The Perils of a New U.S.-Saudi Strategic Compact

July 1, 2022 According to most media reports, President Biden will be heading to the Middle East later next month—making stops in Israel, the West Bank, and finally Saudi Arabia—where he will allegedly be looking to mend fences with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after calling the kingdom a “pariah” on the campaign trail, and

Humanitarian Notification and Beyond: The Protection of Aid Organizations Operating in Conflict Zones

June 10, 2022 Back on January 27, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin directed the Department of Defense (DoD) to develop a Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan (CHMRAP) to, “improve [DoDs] approach to civilian harm mitigation and response and…inform completion of a forthcoming DoD Instruction (DoDI) on Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response.” As

Even a Broken Clock is Right Twice a Day: On the Need for a Special Inspector General for Ukraine Assistance Funding

June 3, 2022 Back on May 19, the United States Senate, by a vote of 86-11, passed a $40 billion emergency aid bill which aims to supply Ukraine with weapons and other assistance in order to help the country resist the Russian invasion. This followed a May 10 vote in the House of Representatives, when

Some of What Happens Then is Hard As Hell to Live Down: Nigeria’s SARS and Baltimore’s GTTF – Two Birds of a Feather

May 6, 2022 On April 25th, the first episode of David Simon and George Pelecanos’ We Own This City premiered on HBO. With their new miniseries, Simon—the creator of the seminal early 2000s TV series The Wire—and Pelecanos—a writer and producer on the early ‘00s classic—tell the real-life story behind the Baltimore Police Department’s (BPD)

The Long Shadow of the War in Ukraine: Managing Escalation, Reconstruction, and NATO Force Planning After the Russian Invasion

April 29, 2022 The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs this week, in their weekly Humanitarian Impact Situation Report for Ukraine, noted that, “the ongoing war continues to exacerbate a massive humanitarian crisis,” and that, “over 24 million people – more than half of Ukraine’s population – will need humanitarian assistance in

The UK’s Integrated Review at One: Not Fit for Purpose

April 8, 2022 Just over a year ago, in late March 2021, the United Kingdom published its long-awaited national security strategy document, “Global Britain in a competitive age: The Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy.” While the Integrated Review attempted to provide a comprehensive reimagining of UK policy around the globe—paying attention

Lurching from Crisis to Crisis: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Untenable Status Quo

April 1, 2022 On Wednesday, March 29, a Palestinian gunman, allegedly armed with an M-16 assault rifle, murdered five people in Bnei Brak, a religious suburb on the outskirts of Tel Aviv in Israel. The incident brings the number of those killed by militants in recent days to eleven, and has heightened fears of another

Unforced Errors: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Turkey’s Domestic and Foreign Policy Crises

March 25, 2022 Early last summer, Pavel Baev, writing for the French Institute of International Relations (Ifri), wrote that, “the tumultuous year 2020 tested and significantly degraded the always ambiguous Russian-Turkish partnership, which had become transactional at best and certainly not ‘strategic’”, and that, “the maturing of autocratic regimes in Russia and Turkey does not

Demography as Destiny in the Sahel?

March 18, 2022 Twenty years ago, authors John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote a book that would, for a few years at least, become highly influential in Democratic political circles and thinking. Their work, The Emerging Democratic Majority, posited, “that Democrats should take advantage of a set of interrelated social, economic, and demographic changes…”

The Russian War in Ukraine: A Truly Global Problem

March 11, 2022 In today’s globally interconnected world, war and strife in one part of the Earth can, and often does, have an enormous impact not only on the immediate region, but the rest of the planet. Indeed, the effects of the war even reach beyond the Earth, as well. While the majority of U.S.