Top Pentagon and State Department officials on Tuesday said the U.S. won't be leaving Syria anytime soon, even as President Trump indicated the same day that he wants to pull U.S. troops from the war-torn country.

The top commander of U.S. forces in Syria made the case Tuesday for American troops to remain in the country at the same time President Donald Trump doubled down on his argument for pulling them out.

President Trump said Tuesday that the end is in sight for the U.S. military mission in Syria, yet military leaders have said the U.S. should remain until the Islamic State is wiped out. American reinforcements have arrived in Manbij in recent days, a sign that they will remain a counterweight in the conflict. John Yang talks to former USAID official Mona Yacoubian and Amberin Zaman of Al Monitor.

Given the current political upheaval in the country, and with general elections just around the corner, the current state of the recently set-up local governments are not getting any attention. Yet, an effective local government system, however, remains vital for deepening the culture and institutions of democracy within our country.

After five decades of autocratic military rule, Burma (also known as Myanmar) has initiated a critical transformation to representative democracy. But various regional and national tensions threaten the already tenuous transition; the crisis in Rakhine State, on-going clashes between...

Migration crises in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa reconfigured global politics. So why – as the millionth South Sudanese took refuge in Uganda earlier this year, and with the total number of South Sudanese refugee and asylum seekers now more than two million – is there no comparable shift in the political posture of East African states?

The U.S. military is racing to demonstrate it is making progress in Afghanistan during a critical period that will test President Trump’s strategy and, potentially, political support for the war. Military leaders say the arrival of new troops and aircraft, along with a renewed mission to advise local operations more...

The column was supposed to draw attention to a crisis in a country that Americans don't often hear about in the media: the Central African Republic. Instead, it drew fury on social media this week for its portrayal of CAR and the sources interviewed. Sarah Knuckey, a professor at Columbia University's law school and the co-director of the university's Human Rights Institute, called it "shallow" and "reckless" in its reporting.