Trip the Beltway Fantastic With Kelley Vlahos and Friends

As the West focuses on and indulges Israel’s wars in the Middle East, U.S. security policy toward China, supposedly the ‘pacing threat’ , seems neglected. Is that such a bad thing? One of the most interesting threads to come out of the last six months of new Trump foreign policy is that China has not been the focus, other than a tariff war which as of this writing, does not appear to have blown up...

News is moving so rapidly in the Middle East right now. Israel launched strikes against Iran on June 13, the Iranians have been retaliating in kind, and then the U.S. jumps in with its own strikes against Iran’s nuclear program on June 21. On Monday the Iranians engaged in limited retaliatory strikes on the U.S. military base in Qatar and by the end of the day Trump announced a ceasefire which was...

Ukraine’s attacks on Russia bases and aircraft on June 1 has sent the media and Ukraine’s supporters in Congress and Europe into a flurry of triumphal metaphors and hyperbole , from “David and Goliath” to “daring”, “stunning”, “audacious” and one “bad-ass” operation.  Ukrainian military officials said 41 Russian aircraft were hit, including strategic bombers and surveillance planes, with some dest...

Just before Memorial Day on Friday the Trump administration let go scores of staff from the National Security Council. The usual howling from the media and foreign policy establishmentarians ensued, but the Trump administration was signaling his intent to do this even during his first term. His point: that over the years — particularly in the Bush I and Obama administrations — the NSC has not only...

This last week has been dizzying when it comes to Middle East news. As we speak the President is in the region and has already made a number of announcements regarding a massive arms deal for Saudi Arabia and another for Qatar. He announced lifting sanctions on Syria and even met with Ahmed al-Sharaa , the new president of Syria, the first time leaders from the two countries have met in 25 years....

Trump administration has worked doggedly to follow through on its promise to end the war. President Trump started talks with Moscow, which didn’t make the Ukrainians and the EU happy. He then worked to bring Zelensky into the fold after some tense moments in the Oval Office. Trump then tried to bring about a ceasefire, which really didn’t work as both sides blamed each other for not keeping it. Me...

Within just a year we have gone from government censorship of so-called disinformation, brought on by reactionary responses to COVID and Russia-gate, to foreign students literally being abducted off the streets and thrown into detention centers, without charge, for having the wrong attitudes (whether in op-eds, campus protests, or in the case of Badar Khan Suri , a father-in-law problem) about the...

To say that the European debate over the war in Ukraine — at least in the elite halls of government, academia and the professional classes — is virtually non-existent, might be an understatement. For all of the grousing my friends in the realism and restraint world have done about the hive-mind thinking about Russia and the war since the 2022, it is nothing like the conformist strictures that exis...

We are into the second week of U.S. airstrikes against Houthi targets in Yemen. U.S. warplanes have targeted Houthi infrastructure, weapons depots and leadership in the capital city of Sana’a as well as other towns and villages in northern Yemen, which have invariably caused civilian injury and death, though the actual numbers are hard to pin down . Not surprisingly, the Houthis have responded wit...

“We Live in a Fascist Dictatorship” “Mad King Trump’s Tariff Disaster” “Trump’s neofascism is here now. Here are 10 things you can do to resist” “A Guide to Trump’s Fascist Presidency — From Ignoring Judge to Erasing History” “Fit for a king? Trump’s moves challenge world order and U.S. bureaucracy.” These are all headlines I found in five minutes this morning Googling “Trump fascist“ “Trump fasci...

At the end February, newly minted Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General CQ Brown, who was an appointee of President Biden and had been on the job 15 months. Hegseth said Brown, a career Air Force officer, was “honorable” but “not the right man for the moment,” and said the replacements of five other three- and four-stars were “a reflection of th...

This past weekend at the Munich Security Conference it would be an understatement to say that sparks were flying, or even fireworks. More like bombs going off. It started last week with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegeth saying that Ukraine would not be given membership in NATO in any peace agreement and said NATO’s European members would have to provide the lion’s share of funding for their defense...

