease-fire between Israel and Iran. Iran’s nuclear program, Trump said, had been “obliterated” and “totally destroyed” by the U.S. strikes, and Iran’s retaliation was “very weak” and resulted in “hardly any damage.”
If the cease-fire holds, this episode would appear to mark a major foreign-policy victory for the president.

The prospect of a Russian invasion of Ukraine creates a set of problems not encountered since the early Cold War period. These problems do not lend themselves to a typical diplomatic negotiation to find a compromise, nor are they a good fit for the traditional tools of deterrence.

If you’ve traveled internationally this summer and have had to navigate a labyrinth of COVID-19 tests, quarantines, health-authorization forms, and scarce flights to get there, you are one of the lucky ones. Many people have been unable to travel at all.Few would argue that governments ought to fully reopen travel now, especially with the threat of the Delta variant.

Thursday night’s very public dustup between United States and Chinese officials in Anchorage, Alaska, during the Biden administration’s first official meeting with China, may have seemed like a debacle, but the exchange was actually a necessary step to a more stable relationship between the two countries.

Wednesday’s insurrection laid bare the fragility of democracy in the United States. It is unsurprising that many Americans feel their confidence in the country’s democratic ideals deeply shaken. The expressions of concern from American allies, and the schadenfreude from autocrats, including Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, are sobering.

Competition with China will likely be the most difficult foreign-policy issue that President-elect Joe Biden will face. What he decides to lead with and the precise mix of areas in which he engages and confronts Beijing are critically important. This is why Biden’s choice of John Kerry as a special presidential envoy on climate change might create a problem for the incoming president on China policy.

When a reporter recently asked Donald Trump if he would accept a peaceful transition of power, the president wouldn’t commit. “We’ll see what happens,” he said. In an apparent reference to mail-in ballots, he went on, “We’ll want to have—get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very—we’ll have a very peaceful—there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave one of the most surreal speeches of the Donald Trump presidency at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, on Thursday. In his speech, titled “Communist China and the Free World’s Future,” he declared the failure of 50 years of engagement with China and called for free societies to stand up to Beijing.I am sympathetic to the argument.