Section: The Atlantic (USA)
Trials Are for Evidence
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is in the midst of discussions about the shape and scope of the forthcoming impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. His most recent public offer is to adopt the same rules for Trump’s impeachment as those used in President Bill Clinton’s. He says he has the votes to impose that process on...
The Senate Republicans Who Could Still Turn Against Trump
The great Senate anti-climax will soon be upon us, if you haven’t heard—an impeachment trial that will acquit President Donald Trump just as predictably as the Democratic-led House voted to charge him last month.It’s an outcome so widely assumed that, given Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s delay in formally sending articles of impeachment...
Putin’s Big Lie
In the opening scene of the most famous Polish movie of the past two decades, a crowd of anxious, desperate people—on foot, riding bikes, leading horses, carrying bundles—walks onto a bridge. To their immense surprise, they see another group of anxious, desperate people heading toward them, walking from the opposite direction. “People, what are...
Trump Wants America to Trust Him on Iran
More so than any president in the modern era, Donald Trump has made his administration a one-man spectacle. He hires and fires officials on impulse, demonstrating at every turn that the people under him are disposable and he’s the only figure who counts. Should the conflict with Iran escalate into a hot war, Trump will be the one who needs...
Happy New Year From the President of the United States
Perhaps you, like me, are slowly returning to following the news closely after a break from your standard media diet over the holidays. That meant, among other things, mostly tuning out the president’s social-media feed. Perhaps you heard about the lowlights, such as when Donald Trump retweeted a message naming the presumptive...
The 2010s Were a Foreign-Policy Disaster
Every four years, after the U.S. presidential election, the National Intelligence Council publishes a report looking ahead to the next two decades in global affairs. We do not have a report to mark the beginning of the 2010s, but the council’s 2012 report, “Alternative Worlds,” described two scenarios—the best plausible case and the worst...
What U.S. Intelligence Thought 2020 Would Look Like
In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook. George W. Bush was reelected president of the United States. And American intelligence analysts consulted with hundreds of experts across five continents to try to predict what the world would look like in 2020.The result, a 119-page report by the National Intelligence Council titled “Mapping the Global...
How Small European Allies See Trump
During my three and a half decades as a career American diplomat, I served as ambassador to Russia and Jordan. Every year, I was responsible for thousands of cables back to the State Department and other readers in the U.S. government, reporting on the efforts of diplomats in our embassy to promote American interests and on developments in the...
The Legal Questions Still Unanswered by Trump’s Impeachment
The House of Representatives has now approved two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. One relates to Trump’s alleged abuse of power, focusing on his solicitation of a bribe from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for his own political gain; the other charges him with obstructing the House’s investigation of the...
A Gangster in the White House
Amid a two-day binge of post-Christmas rage-tweeting, President Trump retweeted the name of the CIA employee widely presumed to be the whistleblower in the Ukraine scandal. On Thursday night, December 26, Trump retweeted his campaign account, which had tweeted a link to a Washington Examiner article that printed the name in the headline. Then, in...
