New American Engagement Initiative

On July 9, Inkstick Media published the first of NAEI’s Adults in a Room series, which features insights from participants in NAEI’s private monthly networking sessions. The topic of this month’s installment was the outcomes of the Biden-Putin summit and included submissions by Trey Herr, Julian Mueller-Kaler, Miranda Preibe of RAND, and Olya Oliker of […]

On July 12, Christopher Preble was quoted in a Politifact article examining President Biden’s promises to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan. “The American people’s continued support for withdrawal, including a number of veterans groups, appears to have had much more of an impact than the worsening security situation inside of Afghanistan. Most Americans recognized some […]

On July 9, Emma Ashford’s book review of Kyle Lascurettes’ new book on the history of World Order, entitled “Orders of Exclusion: Great Powers and the Strategic Sources of Foundational Rules in International Relations”, was published in an ISSF/HDiplo roundtable. “The book offers a number of important lessons for today’s policymakers. Lascurettes is clearly correct […]

Policymakers should intensify efforts to understand the scope of ambition of other states, focus less on forward deployment and engage in reassurance measures.

Policymakers should cultivate more realistic expectations about the likelihood that their coercive threats will work as intended, evaluate their full costs against their potential benefits, and invest more in deterrence and defense.

The core assumptions underpinning US policy in the Middle East—ensuring oil flows, maintaining Israel’s security, preventing the rise of a dominant hegemon, and countering terrorism—have been upended by new realities.

The Biden administration has released an Interim National Security Strategic Guidance (INSSG), a stepping-stone to a full National Security Strategy (NSS). Although this document presents a more realistic vision of the world than the Trump administration’s NSS did, the INSSG still contains some questionable assumptions.

The Biden administration has been slow to distribute surplus COVID-19 vaccine doses to countries in need or to facilitate foreign manufacturing of vaccines, squandering a diplomatic opportunity and potentially endangering US security.

What does it say about our system of government that hard truths are not absorbed? This year’s Annual Threat Assessment and Global Trends 2040 are blunt about the challenges facing the United States. But the warnings about China should have been heeded a decade or more ago.

There’s a silver lining to parenting in a pandemic: It’s an education in the core concepts of international relations, as well as a useful reminder that we’re all operating in a condition of anarchy. Here’s a mom’s primer on deterrence, coercion, credibility, and reassurance.

There’s a disconnect between rhetoric and reality when it comes to women’s roles in peacebuilding and development projects because the discussion about women overwhelmingly focuses on them as victims of conflict and political violence without also recognizing them as participants in it. That’s a problem.