Daniel R. DePetris

The Afghan people's well-being is now connected to the Taliban. The U.S. shouldn't pretend otherwise.

If U.S. officials were being honest with themselves, they would recognize that more military assistance to the Ukrainians is unlikely to do much of anything except prompt Russia to retaliate in kind.

U.S. officials should continue to encourage its allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific to take ownership of their own security, bolstering the region's ability to check China from becoming a Eurasian hegemon.

The U.S., to put it bluntly, is not the all-powerful player at the head of the table with infinite resources and an unending reservoir of leverage.

Just because the U.S. can find, track and kill terrorists wherever they are doesn't mean the U.S. shouldn't be judicious about utilizing this capability.

The last thing the U.S. needs is another crisis in the Middle East. Common-sense diplomacy can help us escape it.

If there is one tool policymakers and lawmakers in Washington are almost always predisposed to use, it is the economic stick commonly known as sanctions.

The U.S. is slowly but surely diverting its focus from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific. For leaders like Mohammed Bin Salman and Mohammed Bin Zayed who are used to being catered to by the U.S., times are changing.

Is there a better way to defend the U.S. from anti-American terrorism other than weighing into internal fights on behalf of governments that oftentimes disillusion their own populations?

Right now, the Biden administration's Syria policy is in a holding-pattern.

Twenty years after President George. W. Bush's infamous Sept. 20 speech to a frightened nation, the war on terrorism continues to this very day.

The most effective way to push Europe into becoming more self-sustainable, if not independent, is for the U.S. to do less on the continent.

But let's face it: two decades after 9/11, Saudi Arabia's political leadership has a long way to go in cracking down on the sources of terrorism funding.

Taliban fighters spent 20 years seeking to return to power, a goal they finally accomplished recently. But sustaining an insurgency is not the same thing as running an even semi-competent government.

The sustainable stalemate is a myth, nothing more and nothing less.

The U.S.-organized Summit for Democracy is meant to give democracies a boost and put autocracies on notice. But the summit carries the risk of being counterintuitive.

U.S. officials should not overestimate Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping's friendship.

Afghanistan's domestic troubles are no longer a U.S. responsibility.

Until the Biden administration puts more flesh on the bones of its North Korea policy, it's difficult to see how attempts to improve inter-Korean relations will be anything other than minor or symbolic.

Cuba is a perennial thorn in America's side.

From the outside, intervening in a dicey situation can seem like the easy solution to a devil of a problem. Too frequently, though, it turns out to be the wrong one.

Is it wise to pit every democracy against every autocracy and turn the complicated game of geopolitics into a simplistic, zero-sum existential struggle?

President Joe Biden's latest military action exposes the hot mess otherwise known as Washington's Middle East policy.

Until lawmakers stop providing the executive branch the benefit of the doubt about when and where to take the nation to war, inter-branch disputes on this issue will continue for a long time to come.

Halfway through its first year in office, the Biden administration has adopted "democracy vs. autocracy" as the organizing theme of its foreign policy.

If results are to be found during the Biden-Putin chat, they will likely happen at the margins and far away from the big, irreconcilable disputes that continue to hobble bilateral ties.

There is no doubt in anyone's mind that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko's latest attempt to squelch opposition is a gut punch to those who believe horrible actions like this have no place in the 21st century.

If anything should guide U.S. foreign policy, it is U.S. interests—not the need to be liked by a particular country.

Syria's neighbors, many of whom detest Bashar al-Assad and funneled arms and money to their favorite rebel groups earlier in the war, now acknowledge he isn't going anywhere.

It's a vicious circle the U.S. has yet to escape: more defense spending tempts over-extension around the world, which in turn is used to justify even higher defense budgets in the future.