The Senate approved the national security supplemental on Tuesday night, by a vote of 75-17. The legislation combined the four bills that were approved by the House over the weekend. After months of pushing the Biden administration to do more to pressure Israel to change its conduct in its war in Gaza, Democrats in Congress ultimately approved $26 billion in aid for Israel, including approximately $9 billion in global humanitarian aid (how much would go to Gaza, to be determined). In the Senate,...
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is set to travel to Beijing this week in the latest round of high-level diplomacy between the U.S. and China. Since the U.S.–China relationship hit new lows in late 2022 and early 2023 — thanks to incidents like then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan and a Chinese spy balloon’s visit to U.S. airspace — both sides have made a welcome effort to slow the slide toward crisis and conflict.This effort has focused on top leaders exchanging views through in-person...
The government should do more business with McKinsey & Co. — one of the world’s largest consulting firms — says a Pentagon presentation: “Leverage [the] consulting firm’s expertise and objectivity – outsourcing is a positive action.” While this might sound like a talking point from lobbyists, it actually came from an active-duty naval commander who spent almost a full year working at McKinsey & Co. with you, the taxpayer, footing the bill. It’s no secret that major defense companies spend...
Total military spending by nations reached a record high of $2.443 trillion in 2023, according to a new report released Monday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, or SIPRI.Across the globe, military expenditures increased by 6.8% in real terms over 2022, the steepest rise since 2009, according to the Swedish think tank which has tracked the military spending by countries based on open sources since the 1960s. Every region saw an increase, but Europe, Asia and Oceania, and...
The Biden administration is breathing a sigh of relief that it has so far avoided a wider regional war between Israel and Iran. But that self-congratulation should be tempered with realization that it was a close call and that the incentives for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hawkish governing coalition to provoke one are still present. The Biden administration’s rhetorical outrage at Iran’s forewarned and well-choreographed symbolic missile and drone attacks on Israeli...
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Iraq Monday for the first time since 2011, marking a potential thaw in relations between the two neighboring countries, which have long clashed over Turkish attacks on Kurdish groups in Iraq’s north. “For the first time, we find that there is a real desire on the part of each country to move toward solutions,” Iraqi Prime Minister Muhammad Shia’ al-Sudani said during a recent event at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C. Sudani noted that the...
Is America experiencing a crisis of confidence? That is the assessment of some world leaders from allied and partner nations in recent months. Former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen criticized the U.S. at the start of the year, “Recent global events in the Taiwan Strait, in the Middle East, in Ukraine are all results of American hesitance to actually lead.”As he addressed Congress earlier this month, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida chided his audience for what he called “an...
With the pendulum of war swinging in Russia’s favor and the Western alliance only now clearing the way for more aid to Ukraine, many have been waiting for the Institute for the Study of War to offer its take on who is to blame and what is to be done. ISW has been one of the most referenced think tanks in mainstream media reporting on the war in Ukraine and has played a prominent role in creating and sustaining war optimism in the West in 2022 and 2023. Its daily battlefield reports have...
After a diplomatic struggle during which service members on the ground were complaining they were being 'held hostage,' the Biden administration has announced that it is pulling up stakes in Niger at the ruling junta's request.The junta, which seized power in a coup last August, said it wanted the U.S. out. This occurred last month after a reportedly disagreeable meeting between Niger and U.S. diplomatic officials. Washington has a drone base in Niger and 1,100 Army and Air Force members, who...
The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed four separate national security supplemental bills on Saturday, clearing the way for the foreign aid package to arrive at President Joe Biden’s desk.One bill contained roughly $60 billion in aid for Ukraine, one with approximately $26 billion for Israel, another with $8 billion for the Indo-Pacific, and a final one that included a series of other policy priorities like the sale of TikTok and the REPO act that would allow the U.S. to seize...
The Biden administration has reimposed economic sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry in response to President Nicolás Maduro's attempts to hold onto power by blocking candidates who want to run against him in the July elections.Maduro’s government is clearly violating the conditions of the 2023 Barbados Agreement that it made with the Venezuelan opposition alliance Plataforma Unitaria Democrática in October and that stipulates that the government create conditions for free and fair elections....
The RAND corporation’s Samuel Charap and Johns Hopkins University professor Sergey Radchenko published a detailed timeline and analysis of the talks between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators just after the Russian invasion in February 2022 that could have brought the war to an end just weeks after it had begun. Much of the piece confirms or elucidates parts of the narrative that had previously been reported. In the spring of 2022, the two sides appeared relatively close to a deal, one that,...