“President Ronald Reagan said that he dealt with the Soviet Union on the basis of ‘trust but verify’.  When it comes to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), I say we must distrust and verify”.  With these words in a major speech delivered at the Richard M. Nixon Library on July 23, Secretary of State Mike […]

In our complicated response to the many transgressions perpetrated by China, not least of course their duplicity in the birth and spread of the Coronavirus pandemic, there is possibly one magic bullet that would have more significant impact on them than other types of power, and that is the power of freedom.  The Wall Street […]

Count me very skeptical about the Afghan deal that President Trump has just signed–“an agreement for bringing peace to Afghanistan”.  I agree that it’s the best deal with the Taliban we have seen and I like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s thinking and bearing on the deal, but I would have liked to have heard […]

I was wrong last month when I wrote that, when finally making a strategic policy choice on troop withdrawals, President Trump would not prefer a legacy in the Middle East as the President who vacated leadership in that region to Russia, Iran, and ISIS.  Only days after I wrote he made what I consider to […]

“Hong Kong is part of China.  They’ll have to deal with that themselves.  They don’t need advice.”–President Donald Trump. “Only one capital is responsible for what is unfolding in Hong Kong: Beijing……It is critical to recognize that the dynamics that led to this crisis didn’t begin in Hong Kong and won’t end there.  The turmoil […]

This week will mark two significant anniversaries of world-changing events.  The D-Day invasion of the allies on June 6, 1944 to free Europe from the Nazis was a peak of the American Century, for at the point of victory over national socialism followed by the defeat of Japanese militarism, the United States stood unchallenged as […]

It is pretty clear to me from a distance and with minimal insight that the overthrow of the Maduro regime in Venezuela, thought by many to be imminent a few months ago, has become a very remote proposition.  It seems that everyone who can leave has already left. So what next?  Do we simply continue […]

The media and many other observers can’t abide a foreign policy “summit” without an “agreement”, as though the absence of one is a failure of the effort.  Not so, as proven many times, most notably with Reagan at Reykjavik with Gorbachev.  Likewise, I believe the recent meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong Un of […]

As always with President Trump, if you don’t like one of his announced decisions, wait a couple of news cycles and he will have rethought, regrouped, and often changed course.  And this now appears to be the case with his surprise announcement that all U. S. troops will immediately be pulled out of Syria, so […]

Last May I wrote of the importance of transformational leadership in negotiating the long-term strategic relationship between the U. S. and China in order to avoid what Graham Allison has named the “Thucydides Trap” in his compelling book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?. In October at the Hudson Institute, Vice […]