One of the most extraordinary sidebar stories of the 2024 election has been the complete implosion of mainstream media. Of course mainstream news or more exactly, legacy media, was in its death throes long before Trump won in November. The major network news, cable news, the newspapers of record — the Washington Post, the New York Times — NPR radio — all had been bleeding viewers and listeners to...

If you have been paying any attention to international politics over the last four years you have no doubt picked up on the phrase “Global South” relating to a host of middle and small powers ranging from South Africa and Indonesia, Brazil to the Pacific Islands and their growing influence on the geopolitical stage. These nations have emerged as opposition to Western policies on Ukraine and Israel...

Last week there was a very brief moment in which it looked like the newly inaugurated President Trump was finally going to allow the declassification of all the files relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. This has been decades in the waiting , and he had said clearly in interviews during the campaign and after his election that he was going to immediately release thes...

Today we commemorate the inauguration of the 47th president, Donald Trump, after the longest and most tumultuous year in recent memory in terms of politics and foreign policy. The results of the 2024 election in November, largely predicted by my two guests today, were still a surprise in a way that no one could have guessed what a seismic shift there would be in the political and social landscape...

The fall of Bashar Assad in Syria has led to grave uncertainties — both in the geopolitical situation there, and in the day-to-day running of the country, which has suffered under civil war for 14 years.  The new governing authority under HTS is looking for the l ifting of international sanctions so it can start rebuilding the country after over a decade of civil war. Also, questions remain over w...

For the Palestinians in Israel, conditions keep getting worse. In Gaza, the official death toll is now over 45,000 , the vast majority civilians. This cannot take into account bodies still under the rubble, which covers the landscape of the two-mile strip . Thousands are displaced and without food, orphaned, and struggling for healthcare as none of the hospitals in Gaza are working at full capacit...

This week we have seen the utter collapse of the Assad regime and the Baathist political ideology in Syria. This follows a year of crisis and turmoil in the Middle East and absolute uncertainty in the days ahead as power centers completely shift and foreign militaries, including the Turks, Israel, and the U.S. race to take advantage of the power vacuum and chaos that remains.  This is all happenin...

A week ago Syrian Sunni rebels under the banner of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham or HTS launched a surprise attack on the government forces of President Bashar al-Assad, capturing over the last week most of the strategic provinces of Aleppo and Idlib, which had been at the heart of the ISIS insurgency during the early years of the Syrian Civil War. The timing is auspicious : Assad’s key allies — Russia, Ir...

On Wednesday the US embassy in Kyiv issued a rare, urgent warning that Russia might launch a “a significant air attack.” The embassy was closed and employees were told to shelter in place. Officials did not provide any specific information about threats to the building, and air raids were sounding for most of the county due to incoming drone attacks from Russia. The warnings come just days after t...

It’s been an incredible roller coaster ride and it’s only been a week since the election, with Donald Trump winning both the popular and electoral vote in what he and his supporters are calling a mandate for their side. Where does this leave foreign policy and national security? After what was considered a “win” for realism and restraint last weekend, Trump announced that he would not be asking ub...

We are just days away from the presidential election, in fact we are entering the final weekend. Interestingly, Donald Trump appears to have seized on all of Kamala Harris’s weaknesses on foreign policy — particularly the hell she has been taking from her left flank over Gaza — to try and peel off voters in key swing states including Michigan and Wisconsin, which we know have big Muslim-American p...

We talk a lot about the military industrial complex here but a growing threat to our liberty is the disinformation/misinformation industrial complex, or what our next guest Jim Bovard and others call the Censorship Industrial Complex.  One could say this began shortly before the 2016 election when the Obama administration began investigating the Donald Trump campaign for links to the Russians. Whe...

The war in Gaza continues today with scores of Palestinians dead, mostly from airstrikes on shelters and schools and neighborhoods outside hospitals. The displaced have nowhere else to go. In the meantime, the Israeli military has expanded its bombing and ground campaign into Lebanon, with more than 1400 dead and a million displaced since mid-September.  A new generation of reporters and editors a...