The Week That Was

Mallory Stewart—in anticipation of President Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday—identified three significant risks to international law and security that the Trump team should keep in mind: the perception that the meeting is a reward to Russia, the potential to negotiate away essential defensive capabilities for Ukraine and Europe, and the illusion that one meeting can solve the massive security challenge Russia poses.  

Benjamin Wittes argued that the Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska is dishonorable because Trump is needlessly elevating Putin into the realm of the respectable, and is also very likely to fail because Putin is reluctant to stop fighting and only Ukrainian, not American, acceptance of peace terms can end the war.

Shibley Telhami analyzed a University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll that found that American support for Ukraine is at its highest since early 2023, and suggested that as President Trump seeks a deal with Putin, embracing Moscow would put him at odds with Western Allies and the American public.

Anastasiia Lapatina sat down with Anastasia Radina to discuss the Ukrainian government’s attack on anti-corruption agencies' independence.

Mary Ford shared the text of the District of Columbia’s federal lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's attempts to seize control of the Metropolitan Police Department.

Wittes agreed with President Trump’s claim that there is a crime issue in D.C., but contended that the substance of the District’s crime issue is unrelated to the city’s crime rate, and instead has everything to do with President Trump’s flagrant attacks on the rule of law.

Chris Mirasola—amid President Trump’s deployment of 800 D.C. National Guard personnel to take over the capital's policing—explained that the president’s use of these forces in the District relies on outdated and broadly interpreted statutory law, and erodes legal protections against military incursion into domestic affairs. 

Anna Bower chronicled the three day bench trial in Newsom v. Trump—California’s lawsuit against the Trump administration over its federalization and deployment of the California National Guard in response to protests in Los Angeles.

On August 15 at 4 pm ET, Wittes sat down with Bower, Mirasola, Roger Parloff to discuss President Trump deploying the D.C. National Guard, the bench trial in Newsom v. Trump, foreign aid litigation updates, and more.

Cerin Lindgrensavage and William Ford evaluated Director of Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought’s claims that the executive has sweeping authority to “pocket rescind” funds—that is, cut federal funding without receiving congressional approval. Lindgrensavage and Ford analyzed how Congress fought back against pocket rescissions during the Ford and Carter administrations and emphasized that Congress should look to precedent to stop Vought’s abuses and protect its power of the purse.

Andrew Kenealy argued that legislators can use three informal strategies to amplify congressional influence over public opinion and in turn, shape U.S. foreign policy matters—issue joint statements; message on policy, not the president; and proactive position-taking.

Wittes sat down with Bower, Parloff, and Peter Harrell to take stock of the legal challenge to President Trump’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariffs, the D.C. Circuit’s decisions to vacate Judge James Boasberg’s probable cause of contempt by the Trump administration, the ongoing legal battle in Texas over the Democratic lawmakers who fled the state to prevent Republican efforts to redistrict it, and more.

Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat reviewed Tamar Mitts’s book entitled, “Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism,” and argued that Mitts thoroughly diagnoses the problem, but methodological oversimplifications—namely her measure of platforms’ moderation thresholds—render her work an important, but not authoritative, source on extremist platform migration. 

Adam Isles argued that software buyers would benefit from a “window sticker,” a document disclosing an item’s overall security performance, when purchasing software products. Isles proposed the design of a sticker with performance information structured around three broad categories—security processes, security performance, and impactful security features— to drive software security reforms.

On Scaling Laws, Anat Lior joined Kevin Frazier to take stock of how agency law can be used to address issues of AI liability, why it’s important to ensure that someone is held accountable when AI systems cause harm, and more.

Also on Scaling Laws, Dean Ball joined Frazier and Alan Rozenshtein to discuss the White House’s AI Action Plan, the challenges of implementing federal AI policy, the right’s evolving attitudes toward AI, and more.

Jakub Kraus evaluated the Group of Sevens’s recent Statement on AI for Prosperity and the impact of the second Trump administration on liberal democracies’ artificial intelligence (AI) policies. Kraus cautioned that deemphasizing AI safety is a gamble that could make multilateral cooperation on the matter more difficult in the future.

Pavlina Pavlova and Christopher Painter acknowledged that consensus agreements such as the “Global Mechanism”—a United Nations (UN) mandate to advance global cyber norms—come at a price, and warned that the UN risks deadlock and difficulty implementing the agreement if it continues to accommodate conflicting views rather than find a reasonable compromise between opposing camps.

In the latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren discussed the hack of the federal judiciary’s electronic case filing system, Microsoft Azure’s data privacy scandal, how much espionage disruption has cost Australia, and more.

Chile Eboe-Osuji urged the International Law Commission to remain faithful to its mandate and reject personal immunity for international crimes tried in national courts.

Kaitlyn Cieply argued that using the U.S. military to oversee the detention of “high priority” criminal migrants at Guantanamo Bay would violate the Posse Comitatus Act (PCA). Cieply emphasized that even if Guantanamo is considered extraterritorial, PCA violations at the detention camp would still be actionable; and presented three possible ways to remedy these violations.

Tyler McBrien sat down with Seth Harp to discuss Harp’s new book entitled, “The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces,” Harp’s time reporting on the murder of two special forces operators at Fort Bragg, how widespread PTSD and addiction are across elite U.S. military organizations in the wake of the 9/11 wars, and more.

Matt Gluck sat down with Stephen Brooks and Ben Vagle to discuss Brooks and Vagle’s new book entitled, “Command of Commerce: America’s Enduring Economic Power Advantage Over China,” the essence of the gap in economic power between the two countries, the importance of U.S. alliances in maintaining economic leverage over China, and more.

Wittes, Daniel Byman, and Kate Klonick joined Scott Anderson to take stock of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s end-goal for Gaza, the details of the Trump administration’s deal with chip manufacturers NVIDIA and AMD, President Trump’s secret order potentially authorizing the use of military force against cartels that have been designated as terrorist organizations, and more.

And in the latest installment of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, KaiChieh KJ Hsu detailed the covert tactics—including espionage and bribery—that Beijing is using to undermine Taiwanese democracy, and proposed that Taipei both strengthen its legal defense doctrine and use elements of U.S. law as a model to protect against Chinese lawfare and democratic erosion.

And that was the week that was.