Experts from the U.S. Institute of Peace provide the latest analysis and perspective on the world’s critical hot spots, U.S. and global security and issues involved in violent conflict, based on the Institute’s work on the ground and with key individuals, governments and organizations. They give interviews and background briefings to journalists and write for news outlets around the world.
In sweeping retaliation for Russia’s growing aggression in the West, the United States and nineteen other nations expelled more than a hundred and thirty Russian intelligence officers and diplomats on Monday. The coördinated rebuke—galvanized after Moscow’s alleged assassination attempt on a former double agent living in Britain—is unprecedented since the Cold War, which ended more than a quarter century ago.
After fourteen months of mixed signals (and confused policy) on Russia, the Trump Administration took twin actions on Thursday to address the increasingly aggressive moves by the government of Vladimir Putin. Washington slapped sanctions on nineteen prominent Russian individuals and five entities—including Russian...
resident Trump and his next Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, are—for now—two peas in a policy pod. The outgoing Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, who learned that he had been fired only after Trump announced his departure in a tweet...
n a breathtaking gambit that surprised his closest advisers, President Trump, almost impulsively, accepted an invitation on Thursday to meet the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un—by May—to discuss how to defuse the world’s most dangerous nuclear standoff. The invitation was relayed by a South Korean delegation...
NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with journalist Robin Wright about President Trump's decision to accept North Korea's "audacious invitation" and what might happen next.
Last month, the former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met privately with Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, a global gathering of foreign-policy glitterati. The diplomatic odd couple once met openly and often—more with each other than with any other foreign leaders—during two years of feisty negotiations over the Iran nuclear deal. No longer.
he hardest game at the Olympics won’t be played on the ice rinks, ski slopes, or luge runs in South Korea, where the United States is fielding the largest number of athletes among participating countries. The enduring legacy of the Pyeongchang Games will instead be whether they generate enough momentum...
It was the quietest protest Iran has ever witnessed. Vida Movahed, a thirty-one-year-old mother of a toddler, stood atop a large utility box on Tehran’s busy Enghelab Street and removed the hijab head covering that all women are required to wear by law. Her jet-black hair cascaded far down her back. She then tied...
For all the hype about Americans joining isis, the majority never saw combat during the Islamic State’s three-year rule. They were largely marginal players in the jihadist caliphate—often working in menial jobs as cooks, mechanics, cleaners, or orderlies. In the end, many became...
Husam Zomlot is the Palestinian front man in Washington. Born in a Gaza refugee camp, he has a doctorate in economics from the University of London and was a research fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center. Now in his mid-forties, he represents a new generation of Palestinian politicians. Last spring, he arrived in the United States on a wave of optimism that President Trump would reinvigorate peace negotiations