Daniel DePetris

A primetime address in the Oval Office is the pinnace of presidential speechifying. Ronald Reagan used the room in 1986 to console the nation after the Challenger blew up on live television. George W. Bush declared the global war on terrorism there. Donald Trump leveraged the weight of the Resolute Desk as he talked to Americans about a deadly but mysterious virus called Covid-19 for the first time.   Tonight, it was Joe Biden’s turn. The topics, the wars in Ukraine and Israel, couldn’t be more different with respect to the players, the stakes or the circumstances leading up to them. Even so, Biden tried to convince the American people on the idea that the two wars were one and the same.

Responding to a voter during a campaign stop this week, Florida governor and 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis endorsed a once fringe idea that is becoming increasingly mainstream in Republican policy circles: that the United States has the right, indeed obligation, to use military force in Mexico to protect the American people from drug cartels. And yes, that includes the use of US drones, a revolutionary military technology the US military and CIA have deployed repeatedly to target terrorists in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Somalia (among others).  "We will absolutely reserve the right if they’re invading our country and killing our people,” DeSantis told the voter.

US President Joe Biden flew into Vilnius, Lithuania early on Tuesday with a big task ahead of him: to keep Nato as united as possible at a time when the alliance is fractured on a bunch of major issues. Foremost among them is when and how to provide Ukraine a path toward eventual membership. In public, the two-day session will be full of group photos of smiling heads of state and warm words about the alliance’s resolve in the face of Russian aggression. But behind closed doors, where the actual business is done, difficult conversations will certainly be had.

French President Emmanuel Macron tends to rock the boat whenever he opens his mouth, saying hard truths that many of his European colleagues, both at the state level and in the European Union’s gargantuan bureaucracy, would rather be left unsaid. Examples are legion: his insistence in 2019 that Nato was going ‘brain-dead’; his proclamation in June 2022 that Russia shouldn’t be humiliated if Europe wants to preserve working relations with Moscow after the war ends; or his comments last April urging Europe to grow a backbone and refrain from blindly following the United States into a confrontation with China over Taiwan.   Should the thirst for justice override the possibility, however faint, of peace?

On March 29, more than twenty years after the United States commenced Operation Shock and Awe in Baghdad, the Senate made history by repealing the military force authorization that green-lit the operation. The bill, which also aims to kill a previous 1991 authorization for the use of military force, or AUMF, against Iraq during the Gulf War, now heads to the House of Representatives where it faces an uncertain future.  On the face of it, repealing both measures would seem like an ordinary event. Saddam Hussein, after all, has been dead for over sixteen years, hanged by an Iraqi court for a litany of crimes against his own people. His regime dissolved within three weeks of the 2003 invasion.

This week we heard a lot about AUKUS, a trilateral initiative between the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia that will revamp the Australian naval fleet with nuclear-powered submarines over the next two decades. President Biden, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made a show of it in sunny San Diego on March 13, where they officially inaugurated the defense agreement and gave speeches about defending sea lanes and the rules-based international order in the Indo-Pacific. But there was another story here: the Pentagon released a torrent of charts and bureaucratic documents on what it would like to see in the coming year’s defense budget.

Jimmy Carter is commonly depicted as one of America’s worst presidents. His four-year tenure is said to be a mishmash of screw-ups, from high energy prices and even higher inflation to low economic growth and a very public, very embarrassing hostage rescue attempt in Iran. His signature achievement, the 1978 Camp David Accords, which codified peace and normalized diplomatic relations between Egypt and Israel, is treated as a small stretch of fresh pavement in an otherwise potholed road. Fair or not, that’s the perception.