In the 2020 election, President Donald Trump’s supporters looked beyond manifest character flaws to domestic and foreign policy results but opponents couldn’t overlook his character to assess any policy achievements. Joe Biden became president as much because Americans voted against Trump as for Biden The buyers’ remorse evident in opinion polls suggests that perhaps voters should have been careful what they wished for.

While in Iranian territorial waters, USS Vincennes fired two surface-to-air missiles to bring down the Iranian plane with the loss of all 290 on board on 3 July 1988. The captain and crew of the Vincennes were later awarded medals. Vice President George H W Bush insisted he would ‘never apologise for the United States – I don’t care what the facts are’.

Resorting to what President Barack Obama called the Washington Playbook of militarised response to a foreign policy crisis, Arta Moeini writes, the ruling elites in the West collude with the mainstream media in a Manichean framing that ‘redirects a natural reaction of sympathy felt by all into a moral outrage that insists on certain retaliation’. This doesn’t just enable, it ennobles the American war machine. For this to work, though, one’s own culpability in creating the crisis in the first place must be forcefully rejected.

Three overarching goals have informed the Asia Pacific Leadership Network's (APLN) approach to nuclear threats since its inception a decade ago: the imperative to hold firm against proliferation, the matching importance of credible steps toward disarmament, and defusing geopolitical tensions that heighten nuclear risks. All three are at play in Ukraine.

On 25 February, the United Nations Security Council voted on a draft resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and calling on it to stop the attack and withdraw its troops. Sponsored jointly by the US and Albania, the resolution received the affirmative vote of 11 of the council’s 15 members. But it was defeated by the solitary negative vote of Russia (by chance the council president for February) as a veto-wielding permanent member. The three countries to abstain were China, India and the United Arab Emirates.

There are two competing narratives about Russia’s push into Ukraine. One holds that President Vladimir Putin has adopted Hitler’s playbook over Sudetenland and failing to check his aggression will fall into the trap of the appeasement at Munich in 1938. The alternative holds that Putin is executing the NATO playbook in Kosovo in 1999.