Eliot A. Cohen

There is a rule in politics never to ascribe to malignity what one can explain through incompetence and stupidity. This approach has become difficult to sustain in the case of the Trump administration. But there is another possibility: Both explanations […]

Many friends of mine are pretty deep in the slough of despond. I occasionally plead with them to make their predictions of catastrophe less hopeless and categorical, but with less success than I wish. I respect their points of view

International affairs often present policy makers with a choice, not between good and bad options but between very bad and truly awful ones. The task of statesmanship is to recognize those alternatives, swallow hard, and go for the very bad.

When Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar launched Operation al-Aqsa Flood against Israel on October 7, 2023, he intended to deal a decisive blow against a powerful nation state—and he succeeded. But the state his attack has devastated turned out not to be

Those of us who first became politically homeless in 2016 have lately been in a quandary: We need to figure out who we are. If we are not to succumb to the Saruman trap—going along with populist authoritarians in the

Over the past year, after suffering a devastating surprise and brutal losses, Israel has achieved remarkable military successes. Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of the greatest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, is dead. So, too, are most of his senior subordinates

I was and proudly remain what the Navy calls a plank owner—a member of the first crew of a new vessel—of the good ship National Security Never Trump. I see no reason to unsay anything I have said about Donald