How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers
Joel Whitney talks about his book Finks, which exposes the agency’s corruption of American culture during the Cold War. “The past is a foreign country,” L.P. Hartley famously wrote as he opened The Go–Between. There is a pretty tristesse in…
Journal Entry #21
Something for Memorial Day. NEW YORK, 29 MAY—This past week, in anticipation of a couple of weeks’ travel, I finished work on the transcript of an excellent interview I conducted early in the spring. Readers of my column will know…
Are China’s Hidden Liabilities Behind Moody’s Ratings Downgrade?
Concerns about China’s “massive debt burden” and slowing economy are causing new concerns after Moody’s Investor Services sounded a full-blown alarm this week downgrading China’s credit rating on sovereign debt from Aa3 to A1. Why would Moody’s cut China’s rating…
Trump the Diplomat? Will He Charm or Harm US Relations?
Whoever put together President Trump’s first foreign tour has a good grasp of the grand gesture. When he departs Friday, his main stops are Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the Vatican, making Trump the first U.S. leader to visit the seats…
Journal Entry #20
Tipping Over. NORFOLK, CONN., 17 MAY—To begin, a couple of quotations. No. 1: “We are seeing in the U.S. a developing schizophrenia. There is no other way I can explain the accusations against the acting [sitting] U.S. president that he…
How China Is Building the Post-Western World
Beijing’s Belt and Road project may be the largest single infrastructure program in human history. Not infrequently, I bang on in this space and elsewhere about “parity between West and non-West.” I consider achieving this the single most pressing necessity…
Trump Does Have Real Connections to Russia—and Here’s Why
When President Trump handed foreign policy over to his generals a few weeks ago, his plans for a new détente with Russia were dead in the water, and Secretary of State Tillerson was more or less out of the picture….
From Xi to Duterte: Why Trump Holds His Enemies Closer
President Trump is suddenly talking to a lot of the world’s “strongmen”—two in the past week—and proposing to talk to others. Should he be? In most cases, the answer is an emphatic “Yes,” and this seems to be Trump’s thinking,…
Letters From the May 22/29, 2017, Issue
Schlesinger and Navasky on McCarthyism… Pollitt, Navasky, Grandin, and Lawrence on ‘Russiagate’… By Our Readers, Victor Navasky, Patrick Lawrence, Greg Grandin and Katha Pollitt McCarthyism, Past and Present In Victor Navasky’s piece “McCarthyism & Trump” [April 24/May 1], the author quotes from a New York Post…
The Military Now Runs US Foreign Policy
And as Trump’s recent turnabout shows, the establishment will brook no dissent from the reigning orthodoxy. You would expect, amid all the tiresome comment written and broadcast on Donald Trump’s “first 100 days,” something worth thinking about might have appeared…
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