One area, happily, where President-elect Donald Trump has left little room for concern, at least during the campaign, is missile defense.

This article about the international order and preserving the nation-state system first appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of Providence‘s print…

Amidst the post-debate spinning, little has been discussed about what Trump and Clinton didn’t say. “Freedom” was nowhere to be found in the debate transcript.

Alexander Hamilton argued in Federalist #68 that given “the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils,” the Constitution should erect “every practicable obstacle” to prevent such “intrigue and corruption.”

As Recep Tayyip Erdogan steers Turkey further away from liberal democracy and ever closer to authoritarianism, we’re reminded of just how often President Obama has picked the wrong partners and chosen the wrong direction on the world stage.

A policy of patient preparedness—bracing for the worst, getting through another day, another year, another term without another war—is how U.S. presidents have measured success in Korea for 63 years. It’s a low bar, to be sure. But given what Korean War II would look like, it’s a worthy goal.

In a rambling column otherwise focused on the November elections, Thomas Friedman revisited one of his favorite themes: his odd and unsettling affinity for autocracy.

In the shadow cast by 9/11, it was difficult to believe something could be worse than al-Qaeda 1.0. But with American nightclubs and office buildings awash in blood, with Europe under siege, with Christians and Yazidis targeted for extermination, with the Pandora’s Box of chemical warfare reopened, with the female populations of entire cities enslaved, here we are.

It was a day, in the words of President Franklin Roosevelt, when “the pride of our nation” began a battle…

In his remarks at Hiroshima, President Obama avoided delivering an outright apology for America’s use of atomic bombs to finally break the brutal war machine of Imperial Japan—a decision that won and ended a just war. Even so, the speech raises three unsettling issues.