With little public fanfare, US Cyber Command, the military’s new center for combating electronic attacks against the United States, has launched operations to deter and disrupt Russians who have been meddling with the US political system.Like other US cyberwar activities, this effort against Russia is cloaked in secrecy. But it appears to involve, in part, a warning to suspected Russian hackers that echoes a menacing phrase that’s a staple of many fictional crime and spy thrillers: “We know wher

Viewpoints Feb. 10, 2019

The handmaiden of peace is exhaustion. We are seeing that lesson in the killing fields of Afghanistan and Yemen. Fragile peace agreements are emerging in both conflicts, thanks to skillful diplomats. There are a hundred reasons why each negotiation may fail, and in assessing Middle East conflicts, we should remember that, unfortunately, “pessimism pays,” as my former Wall Street Journal colleague Karen Elliott House observed nearly 40 years ago. But a process has started: Zalmay Khalilzad, the U

Viewpoints Jan. 31, 2019

As the age of artificial intelligence transforms warfare, the Pentagon faces a delicate problem: How does it convince employees of high-tech companies based in the US that Americans are still the “good guys,” so that they’ll lend their talents to US national-security projects?The challenge is huge, given that Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and other tech giants see themselves as global companies with workers drawn from many nations. But tapping this talent base is essential for future US secur

Viewpoints Jan. 27, 2019

If you wonder what the four Americans who were killed Wednesday in Manbij, Syria, were doing there, let me describe a few images from a visit to that city last February that illustrate their mission of helping stabilize this area after the Islamic State group was expelled.Think of a covered market thronged with shoppers: Until the Americans and their allies liberated Manbij in mid-2016, the only color most women dared wear in public was black; now, a rainbow of dresses is displayed on makeshift

Viewpoints Jan. 20, 2019

US President Donald Trump is giving an unintentional gift to the burgeoning field of Democratic presidential candidates: He is teaching them how they can win.Trump’s failure as president is that he hasn’t forged a governing party that can unite the country, pass legislation and address America’s problems. He has succeeded in creating an insurgency that has toppled the traditional Republican establishment and intimidated Republican Party members of Congress into stunned, appalled silence. But wit

Viewpoints Jan. 17, 2019

One hundred days after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is pressing ahead with anti-dissident campaigns and remains in regular contact with Saud al-Qahtani, the media adviser whom the CIA believes helped organize Khashoggi’s killing, according to US and Saudi sources. The Saudi crown prince, far from altering his impulsive behavior or signaling that he has learned lessons from the Khashoggi affair, as the Trump administration had hoped, appears instead to be

Viewpoints Jan. 13, 2019

At home and abroad, people are now asking a question they’ve dreaded for nearly two years: How will the erratic presidency of Donald Trump function without the steadying hand of Jim Mattis as defense secretary?Life without Mattis is the scary reality of this new year. The president may have tired of the careful, battle-hardened advice he received from the retired Marine general, but America’s allies depended on Mattis for reassurance. As one prominent diplomat put it in a message after hearing t

Viewpoints Jan. 10, 2019

Bill Safire, the late, great New York Times columnist, made a tradition over 35 years of publishing a year-end “office pool,” a multiple-choice quiz in which, as he liked to say, “every reader becomes a pundit” because nobody knows the right answers. The office pool died with Safire in 2009, but perhaps readers will enjoy speculating about what might animate the President’s Daily Brief a year hence, on Jan. 1, 2020. Remember, your guesses are as good as mine -- and those of any sources who may h

Viewpoints Jan. 3, 2019

Here’s one New Year’s resolution that should be easy: The United States and North Korea should resume the diplomatic progress they began in 2018 toward peace and denuclearization.It’s a measure of this year’s turbulent pace that the Singapore summit between President Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un just six months ago now seems a distant memory. The promise of that meeting disappeared soon after it took place, in a stalemate that led many analysts to question whether Kim had ever been serious abo

Viewpoints Dec. 31, 2018

The voice of Gen. Mazloum Abdi, the Kurdish commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces militia, is tight and controlled as he describes US President’s Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from the country and leave America’s allies to their fate.“This was something we never expected,” he said somberly in a telephone interview Saturday night from his command headquarters in northeast Syria. “Honestly, until now, everything the Americans told us, they fulfilled, and the same thing for us. … So we we

Viewpoints Dec. 27, 2018

President Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to pull American troops from Syria is riskier than it looks. It ends a low-cost, high-impact mission and creates a vacuum that will be filled by one of a series of bad actors -- Iran, Russia, Turkey, Islamic extremists, the Syrian regime -- take your pick, they’re all dangerous for American interests in the Middle East. Trump’s withdrawal from northeast Syria will end a campaign that was never really seen or understood by the American people. It was a sma

Viewpoints Dec. 23, 2018

Imagine American politics for a moment as a laboratory experiment. A foreign adversary (let’s call it “Russia”) begins to play with the subjects, using carrots and sticks to condition their behavior. The adversary develops tools to dial up anger and resentment inside the lab bubble, and even recruits unwitting accomplices to perform specific tasks. This 21st-century political dystopia isn’t drawn from a “spec script” that just landed in Hollywood. It’s a summary of two reports on Russia’s Intern

Viewpoints Dec. 19, 2018