Imagine a bully who’s pounding your head against a wall. When you complain that it hurts and threaten to punch back, he offers to sign an international agreement against bullying. Meanwhile, he keeps pounding your head. That’s a shorthand summary of the peculiar situation that has developed in UN discussions about regulating cyberspace. The Russians are aggressively hacking US and European political parties and infrastructure, according to US intelligence reports. At the same time, they are push

As the Syrian tragedy lurches toward a bloody final showdown in Idlib province, the Trump administration is struggling to check Russia and the Syrian regime from an assault there that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warns would be a “humanitarian catastrophe.” The administration’s efforts are so late in coming, and so limited, that it’s hard to muster much hope they can reverse seven years of American failure. But at least the administration has stopped the dithering and indecision of the

The best thing that can be said about President Donald Trump’s latest trade initiative is that it moves the US back toward the kind of agreements Trump unwisely blew up when he became president. So, two cheers for Trump’s revamped free trade agreement with Mexico, announced Monday, and the one he may get soon with Canada. He wants to rebrand the package, of course, so that it’s not called NAFTA (“bad connotations!”). But the preliminary update includes labor and environmental standards somewhat

“Waiting for the jury to come in” is a good description of what this August has felt like. We’ve all been wondering how our legal system would cope with President Trump -- even as we awaited the broader verdict of public opinion that will come with the November midterm elections. Many Americans will probably remember how they heard the news Tuesday that 12 of our fellow citizens had voted to convict Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort on eight felony counts, and that Trump’s personal

For foreign countries that have made big bets on Donald Trump’s presidency -- such as Russia, China, North Korea and Saudi Arabia -- the US midterm elections pose a significant problem: Trump’s maneuvering room may be sharply limited if Democrats win control of the House. Foreign governments are always attentive to US electoral politics, because they’re so affected by American foreign-policy decisions. But this president is a special case. Trump is such a disruptive leader, and his party’s hold

An Arab diplomat recently chided an American audience for speculating about what “the new Middle East” may look like. Open your eyes, he said: The new Middle East is already here. And, personally, I fear its baseline expectation is that American power and values won’t matter in the way they once did.The diplomat was Yousef al-Otaiba, the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates, and he was speaking at a public gathering last month of the Aspen Security Forum. He explained to an audience of policym

When Mike Pompeo became secretary of state on May 1, he advised his new colleagues at Foggy Bottom, “I want the State Department to get its swagger back.” The State Department doesn’t really do “swagger,” but career officials say morale has improved from the rock bottom level it reached with his predecessor, Rex Tillerson.Pompeo, a boisterous ex-congressman, seems to be keeping his own swagger tendencies in check at State. His watchword so far has mostly been a version of “Keep your mouth shut.”

Will the Pentagon, with its 30-year planning cycle for building ships, still be launching aircraft carriers in 2048 -- even though they’re highly vulnerable to attack today?That’s an example of the military-modernization questions that kept nagging participants at last weekend’s gathering of the Aspen Strategy Group, which annually brings together top-level current and former national-security officials, along with a few journalists, to discuss defense and foreign policy. This year’s focus was o

Koreans have a saying that helps explain the recent upbeat exchanges between Washington, Seoul and Pyongyang: “Say pretty things to hear pretty things.” Beyond the Trump White House, there remains much skepticism that North Korea will ever give up its nuclear weapons. Recent leaks about North Korea’s continuing efforts to build its nuclear and missile arsenal underline this concern that President Trump made a sucker play in Singapore. But the public rhetoric from Washington and Pyongyang is warm

For the last 18 months, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other top national-security officials have mostly kept their heads down in public as they tried to quietly counsel President Trump. But this low-key consultation process seems to be weakening, as a headstrong president becomes increasingly insistent about his judgment. The Helsinki summit showed that Trump thinks he’s his own best foreign-policy adviser. The formal interagency process that traditionally surrounds such big events all but di

