The economic normalization deal that President Donald Trump reached September 4 with President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia and Prime Minister Avdullah Hoti of Kosovo was a diplomatic masterstroke. As Ambassador Richard Grenell, special envoy for the Serbia-Kosovo dialogue, explained last week, the deal was born of Trump’s recognition that the longstanding diplomatic approach to the decades-long conflict between the two…

Over the past several weeks, Israelis have been riveted by a new crime drama called “Meniac” or “Rat” whose central character is an investigator in Police Investigations Division of the Justice Ministry, charged with investigating crooked cops. The plot surrounds the main character’s shattering discovery of deeply rooted corruption at all levels of the police and state prosecution. If the…

Between his meetings in Jerusalem on Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recorded a short address for the Republican National Convention in which he discussed many of the Trump administration’s foreign policy accomplished. By the time his remarks were broadcast in the U.S. Tuesday night, Pompeo had already landed in Khartoum, Sudan, the second stop on his week-long shuttle…

Many eulogies of Brent Scowcroft, president George H.W. Bush’s national security advisor who died on August 6, have referred to him as a foreign policy realist. Whereas the question of his putative realism boils down to how you define the term, it is very clear that Scowcroft was an institutionalist. His institutionalism passed away at the UN Security Council last…

Since Israel was established, the Palestinian veto doomed all efforts to forge peace between the Arab world and the Jewish state. The Palestinian veto rests on a toxic proposition that Israel’s right to exist is contingent on its satisfaction of Palestinian claims against it. So long as the Palestinians say they are unappeased, Israel cannot expect the Arab world to…

On Tuesday, two notable events occurred in the Democratic Party. Joe Biden announced he selected California Senator Kamala Harris to serve as his running mate in November; and Rep. Ilhan Omar won her primary, all-but guaranteeing her return to Congress for a second term. On the face of things, Harris’s selection seems like the more significant of the two events.…

Two days after the port of Beirut was destroyed last Tuesday, the first of three U.S. military C-130 cargo planes arrived in the devastated city. U.S. relief from the three shipments is valued at $17 million. U.S. commander of Central Command (Centcom), Marine General Frank McKenzie, called the chief of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) Gen. Joseph Aoun and expressed “U.S. willingness…

Over the past several years, public discourse in the United States has seen a lot of new lows. It saw another one this month when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi referred to federal officers in Portland, Oregon as “stormtroopers,” that is, Nazi Brownshirts. In a tweet on July 18 and in subsequent remarks, Pelosi accused the federal forces deployed to Portland…

Since the 1990s, the dominant view in Israel’s national security community has been that Israel’s top priority in relation to the Palestinians is to maintain the stability of their leadership. This is the case in relation to both the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria and the Hamas regime in Gaza. The rationale behind this view is that despite…