For a scary snapshot of what a “post-American” world looks like, consider the rupture that has been developing through three administrations in the US-Turkey relationship. Turkey has come to think it can call the shots, regardless of US interests.The prime mover has been President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Over the past decade, he has altered Turkey’s political geography -- undoing the Western-facing secular republic created by Kemal Ataturk and creating a neo-Ottoman Turkey that’s more aligned with

Robert Mueller’s final report should present Congress with a clean choice: Either the facts warrant impeachment of President Trump, or they don’t. That was the promise of Mueller’s appointment as special counsel: He would gather the evidence, and then Congress and the public could make a judgment. In a country with a healthy political system, Mueller’s report would lead to such a consensus and resolution. But we don’t live in that country. Instead, congressional Democrats seem to want it both wa

In the days after he resigned as secretary of defense in December, Jim Mattis told people he hoped to be succeeded by Patrick Shanahan, his deputy. Shanahan has remained in limbo since the beginning of the year as acting secretary, perhaps trying to convince President Trump’s critics that he will be independent, the way Mattis was, while simultaneously reassuring the White House that he won’t. Trump appears almost ready to name Shanahan permanently. Newt Gingrich, one of Trump’s confidants, told

President Trump has been insisting for so long that any investigation of his personal finances would cross a “red line” that people may have overlooked the outrageousness of his claim. But this self-declared immunity is about to change. We’re entering a new phase of the Trump-Russia investigation, where the president’s efforts to contain the probe are failing. Information he tried to suppress about his business and political dealings is emerging -- with more to come. “There are no red lines exce

The showy first summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un last June was draped in flags and bunting, but the decoration covered what turned out to be a mostly empty box that lacked a shared agreement on denuclearization. Given this disappointing record, what’s realistically possible when the two leaders meet again in two weeks in Vietnam? “Diplomacy is letting someone else have your way,” as the late Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson once observed. But tha

With little public fanfare, US Cyber Command, the military’s new center for combating electronic attacks against the United States, has launched operations to deter and disrupt Russians who have been meddling with the US political system.Like other US cyberwar activities, this effort against Russia is cloaked in secrecy. But it appears to involve, in part, a warning to suspected Russian hackers that echoes a menacing phrase that’s a staple of many fictional crime and spy thrillers: “We know wher

Iraqi President Barham Salih measured his words in a telephone interview from Baghdad on Monday. He didn’t want to worsen a quarrel with President Trump over US access to an air base in western Iraq. But Iraqi politics is fragile, and ill-considered statements by American presidents can have big consequences. “I appreciate what the US has done to help Iraq,” Salih told me. “We honor that sacrifice. But this success in Iraq is precarious and should not be unduly burdened. It could easily unravel.

The handmaiden of peace is exhaustion. We are seeing that lesson in the killing fields of Afghanistan and Yemen. Fragile peace agreements are emerging in both conflicts, thanks to skillful diplomats. There are a hundred reasons why each negotiation may fail, and in assessing Middle East conflicts, we should remember that, unfortunately, “pessimism pays,” as my former Wall Street Journal colleague Karen Elliott House observed nearly 40 years ago. But a process has started: Zalmay Khalilzad, the U

As the age of artificial intelligence transforms warfare, the Pentagon faces a delicate problem: How does it convince employees of high-tech companies based in the US that Americans are still the “good guys,” so that they’ll lend their talents to US national-security projects?The challenge is huge, given that Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and other tech giants see themselves as global companies with workers drawn from many nations. But tapping this talent base is essential for future US secur

If you wonder what the four Americans who were killed Wednesday in Manbij, Syria, were doing there, let me describe a few images from a visit to that city last February that illustrate their mission of helping stabilize this area after the Islamic State group was expelled.Think of a covered market thronged with shoppers: Until the Americans and their allies liberated Manbij in mid-2016, the only color most women dared wear in public was black; now, a rainbow of dresses is displayed on makeshift

