Articles

Some U.S. military officials appear astonished that the Ukrainian counteroffensive has not made a rapid breakthrough — and, through anonymous quotes to the news media, they are laying the blame on the Ukrainian military. Retired U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Arnold, by contrast, isn’t the least bit surprised at the slow pace of the advance — and he’s blaming the Americans, not the Ukrainians.

Ukrainian drone strikes on Moscow, once unthinkable, have now become routine. The Russian capital region was targeted for six straight days recently, and while the drones haven’t caused much damage, they disrupted flight operations at airports and have helped to bring the war home. Also this month, other suspected Ukrainian drones destroyed a Russian bomber at an air base south of St. Petersburg and struck a railway station in the Kursk region of western Russia. The Kremlin’s response appeared to be limited to expressions of outrage.

The most fitting epitaph for Wagner Group founder Yevgeniy Prigozhin was delivered by the shotgun-wielding hit man Omar Little on “The Wire”: “You come at the king, you best not miss.” There’s still much we don’t know for certain (and might never know), but that pearl of wisdom was confirmed by Prigozhin’s apparent death Wednesday after a private plane he was on reportedly crashed north of Moscow.

For the past decade, Americans have been transfixed by the specter of a rising China. We’ve worried that the Chinese economy would destroy American jobs and that the Chinese military would draw the United States into a war over Taiwan. Now comes evidence that China’s economy is stagnating — and those problems are unlikely to go away, because China’s population is rapidly aging and declining. The “Chinese century” might be over before it has begun.

It is hard to exaggerate the significance of Friday’s summit at Camp David among President Biden, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. This represents another major step toward the establishment of a new trilateral alliance that could help all three nations cope with the growing threats from North Korea and China in a world destabilized by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

There is something thrilling about seeing former president Donald Trump arraigned in court: It shows that no one is above the law. There are many countries where such a spectacle would be unthinkable — where heads of state can never be removed from office, much less prosecuted, no matter how many laws they break.

I came of age on stories of hard-working kibbutzim turning desert soil green and heroic Israeli soldiers rescuing hostages at Entebbe....Yet, while I retain affection for Israel, I often feel as if I do not recognize what it has become. This is a familiar feeling for me, since I am similarly befuddled by modern America: How did we turn into a land of book banners and covid deniers? Both Israel and the United States have been disfigured by the rise of populist rabble-rousers who have tapped into ugly and unsavory prejudices.

Even before Donald Trump was elected president, I wrote that he was America’s No. 1 security threat. Today, I am convinced that Israel’s No. 1 security threat comes from its Trump-like prime minister: Benjamin Netanyahu.

If you want to know the differences on national security between Democrats and MAGA Republicans, it all boils down to one word: Helsinki.

If you admit Ukraine to NATO anytime soon, you’re making NATO a direct party to a conflict with a nuclear armed state. The focus right now should be on providing as many weapons as possible to Ukraine for the success of their counteroffensive and to roll back the Russian aggression.

American liberals have generally been more stalwart in support of Ukraine than American conservatives. (In a recent Pew Research Center poll, 44 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said the United States is sending too much aid to Ukraine compared with only 14 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners.) Yet now progressives are balking at the Biden administration’s decision last week to provide Ukraine with cluster munitions. Liberal hesitancy is understandable but misguided — and inimical to the goal of protecting human rights in Ukraine.

The NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, on Tuesday and Wednesday will focus on the difficult question of whether Ukraine should be given an invitation to join the transatlantic alliance. My heart says yes, but my head says no.

The past few days have been the most tumultuous in Russia’s history since the constitutional crisis in October 1993 when Boris Yeltsin ordered the army to shell the parliament to stop an attempt to oust him. Yeltsin held on to power, but he could never quite claim the same degree of legitimacy again, and within six years, he was gone from office. His handpicked successor, Putin, has now had his own legitimacy undermined by the revolt of Prigozhin and his Wagner Group mercenaries. Whether the damage is fatal remains to be determined.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is learning what so many tyrants have learned before him: When you unleash the dogs of war, they can come back to bite you. When the Russian strongman sent his troops marching to take Kyiv, he never imagined that 16 months later, mutinous Wagner mercenary group troops would march on Moscow.

Republicans love to posture as the “strong on defense” party, and many GOP members of Congress can genuinely claim that label. But there is also a substantial minority of MAGA extremists whose devotion to fighting culture wars imperils America’s ability to fight actual wars.

Washington’s badly frayed relations with China were just starting to recover from the Chinese spy balloon that traversed the United States in early February before being shot down over the Atlantic Ocean. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who had been forced to postpone his trip to Beijing because of all the hot air about the balloon flight, had finally rescheduled his visit for June 18. Then, last week, came word of a Chinese spy station in Cuba. In truth, there is nothing particularly scandalous about the latest revelations.

David Petraeus has had his share of setbacks as well as successes, but he remains one of the most respected generals of modern times. He is also no Pollyanna. Even while the 101st Airborne Division was rapidly advancing on Baghdad under his command in 2003, he wondered: “Tell me how this ends.”

Last week, the U.S. military released a video of a Chinese jet fighter flying dangerously close to a U.S. Air Force RC-135 surveillance aircraft over the South China Sea. On Saturday, a Chinese warship maneuvered perilously close to a U.S. destroyer in the Taiwan Strait. Imagine the crisis that would have resulted if either incident had resulted in a collision. These near misses demonstrate why it is so important to establish lines of communication between the U.S. Department of Defense and the Chinese Ministry of National Defense to prevent a dangerous escalation.

Every Memorial Day, we honor the valor and sacrifice of American troops. But many of them lost their lives unnecessarily because the military was poorly prepared for the wars it had to wage. From the First Battle of Bull Run (1861) to Kasserine Pass (1943) to Task Force Smith in South Korea (1950) to the insurgency in Iraq (2003), U.S. armed forces have often lost the early battles of their wars. In the years to come, such failures could have even more catastrophic consequences than in the past. The job of the Army Futures Command (AFC) is to ensure that doesn’t happen.

From afar, the war in Ukraine can look like a bloody stalemate with no winners and no choice but a negotiated solution. The Ukrainians’ confidence that they can expel the Russian invaders from all of their soil, even Crimea (occupied by the Russians since 2014), can seem delusional. The same Washington eminences who expected last year that Kyiv would fall within 72 hours now warn that Ukrainians might have to settle for a “frozen” conflict that will leave Moscow’s war criminals in control of one-fifth of their land.