The process of obtaining a security clearance for the United States government is at times laborious and frustrating. That is the case partly by design and partly by a combination of bureaucratic infighting and a massive increase of positions needing clearances since 2001....
United States policy in Syria has been at odds with itself since the war began in 2011. Recently, the U.S. has tried to reposition some rebel groups from fighting the Assad regime to fighting the so-called Islamic State...
Some issues that make news globally are less significant than they initially appear. The Chinese Communist Party abolishing its two-term limit for the country’s president and vice president is likely more significant than it appears....
United States economic sanctions currently target not less than 20 countries, as well as thousands of individuals and entities and hundreds of aircraft and vessels. Authority for these sanctions, overseen primarily by the Treasury Department, flows from a range of statutes and Executive Orders....
On February 19, Israel announced that it had reached a deal that would send $15 billion in natural gas from its Tamar and Leviathan gas fields to the Egyptian company Dolphinus Holdings....
On February 20, 2018, the Special Counsel investigating the Russian interference in the U.S. 2016 presidential election charged Alex van der Zwaan, a lawyer with a prominent corporate law firm and the son-in-law of Russian oligarch German Khan, with lying to federal investigators....
While the term ‘global war on terror’ is no longer used, its sentiment remains. For over 16 years, the United States has been fighting a war with little public awareness and no political debate...
The Munich Security Conference (MSC), held from February 16-18, was notably more low-key than is customary for what is, perhaps, the most prestigious annual security conference...
Despite the intense coverage of the ongoing Russian disinformation campaigns against the United States—covered in real time by sites like Hamilton 68, which tracks Russian affiliated bots and memes—the U.S. government has done little to address the issue....
Countries face a range of challenges when addressing the ‘foreign fighters’ phenomenon: countering the ideology that drew their citizens to Iraq and Syria in the first place; properly assessing the threat of those who have returned...
Iranian leaders and their policies are being challenged on a wide range of fronts, in some cases as a result of actions by the Trump Administration and in other cases by the regime’s own failings....
In 2014 and 2015, the so-called Islamic State was not just the richest terrorist group at the time—it was the richest terrorist group in history—with an estimated annual revenue, according to Forbes Magazine, at perhaps $3 billion dollars....
In the last week, the skies over Syria became even more dangerous. On February 3, al-Qaeda affiliated rebels shot down a Russian Su-25 fighter jet in Idlib province in northern Syria. On February 10, Kurdish fighters from the YPG downed a Turkish helicopter near Afrin...
The United States military presence in Syria has been problematic for several reasons: the U.S. has tried to focus on the so-called Islamic State while nearly all other internal and external actors focused on the civil war...
The war in Syria has been raging for so long, the world has become blind to the continuing—and lately increasing—atrocities and suffering plaguing the country....