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Following signals from President Donald J. Trump — who had tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” after an earlier show of force in Lansing — Michigan’s Republican Party last year welcomed the support of newly emboldened paramilitary groups and other vigilantes. Prominent party members formed bonds with militias or gave tacit approval to armed activists using intimidation in a series of rallies and confrontations around the state. That intrusion into the Statehouse now looks like a portent of the assault halfway across the country months later at the United States Capitol.

“We knew there would be violence,” said Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, about the Jan. 6 assault. Endorsing tactics like militiamen with assault rifles frightening state lawmakers “normalizes violence,” she told journalists last week, “and Michigan, unfortunately, has seen quite a bit of that.”

The chief organizer of that protest, Meshawn Maddock, on Saturday was elected co-chair of the state Republican Party — one of four die-hard Trump loyalists who won top posts.

Joseph R. Biden’s presidential campaign has unified the Democratic Party around a shared goal of ousting President Trump from office.

the progressive wing of the party is pushing for appointees with deep ties to labor unions and congressional Democrats. And they are battling against appointees that they say would seek to restore a “status quo” on trade, including those with ties to corporate lobbyists, trade associations and Washington think tanks that advocate more typical trade deals.

Mr. Biden has bridged these divisions so far in the campaign by focusing on criticizing Mr. Trump for his costly and erratic trade policy, which he says has alienated allies like Canada and Europe and failed to convince China to make significant economic reforms.

Former Vice President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump went head-to-head in the mighty swing state of Florida on Thursday, as the US crossed a daily record with more than 88,000 new coronavirus cases

Biden thanked attendees for wearing masks and staying six feet apart

Biden's visit to Trump's adopted home state was the latest example of his bid to expand the electoral map in the campaign's final stretch by spending ample time in states that Trump won in 2016,

The members of the Electoral College will gather in their respective states on Monday to cast their official ballots for president. Ordinarily, the process is little more than a formal duty to rubber-stamp the results of the November election.

For weeks, President Trump and his allies have pressured Republican officials to ignore the popular vote in close-fought states won by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and appoint their own electors who would favor Mr. Trump. They have also asked courts to hand victory to the president in states he lost.

Electors for each state and the District of Columbia meet at a location chosen by the state legislature, most often the state’s capitol. The Delaware electors are meeting in a gym. Nevada is the only state holding its meeting virtually this year.

the debate over whether great-power competition or transnational threats pose the greater danger to the United States is a false one. Look back at strategic assessments from ten years ago on China and Russia, on the one hand, and those on pandemics and climate change, on the other, and it is clear that Washington is experiencing near-worst-case scenarios on both. Great-power rivalry has not yet sparked a hot war but appears to be on the brink of sparking a cold one. Meanwhile, the worst pandemic in a century is not yet over, and the climate crisis is only accelerating. 

What COVID-19 has made powerfully clear is that this is an age of transnational threats and great-power competition—one in which the two phenomena exacerbate each other.

By the same token, ramping up competition with China without a plan to rally the world to deal with transnational threats (which can themselves fuel rivalry between great powers) would only guarantee future disasters. 

fully understanding the invasion of Ukraine is impossible without considering the geopolitical environment in which it is taking place. Russia is emboldened in its quest to recapture lost influence in Europe partly because of its alliance with China and the calculation that American power is giving way.

China’s rise challenges the notion of the West itself. Where the Soviet Union posed a direct threat to Western Europe, China threatens America’s liberal democratic protectorates on the other side of the world: Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, and others. Suddenly to think of the West comprising only the two sides of the North Atlantic no longer makes much sense. If there is a “West” today—a free world allied to the U.S.—it stretches from Western Europe to the Far East and Australasia.

unlike in the ’40s, Western institutions show little sign of changing to meet the new reality. The old order has been so solidly constructed that it appears to have trapped its defenders, who are unable to muster the energy, ambition, or imagination to build anything new.

A year of conflict in Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country and a linchpin of regional security, has left thousands dead, forced more than two million people from their homes and pushed parts of the country into famine.

The tide of the civil war has fluctuated wildly. The government teetered in early November when fighters from Tigray surged south toward the capital, Addis Ababa, forcing Mr. Abiy to declare a state of emergency. Foreigners fled the country and the government detained thousands of civilians from the Tigrayan ethnic group.

But weeks later Mr. Abiy pulled off a stunning military reversal, halting the rebel march less than 100 miles from the capital, then forcing them to retreat hundreds of miles to their mountainous stronghold in Tigray.

A renewed buildup of Russian troops near the Ukrainian border has raised concern among some officials in the United States and Europe who are tracking what they consider irregular movements of equipment and personnel on Russia’s western flank.

The renewed movements of Russian forces in the area come as the Kremlin embraces a harder line on Ukraine. Russian officials from President Vladimir Putin on down have escalated their rhetoric in recent months, attacking Kyiv’s Western ties and even questioning its sovereignty.

The situation also comes as the simmering 7½-year conflict between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists in the eastern Donbas region enters a new stage. On Oct. 26, Ukraine’s military confirmed it had used a Turkish-made drone against a position in Donbas, the first time Kyiv has employed the technology in combat, prompting an outcry from Moscow.

“Give the people what they want” is a core element of democratic politics, and if enough people “want” Trump, then who are American politicians or judges to deprive them? Yet the American founders (and the drafters of the 14th Amendment) also knew the necessity of occasionally checking the popular will, and the Constitution thus contains a host of safeguards designed to protect American democracy from majorities run amok

Why are Republicans in Congress punting to voters and the legal system? For many of them, the answer lies in raw fear. First, there is the simple political fear of losing a House or Senate seat

there’s another fear as well, that imposing accountability will only escalate American political division, leading to a tit-for-tat of prosecuted or disqualified politicians.

