International Security

Stephen M. Walt advises presidential candidate Joe Biden to embrace nationalism while reaffirming liberal values: They are an election-winning combination.

The authors, Mariana Budjeryn and Togzhan Kassenova, are two women who were born at opposite ends of the vast Soviet empire. They describe racism and discrimination in the former Soviet Union with a focus on nuclear issues.

Stephen M. Walt critiques to Francis Gavin's review of his 2018 book, The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy, and offers his view on how one should not evaluate U.S. grand strategy.

The existing global political-economic order has been ruptured by the rise of China, a broad backlash against globalization, uncertainties about the U.S. commitment to a rules-based system, and most recently, the Covid-19 pandemic. What form(s) might a future world order take, and what principles should guide efforts to construct it? The Future World Order event series will address these questions by examining individual topics ranging from traditional security issues such as arms control to newer, relevant issues such as digital trade. Professors Dani Rodrik and  Stephen M. Walt will moderate individual sessions.

Iran, Russia and other countries often use proxies as a way to fight the United States and its allies while advancing their own influence. Fighting proxy war, however, is often more complicated than confronting traditional aggression.  Sara Plana details a range of responses to proxy war and notes their many limitations.

This article examines how buffer status or geographic location between two rival great powers, namely Imperial Britain and Russia, affected Iran’s survival chances from 1860 to 1914.

The closer the president gets to election day, the bigger the threat he poses to U.S. democracy.

Juliette Kayyem details why the end of summer is a bitter reminder: America's coronavirus ordeal won’t end when 2020 does.

Nathaniel L. Moir reviews Antonio Giustozzi's The Taliban at War: 2001–2018 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).  He writes, "Through an assessment of the intra-politics of the Taliban's different shuras, along with the success and failures these shuras have achieved over the recent past, Giustozzi brings readers up to date on the Taliban's organizational status as it moved toward negotiations with the Afghan government."

The nuclear arms control architecture that underwrites European security is crumbling. Europe cannot achieve global nuclear disarmament or build its own credible deterrent, but it can clear the path for the next generation of arms governance through joint action.