International Security & Defense

Does the March 22 terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall concert venue outside Moscow signal a return of recurrent large-scale terrorism to Russia? Hopefully not and there are multiple ways to lower the probability of such recurrence.

The U.S. position in the global value chain puts it at a disadvantage, and Washington's confrontational policies are making things worse.

Stephen Walt elaborates his top five reasons why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to take innocent lives, destabilize the region, consume disproportionate amounts of Washington's political bandwidth, and perpetuate fear, suffering, and injustice.

Juliette Kayyem argues that the sooner President Joe Biden acknowledges that the United States will likely be drawn into a fight to protect shipping traffic through the Suez Canal, the more time the U.S. military has to plan, and the less severe the harm will be to the global economy.

Juliette Kayyem warns that a second Trump term would validate the violent ideologies of far-right extremists—and allow them to escape legal jeopardy.

Jay Mens asks: Why won't the U.S. admit that Iran's proxies, which include Hamas, are acting in concert?

Power transitions affect a state’s ability to exercise economic statecraft. As a dominating and a rising power approach parity, they face structural incentives to decouple their economies. This decoupling affects business-state relations: high-value businesses within the dominant power tend to oppose their state’s economic statecraft because of its costs to them, whereas low-value businesses within the rising power tend to cooperate because they gain from it. 

Stephen Walt analyses the past thirty years of U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East, focusing on five events.

As the war in Israel and Gaza continues, Professor Stephen Waltf and Ambassador Edward Djerejian were two of the five Harvard faculty and affiliates with expertise in the region who spoke with The Crimson about their views on the future of the conflict.

Has something fundamentally changed in the level of US, international involvement in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? Aljazeera's Steve Clemons interviews Stephen Walt.