The Catalan crisis: Is the contemporary nation-state in jeopardy?
Spain’s clumsy government has made a difficult situation worse. That doesn’t mean the nation should be dismembered We reach a grim moment in the crisis between Catalonia and the Spanish state. And it has come hard and fast since late…
Dumb and dumber: Trump’s foreign policy repeats decades of American mistakes
Trump’s foreign policy is entirely incoherent. But it’s just a stupider continuation of everything since 1945 Topic of the week seems to be Donald Trump’s foreign policy. This is about right. Annual reviews of a president’s record managing America’s conduct…
Journal Entry #25
NORFOLK, CONN., October 22—This is a Journal entry with a special purpose. As I publish it I am taking a new turn, and it seems to me right to explain to readers—of this Journal, of my columns—what I mean and…
Donald Trump Has Had a Lot of Help in Sabotaging the Iran Deal
Washington is just not equipped to negotiate its way into the 21st century. In a midday speech on Friday, President Trump fulfilled another of his campaign promises—the kind one wishes he would fail to keep. As widely reported over the…
Making history safe again: What Ken Burns gets wrong about Vietnam
Historian Christian Appy: Vietnam was not a “tragic misunderstanding” but a campaign of “imperial aggression” Three questions came to mind when news arrived that “The Vietnam War,” the latest documentary film from Ken Burns (co-directed with Lynn Novick), would air…
Cold War Illusions: Losing Friends
Just before the November 2016 elections, I was invited to share lunch at a place called Packer’s Corner, a tiny hamlet in southeastern Vermont. I was instantly intrigued. If “faded glory” fairly describes the place now, Packer’s Corner et ses…
An Interview With Stephen Kinzer, Part 2
The award-winning foreign correspondent and author of The True Flagspeaks about the state of US foreign policy and the media. Stephen Kinzer’s The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of the American Empire, published earlier this year, drew me…
An Interview With Stephen Kinzer
The award-winning foreign correspondent and author of The True Flag speaks on the 120-year history of American intervention in the world. When I started reading The True Flag, Stephen Kinzer’s latest book, I got only a few pages in before thinking, “I’ve read him…
A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack
Former NSA experts say it wasn’t a hack at all, but a leak—an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. It is now a year since the Democratic National Committee’s mail system was compromised—a year since events in…
Journal Entry #24
Honorable actions. NORFOLK, CONN., 12 JULY—When I am made aware of people and the things they do such as the following, there is always some humiliation in it. I will be brief. I ought to have posted this days ago…
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