Trump in Beijing—Devoid of a Strategy, While Xi Deploys China’s
Next to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, and its alliance with Moscow, Washington’s preference for perpetual conflict looks pitifully bankrupt. A tour of the Forbidden City, dinner in the Great Hall of the People, a review of the People’s Liberation…
Trump Goes to Asia—but the Pentagon Gets There First
Mattis confirms policy with Manila, Tokyo, and Seoul before the president’s first trip across the Pacific. At the end of this week our president is to set off on an 11–day sweep through Asia—five nations plus two regional forums, one…
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…
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…
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…
On Writers, the Media, and the Corruptions of Power
Joel Whitney, whose book Finks is about the CIA’s subversion of US culture, talks about the scars left by the Cold War. In Part 1 of my exchange with Joel Whitney, conducted shortly after OR Books published Finks: How the CIA Tricked the…
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…
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…
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