US President Donald Trump was doing pretty well in Helsinki, really, laying out a modest but achievable agenda for improving US-Russia relations. And then came the final question about whether Trump believed his own intelligence chiefs or Russian President Vladimir Putin -- and in his weird, waffling answer, you could almost hear the fabric of his presidency rip at the seam. Jonathan Lemire of the Associated Press was the reporter who asked Trump bluntly: “who do you believe” about Russian elect

The catastrophic war in Syria is nearing what could be a diplomatic endgame, as America, Russia and Israel shape a deal that would preserve power for President Bashar Assad in exchange for Russian pledges to restrain Iranian influence. Checking Iranian power has become the only major Trump administration goal in Syria, now that the Islamic State is nearly vanquished. President Trump appears ready to embrace a policy that will validate Assad, an authoritarian leader who has gassed his own people,

President Trump has hurled so many thunderbolts recently that people may have missed the one that could have the greatest long-term impact on America’s national security -- his directive to the Pentagon last week to start creating a new military service that he dubbed the “space force.” It’s certainly a Trumpian idea: big and bold, with a Hollywood glitz factor; highly disruptive of the status quo; and lacking in any detailed planning about implementation. But many experts say the idea of revamp

A bright banner at NATO’s lavish new headquarters here proclaims the core conviction of the trans-Atlantic alliance: “We are together. We are strong.” But the words seem a bit hollow these days, as US President Trump escalates his attacks on America’s traditional European partners.Trump’s “America First” policies have shaken many of the nations that looked to Washington as their ally and protector. He has imposed steep tariffs on European steel and aluminum imports and is said to be preparing si

President Trump boasted last weekend that his “denuclearization deal” with Kim Jong-un could “save potentially millions & millions of lives!” He even proclaimed in the exhilaration of his return from Singapore: “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” But as the Great Dealmaker should know, it’s important to read the fine print. And after a week’s reflection, the Singapore joint communique, for all the dramatic television coverage that surrounded it, looks like what real-estate ma

Credit President Trump for seizing the diplomatic moment at the Singapore summit. But the person who most shaped this extraordinary encounter was North Korean leader Kim Jong-un -- who is indeed, as Trump said Tuesday, a “very talented” young man who has achieved something that “1 out of 10,000 probably couldn’t do.” It’s almost a magic trick, what Kim has accomplished: He has obtained Trump as a partner in rebranding his poor, brutally autocratic country as a modern condo-resort investment proj

Is President Trump’s pitch to disgruntled manufacturing workers a leading political indicator, portending future trends, or a lagging one, appealing to a small and declining segment of the public? We may be about to find out, thanks to Trump’s controversial tariff plan. Trump’s decision last week to levy duties on steel and aluminum imports from Europe, Canada and Mexico seems, oddly enough, to have become the choke point for many Republicans who had stomached far more outrageous Trump proposals

“Are you on the road or in the ditch?” That’s the question labor reporters used to ask about big contract negotiations back when I covered the United Steelworkers union 40 years ago in Pittsburgh -- and it’s the right one to pose now as US President Trump zigs and zags toward a summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Trump and Kim appear to be firmly back on the road to a June 12 meeting in Singapore, after a near-death experience last week. Trump sent his coy breakup letter last Th

In the bizarre double helix that is the Russia investigation, one of the recurring themes is the role of would-be influencers. They start off as connectors and facilitators, but gradually (and implausibly) they move to the center of the story. That’s true with Stefan Halper, the retired American professor at Britain’s Cambridge University who has become the object of President Trump’s counter-witch hunt to expose a supposed FBI mole who infiltrated his campaign. The FBI is guarding Halper’s iden

President Trump’s dismissive treatment of Europe is beginning to erode the trans-Atlantic alliance, which for many decades has been the central pillar of US national-security policy. The growing European-American rift may be the most important but least discussed consequence of Trump’s foreign policy. His disruptive style is usually seen as destabilizing distant adversaries in Pyongyang, Tehran and Beijing. But the diplomatic bombs have also been exploding here in Brussels, the capital of the Eu