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The State Department seal on the podium before a photo opportunity from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, June 9 in Washington, D.C. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images) The Trump administration plans to install a political appointee at the State Department to a key position managing policy on Iran and Iraq, a move that will replace a career […]

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and President Donald Trump wait for a luncheon with African leaders on Sept. 20, 2017 in New York. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images) An award-winning U.S. diplomat who was seen as a rising star at the State Department has issued a scathing resignation letter, accusing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the […]

Iceland’s ruling three-party coalition has fallen in the wake of public outcry following the discovery of Prime Minister Bjarni Benediktsson’s links to a convicted pedophile. On Thursday, it was revealed that the prime minister’s father signed a letter recommending “restored honor” —a provision within the Icelandic judicial system that expunges the records of criminals—for Hjalti Sigurjón […]Read More

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is preparing to take part in nuclear talks next week with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and representatives of other key powers, according to several diplomatic sources, marking the first time the Trump administration’s top diplomat will meet with his Iranian counterpart. The move comes about a month before President […]

With the clock ticking on an impending Oct. 12 deadline for the permanent lifting of U.S.-imposed sanctions on Sudan, Sudanese Foreign Minister Ibrahim Ghandour arrived in Washington on Thursday in an attempt to clinch the deal with U.S. authorities.  His wasn’t the only attempt at persuasion: About 50 members of the Sudanese community from all […]Read More

Growth in India has always been puzzling. For the first decades of democratic India, economists lamented slow economic progress. Some observers worried that India was condemned to permanently sluggish GDP growth. Luckily, things changed. Rapid growth in the last few decades has taken many Indians out of poverty: According to the World Bank, the fraction […]

Kim Jong Un is on a roll. After firing a second missile over Japan, successfully testing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), and successfully detonating a larger-yield nuclear weapon, the North Korean threat has grown significantly more dire in just a few weeks. General John Hyten, who commands U.S. Strategic Command, recently stated that he assumes […]

As North Korea continues to launch ballistic missiles over Japan and puts U.S. territory within range, the U.S. Defense Department is trying to wrap up two critical reports that will outline the Trump administration’s strategy for the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal and its domestic missile defense programs. But the work has been slowed somewhat by […]Read More

The United States appears to have given up on finding a comprehensive political settlement to Syria’s civil war. The topic has not been on the agenda for recent U.S.-Russian talks on Syria, which instead have focused on deescalating violence on the ground, and U.S. officials privately admit that they prefer to invest their efforts in […]Read More

President Donald Trump has frequently threatened to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), just like he has done — to deleterious effect — with the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris Climate Accord. At an August 22 rally in Phoenix, Arizona, Trump again claimed that he would “end up probably terminating NAFTA,” even […]

When Harvard University’s Institute of Politics (IOP) was established in 1966, its first honorary associate was former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Thirty-eight years later, as a low-level employee of the Harvard Kennedy School (now called “HKS”), working as a senior research associate in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs while (very slowly) […]

Having commanded the Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve effort to defeat the Islamic State over the past year, I would like to offer Foreign Policy’s readers some perspective on the execution of the campaign. Specifically, I would like to address some points raised by Airwars’s Samuel Oakford in his recent article on […]