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…
The Unacknowledged Logic of North Korea’s Missile Tests
We may not like it, but nuclear weapons may be all that stands in the way of another US-conducted “regime change.” Given that North Korea flooded the airwaves and the press during our July 4 rituals—which grow more objectionably militarist…
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