By David Santoro and Akhil Ramesh

David Santoro (david@pacforum.org) is President and CEO of the Pacific Forum. Follow him on Twitter @DavidSantoro1
Akhil Ramesh (akhil@pacforum.org) is Senior Resident Fellow at Pacific Forum.

The relationship with India is “the most important for the United States in the 21st century,” said Kurt Campbell, the Biden administration’s National Security Council Coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, last month. President Biden made similar comments earlier in 2022, and the recently published US strategic reviews also talk about the importance of India. The US National Security Strategy, for instance, states that, “As India is the world’s largest democracy and a Major Defense Partner, the United States and India will work together, bilaterally and multilaterally, to support our shared vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
 
Numerous reasons explain this enthusiasm for US-India rapprochement. Even though differences between the two countries are many (notably development level), similarities also abound. Both are big countries with a large and diverse population, both are democracies and both have vibrant civil societies and incredibly innovative communities, especially in technology.
  Continue reading Taking the US-India relationship to the next level →

by James M. Lindsay President Joe Biden delivers his first State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in March 2022. Chip Somodevilla/REUTERS

Divided government is back! After two years of Democratic control of the presidency and both houses of Congress—just barely in the case of the Senate—the 118th Congress that opened yesterday puts Republicans in charge of the U.S. House of Representatives. A single party has controlled the White House and Congress only three times in the last three decades.

So what will divided government mean for U.S. foreign policy? Here are three things to watch. Continue reading The Consequences of Divided Government for U.S. Foreign Policy →

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is still reverberating around the world—and setting the stage for more large-scale violence to come.

JANUARY 1, 2023, 7:00 AM Foreign Policy

By Comfort Ero, the president and CEO of the International Crisis Group, and Richard Atwood, executive vice president of the International Crisis Group.

Will he, or won’t he? This time last year, that was the question. Russian President Vladimir Putin had massed almost two hundred thousand troops on Ukraine’s borders. U.S. intelligence warned that Russia was preparing for all-out war. All the signs pointed to an assault, bar one: It seemed unthinkable.

True, Russia had attacked Ukraine in 2014, and in the spring of 2021 had staged a dress rehearsal for an invasion, building up forces on the frontier before sending them home. Putin seemed ever angrier at Kyiv’s refusal to bow to his will. He openly derided Ukrainian national identity and sovereignty. Still, it was shocking, when Russian forces did roll in, that a nuclear-armed power in 2022 would seek to conquer a neighbor in an act of unprovoked aggression.