This month commemorates two pinnacles for the benign, naive superpower that was America, both involving our now-lost role as Middle East peacemaker. Forty years ago, President Jimmy Carter brokered the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt; and 25 years ago, President Bill Clinton presided over the signing of the Oslo Accord between Israel and the Palestinians. As we looked this week at the old photographs of beaming American presidents grandly mediating between adversaries, what was happe

Viewpoints Sept. 20, 2018

Only a man who is deeply worried about his own strength would talk as much as Donald Trump does about the danger of appearing weak.That’s my biggest takeaway from reading “Fear,” Bob Woodward’s new book about the Trump presidency. The scoops were mostly revealed last week. What’s fresh is Trump’s repeated, obsessive talk about weakness during his first year in office. Woodward’s recounting of Trump’s conversations is a study in character, or lack of it. The president’s vanity, pettiness and mean

Viewpoints Sept. 13, 2018

Imagine a bully who’s pounding your head against a wall. When you complain that it hurts and threaten to punch back, he offers to sign an international agreement against bullying. Meanwhile, he keeps pounding your head. That’s a shorthand summary of the peculiar situation that has developed in UN discussions about regulating cyberspace. The Russians are aggressively hacking US and European political parties and infrastructure, according to US intelligence reports. At the same time, they are push

Viewpoints Sept. 9, 2018

As the Syrian tragedy lurches toward a bloody final showdown in Idlib province, the Trump administration is struggling to check Russia and the Syrian regime from an assault there that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warns would be a “humanitarian catastrophe.” The administration’s efforts are so late in coming, and so limited, that it’s hard to muster much hope they can reverse seven years of American failure. But at least the administration has stopped the dithering and indecision of the

Viewpoints Sept. 5, 2018

The best thing that can be said about President Donald Trump’s latest trade initiative is that it moves the US back toward the kind of agreements Trump unwisely blew up when he became president. So, two cheers for Trump’s revamped free trade agreement with Mexico, announced Monday, and the one he may get soon with Canada. He wants to rebrand the package, of course, so that it’s not called NAFTA (“bad connotations!”). But the preliminary update includes labor and environmental standards somewhat

Viewpoints Aug. 30, 2018

“Waiting for the jury to come in” is a good description of what this August has felt like. We’ve all been wondering how our legal system would cope with President Trump -- even as we awaited the broader verdict of public opinion that will come with the November midterm elections. Many Americans will probably remember how they heard the news Tuesday that 12 of our fellow citizens had voted to convict Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort on eight felony counts, and that Trump’s personal

Viewpoints Aug. 27, 2018

For foreign countries that have made big bets on Donald Trump’s presidency -- such as Russia, China, North Korea and Saudi Arabia -- the US midterm elections pose a significant problem: Trump’s maneuvering room may be sharply limited if Democrats win control of the House. Foreign governments are always attentive to US electoral politics, because they’re so affected by American foreign-policy decisions. But this president is a special case. Trump is such a disruptive leader, and his party’s hold

Viewpoints Aug. 23, 2018

An Arab diplomat recently chided an American audience for speculating about what “the new Middle East” may look like. Open your eyes, he said: The new Middle East is already here. And, personally, I fear its baseline expectation is that American power and values won’t matter in the way they once did.The diplomat was Yousef al-Otaiba, the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates, and he was speaking at a public gathering last month of the Aspen Security Forum. He explained to an audience of policym

Viewpoints Aug. 20, 2018

When Mike Pompeo became secretary of state on May 1, he advised his new colleagues at Foggy Bottom, “I want the State Department to get its swagger back.” The State Department doesn’t really do “swagger,” but career officials say morale has improved from the rock bottom level it reached with his predecessor, Rex Tillerson.Pompeo, a boisterous ex-congressman, seems to be keeping his own swagger tendencies in check at State. His watchword so far has mostly been a version of “Keep your mouth shut.”

Viewpoints Aug. 12, 2018

Will the Pentagon, with its 30-year planning cycle for building ships, still be launching aircraft carriers in 2048 -- even though they’re highly vulnerable to attack today?That’s an example of the military-modernization questions that kept nagging participants at last weekend’s gathering of the Aspen Strategy Group, which annually brings together top-level current and former national-security officials, along with a few journalists, to discuss defense and foreign policy. This year’s focus was o

Viewpoints Aug. 9, 2018

Koreans have a saying that helps explain the recent upbeat exchanges between Washington, Seoul and Pyongyang: “Say pretty things to hear pretty things.” Beyond the Trump White House, there remains much skepticism that North Korea will ever give up its nuclear weapons. Recent leaks about North Korea’s continuing efforts to build its nuclear and missile arsenal underline this concern that President Trump made a sucker play in Singapore. But the public rhetoric from Washington and Pyongyang is warm

Viewpoints Aug. 6, 2018

For the last 18 months, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other top national-security officials have mostly kept their heads down in public as they tried to quietly counsel President Trump. But this low-key consultation process seems to be weakening, as a headstrong president becomes increasingly insistent about his judgment. The Helsinki summit showed that Trump thinks he’s his own best foreign-policy adviser. The formal interagency process that traditionally surrounds such big events all but di

Viewpoints July 26, 2018