Ashish Kumar Sen

Two US lawmakers—one serving and another incoming—listed their top national security concerns at the Atlantic Council’s Annual Forum in Washington on December 14.

The differences between Donald J. Trump and Jim Mattis were on display in their statements on December 20. While Trump wrote in a tweet that his defense secretary was “retiring” at the end of February; Mattis made clear he was resigning over policy differences with the president.

The United States needs to take a hard look at its national security policies and focus its attention on investing in defensive, as well as offensive, measures to deal with cyber threats, US Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) said at the Atlantic Council’s Annual Forum in Washington on December 14.

Despite US President Donald J. Trump’s threat to pull the United States out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it will be much harder to kill NAFTA if the US Congress does not approve a revised trade deal, said Jesús Seade, who served as then Mexican President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s chief NAFTA negotiator in recently concluded, and often contentious, negotiations.

US President Donald J. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping on December 1 agreed to a truce in their trade war in order to allow time for negotiations. In what is a significant de-escalation of a conflict that has been marked by tit-for-tat tariffs, Trump and Xi put on hold threatened tariff increases for ninety days.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador has his work cut out. The populist leader, who is more popularly known as AMLO, will be sworn in as the president of Mexico on December 1. This may be good news for the US-Mexico relationship.

Hours after the Kremlin confirmed a meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald J. Trump on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires on December 1, the US president cancelled the appointment with his Russian counterpart citing the continued detention of Ukrainian naval vessels and their crew by Russia.