PATRICK LAWRENCE: The US Moves on Iran’s Oil Market as an Expression of an Irrational Foreign Policy
Patrick Lawrence gauges the backfiring potential of Pompeo’s withdrawal on Thursday of U.S. sanction waivers from eight major importers. A Decisive Defeat in Long-Running Battle with Foreign Policy Minders Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s announcement last week that no importer…
Sharmine Narwani on the end of the Syrian war and the “post-imperial Middle East”
Middle East correspondent Narwani sees a new era emerging in Asia, while Trump, Pompeo and Bolton bluster In part one of my exchange with Sharmine Narwani, the Beirut-based correspondent dissected the just-ended Syrian conflict as one of the very few journalists…
Reporter Sharmine Narwani on the secret history of America’s defeat in Syria
After years covering the “main battlefield in World War III,” Narwani says everything you think you know is wrong When the war in Syria was recently declared decisively over, there were few correspondents or witnesses to turn to for a…
Journal Entry #46
1. Mueller’s Rorschach test. NORFOLK, CONN., APRIL 19—Jiminy Cricket. It is black, it is white. It tells all, it tells nothing. The president is off the hook, the president now dangles on it —and will for the rest of his…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Trump & the Bolton-Pompeo Axis
Patrick Lawrence eyes the U.S. president’s difficulties with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton as he tries to resume peace talks with Pyongyang. Moon Jae-in’s Oval Office meeting with President Donald Trump last Thursday marked an important…
Journal Entry #45
The complicit. NORFOLK, CONN., APRIL 12—The heart grew sick, the heart broke a little more, on seeing the pictures of Julian Assange as he was forcibly removed from the Ecuadoran embassy in London yesterday. Packed into a waiting police van,…
Journal Entry #44
Truth on trial. NORFOLK, CONN., APRIL 9—Many of us have been greatly distressed by recent reports that Julian Assange will shortly be turned out of the Ecuadoran embassy in London, his asylum privileges withdrawn. It is clear where this will…
VIDEO – CrossTalk: China Arrives in Europe
China has arrived in Europe in a very big way and not everyone in the West is welcoming this. Italy’s support of China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a game changer. The Washington consensus that has dominated the world for…
Journal Entry #43
The Hanoi summit, the Mueller report: Two home truths and a clarification. for L.D. and G.K.J. NORFOLK, CONN., APRIL 1—Readers write in with some regularity these days, and mail is always welcome, of course. Cú Chulainn has had a number…
China’s European Moment Has Arrived
The simplicities of the postwar order have just begun to pass into history, writes Patrick Lawrence. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Xi Jinping’s visits to Rome, Paris and Monaco last week. In bringing his much-remarked Belt and Road…
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