In the final weeks of World War I, a German general sent a telegram to his Austrian allies summarizing the situation. It was, he wrote, “serious, but not catastrophic.” The reply came back: “Here the situation is catastrophic, but not serious.”

“The U.S. thinks Putin will do a full-blown war,” he said. “Europeans think he’s bluffing.”

full-scale war is generally as unimaginable for a Western European public as an alien invasion. The many decades of peace in Western Europe, combined with the continent’s deep dependence on Russia’s oil and gas, incline officials to assume aggressive Russian moves must be a ruse.

WHEN it comes to lethal drone strikes against foreign targets, America’s government and Congress should be aware that “what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander”, says John Bellinger, for eight years a government lawyer charged with explaining George W. Bush’s global war on terror to allies.

China and Russia are just two of the powers that may soon launch their own fleets of unmanned aircraft against suspected foes

A few phrases passed by Congress days after the September 11th 2001 attacks give the president broad war-making powers in the name of self-defence.

At the United Nations, the desire to impose ever harsher sanctions on North Korea to try to curb its development of nuclear arms and ballistic missiles has long stalled in the face of Chinese opposition

They include banning specific, high-tech items used in the nuclear program, like epoxy paste for centrifuges; limiting or outlawing some banking transactions; and a far more stringent inspection of ships bound to and from North Korea.

“If we had the kind of product listing and focus on financial flows and interdiction on North Korea that we placed on Iran, we would not be in this spot,”

What kind of president would Mitt Romney be?

I'll draw on the work of Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek, who has argued that presidents' fortunes depend on how they establish their political legitimacy in the particular circumstances under which which they assume power.

Our current political regime emerged in the wake of Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, and it has continued even through the Democratic presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. It is politically conservative and skeptical of government, at least in contrast to the New Deal/civil-rights regime that preceded it. And the Republicans have been the dominant party. Skowronek's key insight is that a president's ability to establish his political legitimacy depends on where he sits in "political time": Is he allied with the dominant regime or opposed to it, and is the regime itself powerful or in decline?

When the Thirty Years War and Peace of Westphalia stifled Austrian ambitions in Germany, the Hapsburgs expanded eastward against the Ottoman Empire.  Ever since the death of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1565, the Ottoman Empire had been in serious decline, with a corrupt government, rebellious army, obsolete military technology, and decaying economy. Such a faltering empire was a tempting target for its neighbors.  However, the Hapsburgs were never able to concentrate solely on the Turks.  This was because France under Louis XIV posed a constant threat of invasion to the various German states, which forced the Hapsburgs to divide their attention between east and west.

This triggered the Turks' last major invasion of Europe, climaxing at the siege of Vienna in 1683.  A huge Turkish army of possibly 150,000 men, but with no large siege artillery, was faced by only the stout walls of Vienna and a garrison of ll,000 men.  The siege lasted two months as the Turks gradually used the old medieval technique of undermining the walls.  Just as the hour of their victory approached, a relief army from various European states arrived and crushed the Turkish army.  From 1683 to 1700, Hapsburg forces and their allies advanced steadily against the Turks, only being interrupted by having to meet French aggression in the West.  In 1697, the allied forces demolished another Turkish army at Zenta and watched as the once proud Janissaries murdered their own officers in the rout.  The resulting treaty of Karlowitz (1699) gave Austria all of Hungary, Transylvania, and Slavonia.  Karlowitz re-established Austria, now also known as Austria-Hungary, as a major European power.  From 1700 until the end of World War I in 19l8, the Hapsburg Empire would dominate southeastern Europe, while the Ottoman Empire staggered on as the "Sick Man of Europe."

Although the Hapsburg Empire had regained its status as a military and diplomatic power, it still had serious internal problems, namely a powerful nobility ruling over enserfed peasants, a hodge-podge of peoples with nothing in common except that they all called Leopold their emperor, and a variety of states that each had their own rights, privileges and governmental institutions

In July 2014, four months after Putin annexed Crimea, only 10 percent of Republicans held a favorable opinion of Russia’s president, according to an Economist/YouGov poll. Today, that figure is 37 percent.

A recent poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that, while 65 percent of Americans support a congressional inquiry into Russian election interference, a narrow majority (51 percent ) of Republicans oppose it.

82 percent of Hillary Clinton voters want to maintain sanctions imposed on Moscow in response to its meddling, while only 16 percent of Trump voters do.

The answer to the question of how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has been to partition “Palestine” into two states. This assumes, however, that the parties only have a dispute over land; but that has never been the case. The conflict has always had political, religious, historical, geographical and psychological dimensions. The international community’s unwillingness to accept this reality has led to the continued fantasy that a two-state solution is possible.

The Palestinians have never been prepared to share any part of the land they claim as their own.

Jews have no place in the Islamic world — except as second-class citizens (dhimmis) under Muslim rule

A new book by General Sir Richard Shirreff, NATO's deputy supreme allied commander for Europe between 2011 and 2014, evokes a potential scenario that leads to a devastating future war with Russia.

In his account, Russia rapidly expands its war aims by invading the Baltic States, which are NATO members, and world war ensues.

The latter, written at the height of the Cold War, was conceived as a "future history," supposedly looking back at the outbreak and subsequent unfolding of a full-blown NATO vs Warsaw Pact war.

Trump sees the world in terms of a zero-sum game. In reality, globalisation, if well managed, is a positive-sum force: America gains if its friends and allies – whether Australia, the EU, or Mexico – are stronger.

But Trump’s approach threatens to turn it into a negative-sum game: America will lose, too.

Previous administrations have always taken seriously their responsibility to advance US interests. But the policies they pursued usually were framed in terms of an enlightened understanding of national interest. Americans, they believed, benefited from a more prosperous global economy and a web of alliances among countries committed to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.