Behind last week’s admission by a former CIA officer that he plotted to spy for China lies an astonishing tale of Beijing’s espionage against America -- and the vindication of other officers who were falsely suspected of being the Chinese mole. This saga has a classic thriller plot, in which a suspect must find the real villain to clear his name. Unfortunately, most of the details of the true-life version remain secret, under seal at the US attorney’s office in Alexandria or in the vaults of the

Viewpoints May 12, 2019

At a time when America is facing a potential military confrontation with Iran, an escalating trade war with China and a showdown with North Korea, you’d think President Donald Trump would want a permanent secretary of defense to oversee Pentagon plans.But Patrick Shanahan is still cooling his heels as acting secretary, awaiting a formal nomination that was expected nearly two weeks ago, after Shanahan was cleared in a conflict-of-interest probe. The nomination sits and waits, and some prominent

Viewpoints May 9, 2019

Joe Biden’s limitations as a presidential candidate are so obvious that they’re almost a litany: He’s too old, too white, too male, too touchy-feely, too loquacious. But he has one huge plus: He may be the person who could move Donald Trump out of the White House. Biden rightly put the obligation of replacing Trump at the center of his announcement Thursday that he’s running. “The core values of this nation -- our standing in the world, our very democracy, everything that has made America, Ameri

Viewpoints April 28, 2019

One disturbing aspect of the Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka was that the slaughter of 321 victims came at a time when America is suffering what might be described as “terrorism fatigue.”The wars against al-Qaida and the Islamic State extremist group are part of a painful past that policymakers and the public want to escape. Those Middle East conflicts were costly and distracting. They didn’t produce many tangible gains, other than killing terrorists. Sept. 11, 2001, feels like it happened a

Viewpoints April 25, 2019

In the rebalancing of Sino-American relations that’s underway, the usual roles are reversed: China’s normally deft President Xi Jinping appears to have badly overreached in seeking advantage. And President Trump, who often seems tone-deaf on foreign policy, is riding a bipartisan consensus that it’s time to push back against Beijing. The two nations will probably make a trade deal soon, patching together a working relationship that has been frayed by a year of tariffs and economic brinksmanship.

Viewpoints April 18, 2019

Is Julian Assange a journalist? The US Justice Department sidestepped that question in its indictment of Assange. But his case is still certain to stir a debate about whether the WikiLeaks founder deserves protection under the First Amendment. Assange was arrested in London on Thursday, as US prosecutors unsealed an indictment accusing him of conspiring with Chelsea Manning to hack a Pentagon computer in 2010 to obtain secret documents that WikiLeaks hoped to publish. The indictment focuses on A

Viewpoints April 14, 2019

The Trump administration’s “maximum pressure campaign” against Iran assumes that economic sanctions are weakening the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps -- and that more sanctions will make the IRGC weaker still. The problem is that US and European intelligence analysts don’t think this forecast is accurate. “Re-imposition of sanctions in 2018 has played into the hands of the IRGC,” warns one recent Western intelligence assessment. Rather than turning Iranians against the corrupt IRGC leadership,

Viewpoints April 11, 2019

Russian claims this week that the country has been exonerated by Robert Mueller’s final report make my skin crawl. But they highlight the critical question of how the US and Russia can begin to move back toward a saner relationship. Frankly speaking (as Russians like to say), the first step is for Russia to stop pretending that it didn’t meddle in the 2016 US presidential election. The Kremlin got caught red-handed, one could say, and if its representatives keep claiming otherwise, they obstruct

Viewpoints March 31, 2019

Sen. Mark Warner is all for defense modernization. But just don’t touch those aircraft carriers, six of which are based in Norfolk. The Virginia democrat had said a year ago year that rather than investing in 20th-century military technology, he wanted to discuss “a reallocation of some of those resources” to deal with the 21st-century challenge of cyber threats. But when the Navy this week proposed to retire the carrier Harry S. Truman, to save money for modernization, Warner urged it to “reass

Viewpoints March 17, 2019

Dick Cheney, the former vice president, made just about the nastiest crack a Republican could offer about President Trump’s foreign policy when he said it “looks a lot more like Barack Obama than Ronald Reagan.” Obviously, the comparison is flawed. But say this much for Cheney: He’s the rare Republican who isn’t intimidated by Trump these days. Cheney made a string of similarly blistering comments at a supposedly off-the-record conversation with Vice President Pence at a gathering in Sea Island,

Viewpoints March 14, 2019

For a scary snapshot of what a “post-American” world looks like, consider the rupture that has been developing through three administrations in the US-Turkey relationship. Turkey has come to think it can call the shots, regardless of US interests.The prime mover has been President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Over the past decade, he has altered Turkey’s political geography -- undoing the Western-facing secular republic created by Kemal Ataturk and creating a neo-Ottoman Turkey that’s more aligned with

Viewpoints March 10, 2019

Robert Mueller’s final report should present Congress with a clean choice: Either the facts warrant impeachment of President Trump, or they don’t. That was the promise of Mueller’s appointment as special counsel: He would gather the evidence, and then Congress and the public could make a judgment. In a country with a healthy political system, Mueller’s report would lead to such a consensus and resolution. But we don’t live in that country. Instead, congressional Democrats seem to want it both wa

Viewpoints March 7, 2019

In the days after he resigned as secretary of defense in December, Jim Mattis told people he hoped to be succeeded by Patrick Shanahan, his deputy. Shanahan has remained in limbo since the beginning of the year as acting secretary, perhaps trying to convince President Trump’s critics that he will be independent, the way Mattis was, while simultaneously reassuring the White House that he won’t. Trump appears almost ready to name Shanahan permanently. Newt Gingrich, one of Trump’s confidants, told

Viewpoints Feb. 27, 2019

President Trump has been insisting for so long that any investigation of his personal finances would cross a “red line” that people may have overlooked the outrageousness of his claim. But this self-declared immunity is about to change. We’re entering a new phase of the Trump-Russia investigation, where the president’s efforts to contain the probe are failing. Information he tried to suppress about his business and political dealings is emerging -- with more to come. “There are no red lines exce

Viewpoints Feb. 17, 2019

The showy first summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un last June was draped in flags and bunting, but the decoration covered what turned out to be a mostly empty box that lacked a shared agreement on denuclearization. Given this disappointing record, what’s realistically possible when the two leaders meet again in two weeks in Vietnam? “Diplomacy is letting someone else have your way,” as the late Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson once observed. But tha

Viewpoints Feb. 14, 2019