Outside the Beltway

There’s not a whole lot the United States can do to respond effectively and proportionally to North Korea’s hacking attack against Sony.

Talk about your second- and third-order effects.

For a year that started out with regaining long-lost territory in Ukraine, 2014 is not ending so well for Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Sony is warning the press not to publish material leaked by hackers, but it doesn’t have much of a legal leg to stand on.

Michael Brown’s stepfather made incendiary comments in the wake of the Grand Jury announcement, but they do not amount to a crime.

Russia’s own government is projecting that its economy will slip into recession next year. How that will impact Putin’s current belligerence remains to be seen.

A new poll finds that a majority of Germans support sanctions against Russia, even if those sanctions end up hurting the German economy.

The CIA has always separated its core spying and analysis functions; that may soon change.

Vladimir Putin’s latest actions seems to have exhausted Germany’s patience.

Vladimir Putin’s reception at the G-20 Summit in Australia has been less than warm thanks to recent events in Ukraine.

The Ukraine crisis, which never really went away, is back,

Quietly, oil prices have been falling for months now. That’s potentially a very big deal.

A disappointing setback.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul continues to challenge Republican orthodoxy on foreign policy, and that’s a good thing.

Yesterday’s apparent terrorist shooting in Ottawa reveals again a phenomenon that seems difficult if not impossible to stop in advance.

Germany’s new defense minister has promised a more robust role but lacks the ability to back her words with action.

It has nothing to do with winning, but it does have a lot to do with the foreign policy debate inside the Republican Party.

One of these ballots is legit. The others, not so much.

It’s all over but the voting in Scotland.

After keeping his distance from them for three years, President Obama is placing much misplaced hope in the “moderate” Syrian rebels,

A major escalation.

The rebels in eastern Ukraine continue to suffer setbacks, and Russia is massing troops on the border again.

Does Hillary Clinton remember that she was Secretary of State for four years?

End game? Or the potential spark of a wider war?

A glimmer of hope in Gaza is quickly snuffed out.

The U.S. and Europe have announced a new round of sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine crisis, but it’s not clear that the Russians will be motivated to change course.

What the West does in response to Russia’s actions in Ukraine is largely up to Europe, not the United States.

No surprises so far.

History matters.

Things are getting serious in eastern Ukraine.

If you live in Russia, you’re getting a different version of the story of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

Vladimir Putin has become immensely popular in Russia again, and its not hard to figure out why.

Yesterday’s events are likely to be a game changer, but how the game plays out depends largely on how Europe reacts.

Basically, the answer is that nobody really thought there was much of a risk that a plane could be shot down.

Someone took down a Boeing 777 over Ukraine today.