Hal Brands

The economic trauma of the Ukraine War is only beginning: Energy shocks, food-supply disruption and commodity shortages will have growing impact as the conflict persists. The war, moreover, is just part of an accelerating geo-economic realignment. The golden age of globalization, when countries…

The Western powers are tightening the screws on Russian President Vladimir Putin: The next move appears to be a phased-in European ban on purchases of Russian oil. It’s the right policy, given that oil money is financing Putin’s war in Ukraine and keeping the Russian economy alive. But the risks…

One of the biggest questions of the Ukraine war concerns tensions half a world away: What lessons will China draw from the Russian invasion? Western observers hope that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s faltering invasion of Ukraine will convince China to go slow — that it will discourage…

America is following an “arsenal of democracy” strategy in Ukraine: It has avoided direct intervention against the Russian invaders, while working with allies and partners to provide the Kyiv government with money and guns. That strategy, reminiscent of US support for Britain in 1940-41, has…

Foreign policy suddenly has a very retro feel. A US president visits Europe to give a soaring speech on the fate of human freedom. An adversary is threatening nuclear war to intimidate the West. The dream of a fully integrated global system is crashing as geopolitical tensions break the world into…

Last weekend saw the re-election of the man often thought of as Europe’s proto-Putin: Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister who has attacked his country’s democracy while seeking to weaken the European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization from within. Yet Orban should be careful…

All wars end with political settlements. As the war in Ukraine drags on, some analysts argue that the country agreeing to political neutrality would serve as the basis for a peace pact with Russia. Yet the devil of any settlement is in the details, and in this case, those details are devilish…

The world has been transfixed by Ukraine’s fight for survival. As the war drags on, we’d better start considering what will become of Russia, as well. President Vladimir Putin’s nation has now been subjected to an isolation more sudden and total than that experienced by any major power in recent…

The war in Ukraine is getting more dangerous, in part because it is going better than Ukraine’s supporters could have imagined. President Joe Biden has sought to reconcile two conflicting objectives: avoiding US military intervention while also helping Ukraine and making Moscow pay a high price for…

The great NATO enlargement debate never ends. In the 1990s, US officials and academics argued about whether pushing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into Eastern Europe was likely to sustain the post-Cold War peace or prematurely end it. More recently, critics have charged that Russia’s war…