Foreign Affairs

In recent months, the U.S.-Israeli relationship has been subjected to unprecedented scrutiny from all sides. Forty Democratic senators voted to block an arms sale to Israel in April because of the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon, a vote that would have been unimaginable only a year earlier.

“I believe we should talk to Putin,” Finnish President Alexander Stubb said in an early June interview. It was a revealing admission. Stubb has, for years, been one of Europe’s most pro-Ukraine politicians and generally hawkish toward the Kremlin. But now, Stubb told journalists, ignoring Russian President Vladimir Putin was becoming untenable. “This border will remain,” he said, referring to his country’s 833-mile boundary with Russia.

As the United States races to build the infrastructure required for artificial intelligence, it faces a constraint: legitimacy at the local level. Data centers, transmission lines, and energy-intensive computing facilities have become strategic assets, central to economic competitiveness and national power. Yet they must be sited, permitted, and sustained in communities whose priorities do not always align with national ambitions.

For over a decade, U.S. President Donald Trump has accused Washington’s European allies of free-riding on American security guarantees. He has been criticizing NATO members that do not pay “their fair share” since launching his first presidential campaign in 2015. He threatened to pull out of the alliance after winning office, and then again when running for president in 2024.

Celebrations of America’s founding and reflections on its ideals often overlook the central role of civil-military relations. This is a mistake. In the Declaration of Independence, a chief complaint was that King George III “affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.” George Washington himself worried about this abuse of power and went to great pains to avoid it in his own career.

It seems to many these days that the world is a jungle beholden only to one law. Since returning to office in 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump has not only made a spectacle of American power—by striking alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean, kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, bombing Iran, and even threatening the sovereignty of allies—he has also made a principle out of it.

When the presidents of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda met in Washington, D.C., in early December 2025, for a ceremony sealing the peace deal that ended four years of fighting, it was meant to showcase U.S. President Donald Trump’s ability to settle even the most intractable conflicts. Trump blanketed the signing event with his trademark hyperbole: “Look at how they love each other,” he marveled about the two presidents.

The consensus among analysts is that Hamas is down, but hardly out. The group may be badly battered, but it has been around since 1987, and in that time, it has been repeatedly attacked by Israel and has always grown back. The conditions that gave rise to the organization—occupation, dispossession, and humiliation at the hands of Israel—are as severe as ever. And in the Gaza Strip, there is no comprehensive alternative to Hamas’s governance.

Play Listen to the Episode 00:00 / 00:00 MP3 Close audio player The breakneck pace of AI progress and the intensity of the competition for AI supremacy has left U.S. policymakers in a difficult position. They must encourage the innovation needed to ensure an advantage over China and to power economic growth; protect against a national security catastrophe; and assuage the concerns of an anxious and skeptical public.

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