Late last week, Finland’s prime minister and president jointly announced Helsinki’s intention to move ahead with its application for NATO, a move that, if completed, would be a significant boon for the transatlantic alliance. Putin believed a strong and swift invasion of Ukraine would intimidate NATO and non-pliant nations on …

China wants to expand the group of emerging economies known as BRICS, in the first shake up of the bloc in over a decade, a senior Chinese diplomat said on Thursday. Brazil, Russia, India and China initially formed the bloc in 2009, with South Africa joining in 2010. “China proposes …

The top U.S. military officer, General Mark Milley, spoke by telephone with Russia’s Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov, the Pentagon said on Thursday, the first conversation between the two since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. “The military leaders discussed several security-related issues of concern and agreed to keep …

While the world remains fixated on the horrific human and political consequences of the conflict in Ukraine, there has been an undercurrent of discourse comparing the extreme attention to this conflict to the intermittent and waning interest over the past few years in civilian suffering and acts of aggression in …

The United States is “back,” proclaims U.S. President Joe Biden, seemingly as often as he can. The coming week will show if the same is true of the West. At successive summits of the G-7, NATO and the European Union, Biden and fellow leaders will confront a dual task: reviving …

In early August, I watched the frenzied U.S. exit from Afghanistan from my hotel room in Accra, Ghana. I was not the only one in West Africa transfixed by the events in Kabul. Though Ghana is some 7,000 miles from Afghanistan, the chaotic scenes from the Kabul airport played on …

Beyond its immediate implications for European security, the current crisis at the Ukraine-Russia border highlights the enduring importance of state sovereignty as an ordering principle in world politics, notwithstanding frequent claims that globalization has rendered it obsolete. It also exposes the tendency of governments to invoke, dismiss or reinterpret this …

Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy delivered an impassioned rebuke to the United Nations Security Council for its failure to prevent Russia’s invasion of his country. “Where is the security that the Security Council needs to guarantee?” he demanded. “It’s not there.” Rather than taking forceful action to arrest or …

GEORGIA Breakaway territory South Ossetia’s de facto president Anatoly Bibilov announced last Friday a referendum scheduled for 17 July on whether the region — which Moscow recognised as an independent state in 2008 — should accede to the Russian Federation. Bibilov was defeated in second-round elections earlier this month by …

China has been unabashed about making its intentions known. Already in 1999, two colonels in China’s People’s Liberation Army, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiansui, wrote, “Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Master Plan to Destroy America.” In it, the authors “suggest the significance of alternatives to direct military confrontation, including international policy, economic …