US President Donald Trump is giving an unintentional gift to the burgeoning field of Democratic presidential candidates: He is teaching them how they can win.Trump’s failure as president is that he hasn’t forged a governing party that can unite the country, pass legislation and address America’s problems. He has succeeded in creating an insurgency that has toppled the traditional Republican establishment and intimidated Republican Party members of Congress into stunned, appalled silence. But wit

One hundred days after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is pressing ahead with anti-dissident campaigns and remains in regular contact with Saud al-Qahtani, the media adviser whom the CIA believes helped organize Khashoggi’s killing, according to US and Saudi sources. The Saudi crown prince, far from altering his impulsive behavior or signaling that he has learned lessons from the Khashoggi affair, as the Trump administration had hoped, appears instead to be

At home and abroad, people are now asking a question they’ve dreaded for nearly two years: How will the erratic presidency of Donald Trump function without the steadying hand of Jim Mattis as defense secretary?Life without Mattis is the scary reality of this new year. The president may have tired of the careful, battle-hardened advice he received from the retired Marine general, but America’s allies depended on Mattis for reassurance. As one prominent diplomat put it in a message after hearing t

Bill Safire, the late, great New York Times columnist, made a tradition over 35 years of publishing a year-end “office pool,” a multiple-choice quiz in which, as he liked to say, “every reader becomes a pundit” because nobody knows the right answers. The office pool died with Safire in 2009, but perhaps readers will enjoy speculating about what might animate the President’s Daily Brief a year hence, on Jan. 1, 2020. Remember, your guesses are as good as mine -- and those of any sources who may h

Here’s one New Year’s resolution that should be easy: The United States and North Korea should resume the diplomatic progress they began in 2018 toward peace and denuclearization.It’s a measure of this year’s turbulent pace that the Singapore summit between President Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un just six months ago now seems a distant memory. The promise of that meeting disappeared soon after it took place, in a stalemate that led many analysts to question whether Kim had ever been serious abo

The voice of Gen. Mazloum Abdi, the Kurdish commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces militia, is tight and controlled as he describes US President’s Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from the country and leave America’s allies to their fate.“This was something we never expected,” he said somberly in a telephone interview Saturday night from his command headquarters in northeast Syria. “Honestly, until now, everything the Americans told us, they fulfilled, and the same thing for us. … So we we

During the past year, Defense Secretary James Mattis has sometimes seemed to be running the Pentagon with clenched teeth. He kept quiet when President Trump made decisions that Mattis thought were wrong; he sat steely-eyed in White House meetings, refusing to indulge in the idolatry toward Trump of other cabinet members. He argued for the policies he thought were right and kept his mouth shut when he lost.But on Thursday night, something snapped, and the unflappable Mattis did something that’s r

President Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to pull American troops from Syria is riskier than it looks. It ends a low-cost, high-impact mission and creates a vacuum that will be filled by one of a series of bad actors -- Iran, Russia, Turkey, Islamic extremists, the Syrian regime -- take your pick, they’re all dangerous for American interests in the Middle East. Trump’s withdrawal from northeast Syria will end a campaign that was never really seen or understood by the American people. It was a sma

Imagine American politics for a moment as a laboratory experiment. A foreign adversary (let’s call it “Russia”) begins to play with the subjects, using carrots and sticks to condition their behavior. The adversary develops tools to dial up anger and resentment inside the lab bubble, and even recruits unwitting accomplices to perform specific tasks. This 21st-century political dystopia isn’t drawn from a “spec script” that just landed in Hollywood. It’s a summary of two reports on Russia’s Intern

Last week was a vivid demonstration of the inability of conservatives to deliver results after the great populist revolts in 2016 in Britain and America. And it showed that there is a golden opportunity for liberals in both countries to tackle the public concerns that motivated the mistaken decisions to vote for Brexit and Donald Trump. To put it bluntly, the Tories under Prime Minister Theresa May and the Republicans under President Trump have failed as governing parties. That’s because they ca