Tobin Harshaw

In the fantastically terrifying HBO miniseries “Chernobyl,” the scientist Valery Legasov warns, "If we don't find out how this happened, it will happen again." The same could be said, I fear, about the predations of a revanchist Russia, where President Vladimir Putin seems as blinkered to reality…

“Who lost China?” According to legend, this phrase tipped off the great foreign-policy blame game of the 1950s. 1 But in retrospect, the correct answer is pretty clear: Nobody. Because Mao Zedong and his comrades won it, fair and square. So fast forward 70 years, and maybe the question is “Who…

Big numbers can lead to big misunderstandings, and the US Defense Department budget is almost unfathomably big. Hence some canards and exaggerations such as the $600 hammer and $125 billion in waste. Most of confusion stems from the opacity of the Pentagon contracting process, which is also pretty…

What’s worse than being ruled by one of history’s greatest monsters? The unfortunate people of Sudan are at risk of finding out. Omar al-Bashir - who made the International Criminal Court’s most-wanted list for overseeing a genocidal campaign in Sudan’s Darfur region; who drove his economy to…

So, is America going to war? For the first time in over 15 years, perhaps, that’s a very sensible question. The answer is: likely not. At least not in the Middle East. Ships have been attacked in the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians have denied responsibility. The Trump administration says it…

Last month I discussed nuclear game theory with Vipin Narang, a professor of political science at MIT and author of “Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era.” If we agreed on one thing, it was that nuclear war is not a game. “It’s really about a strategic logic,” Narang explained, “how your adversary…

When is $227 billion greater than $606 billion? When comparing Chinese defense spending to that of the US — and if Army Chief of Staff Mark Milley is the one doing the math. At a hearing last week, the ranking Democrat of the Senate’s defense appropriations subcommittee, Dick Durbin of Illinois,…