Next week the US will try to get the UN Security Council to do something it has been trying to get its allies to support for the last year: Extend the UN’s conventional arms embargo against Iran, which is slated to expire in October. The resolution will almost certainly fail, but that doesn’t mean…

Rami Makhlouf is not a man accustomed to hardship. The Syrian businessman and first cousin of the country’s ruler, Bashar Assad, has made a fortune in Syria, owning until recently one of Syria’s two mobile phone networks. But all of that began to change this spring. In May, Syrian authorities…

When US missiles killed Iran’s most important general and its most important militia leader in early January as they were visiting Baghdad, it looked like American forces would be kicked out of Iraq. Iraq’s parliament convened just hours after the strike and approved a symbolic resolution to expel…

For most of President Donald Trump’s tenure, his cabinet has tempered his instincts to appease his Russian counterpart. Despite the president’s baffling suck-ups to Vladimir Putin and his desire to improve the relationship, his administration has expanded sanctions against Moscow, expelled Russian…

Five years ago, as the US was hammering out the final details of the Iran nuclear deal, negotiators relented on a key demand: Iran would not have to account for the possible military dimensions of its past nuclear activities. This bargain was enshrined in a December 2015 report from the…

When UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced in January that he would allow China’s largest telecom company to have a limited role in erecting a 5G wireless network for his country, the US warned that there would be serious consequences. President Donald Trump has now directed his administration…

For 40 years American presidents have pondered a fundamental question about Iran, best summed up by Henry Kissinger: Is it a country or a cause? On Thursday evening, Donald Trump gave his answer: Iran is a cause, a terrorist cause, and it will be treated as such. That could be the lasting…

As US intelligence analysts comb through electronic and paper documents seized from the lair of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, one question is foremost on their minds: How was the ISIS leader able to find refuge in a Syrian province secured by the Turkish military and its proxy forces? Three US national…