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Atlantic Council blogs provide short-form analyses from Council experts and a wider community of global voices on the world’s most important news stories.
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SyriaSource

May 10, 2017

Arming the YPG

By Frederic C. Hof

On May 9, 2017, the United States Department of Defense (DoD) announced President Trump’s approval of a DoD proposal to provide arms to the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), a militia that has emerged over the past two-plus years as the principal ground combat component in the military campaign against ISIS (ISIL, Daesh, Islamic […]

Syria

Rebuilding Syria

May 10, 2017

Rebuild Syria by Supporting Syrians—Not Their State

By Nate Rosenblatt

The fall of Aleppo in December 2016 marked a turning point in the Syrian uprising from a civil war where the opposition still had a chance, to one where the regime was on the path to victory. Amid this pivot marked by widening military asymmetries and international accommodation to the Syrian regime; governments, multilateral donor […]

Syria

SyriaSource

May 10, 2017

Is a Ceasefire Taking Hold?

By Frederic C. Hof

On May 4, 2017 in Astana (Kazakhstan) Iran, Russia, and Turkey signed a memorandum “on the creation of de-escalation areas in the Syrian Arab Republic.” Four such areas were listed: “Idlib province and certain parts of the neighboring provinces (Latakia, Hama, and Aleppo provinces); certain parts in the north of Homs province; in eastern Ghouta; […]

Syria
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NATOSource

May 10, 2017

Trump Asking NATO to Join Coalition Fighting Against ISIS

By Matthias Gebauer and Peter Müller, Spiegel

In Donald Trump’s eyes, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg was actually the head of an alliance that history had made superfluous.

NATO Security & Defense

UkraineAlert

May 10, 2017

Russia Deploys Banned Missile and Brags about It

By Semen Kabakaev

Thirty years ago, on December 8, 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which entered into force on June 1, 1988. The parties pledged not to produce, test or deploy ballistic and cruise land-based missiles of medium range (from 1,000 to 5,500 kilometers). Elimination of all declared missiles and […]

Russia Ukraine

New Atlanticist

May 10, 2017

A Moon Rises Over South Korea

By Robert A. Manning

South Korean leftist opposition candidate Moon Jae-in’s impressive presidential electoral victory is reverberating not only across the Korean Peninsula, but throughout Northeast Asia and the United States as well. In a crowded field of fifteen candidates, Moon won 41 percent of the vote, soundly defeating his conservative rival, Hong Joon-pyo, who won 24 percent. While […]

Korea
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NATOSource

May 9, 2017

Mattis Trip to Europe Should Lead to Larger US Role in the Baltic Sea Region

By Magnus Nordenman

This week Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis is in Europe to discuss the counter-ISIS campaign with European friends and allies.

NATO Northern Europe

UkraineAlert

May 9, 2017

How to Win Friends and Influence People on a Global Scale

By Alexandra Hall Hall

Dale Carnegie’s famous self-help book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, centers on investing in personal relationships in order to achieve success. President Donald Trump has demonstrated an instinctive understanding of this principle in the way he has interacted with a succession of world leaders, whether over a round of golf at Mar-a-Lago or […]

The Caucasus

SyriaSource

May 9, 2017

At the Astana Table, a Lesson from Cyprus

By Bassam Barabandi and John Arterbury

As representatives from Russia, Turkey, and Iran gather in Astana to pen a solution for Syria, the war’s end that appears within reach is yet further away than ever. Although Astana has enough participation from superpowers immediately involved in the conflict to offer a narrow window for peace, the involvement of only a limited spectrum […]

Syria

New Atlanticist

May 9, 2017

Macron Faces a World of Challenges

By Louis Golino

Emmanuel Macron’s election as the next president of France is consequential not just because it is the first time that a centrist who has never held elected office has won or that it reinforces, after the recent Dutch and Austrian elections, the fact that the forces of nationalism have, at least for now, been kept […]

European Union France