Why 2015 Will Make or Break a Spate of Global Alliances
U.S., Russia, Iran, China, Europe all face loyalty tests Call it the “Year of Tenuous Ties” as new alliances take shape Obama has to rethink his approach to both Russia and China Last January this column nominated 2014 as “the…
“Have we forgotten how beautiful it is to be on fire for justice?”
No matter the country, our foreign policy seems to make the same mistake over and over. What’s behind this pattern? “Novelists write the secret histories of nations.” I am not sure who made this bull’s eye remark. But I cite…
Lies the media repeats about Iraq: Phony patriotism, fake Syrian “moderates” and the very real end of empire
We have made a shocking mess in the Middle East. This new adventure sets America up for incredible decline In history there are the Punic Wars and the Opium Wars, each a turning point, and now we must talk of…
Bomb-crazy, “do something” neocons must be stopped — or Iraq will be Obama’s Vietnam
We have done enough harm. We’re not able to do good. We must simply admit the enormity of our mistake — and change It is too soon to quote Reagan, much as one always longs to do so, and exclaim,…
George W. Bush’s horrific, deadly blunder: Would Saddam Hussein be better than Iraq’s new hell?
Eleven years, and so much death, misery and destruction later, Iraq’s best outcome looks like the one Bush upended Foreign policy, at least the American kind, is like a stone thrown into a pond: The ripples outward go on and…
American exceptionalism and American innocence: The misleading history and messages of the 9/11 Memorial Museum
The 9/11 Memorial gets grief profoundly. But the museum cynically exploits tragedy, confuses history with ideology After a dozen years of thinking, planning, disputing, designing, building and — we cannot leave this out — patriotic hyperventilating, we have a museum…
Japan’s Pivot Away from the West Leads Back to China
Japan-watchers have asked since the “bubble” of the late-1980s, “What are the Japanese going to do?” Now Shinzo Abe, the bluntly nationalist prime minister, is making this clear, prompting a new question: “How will Americans and Japan’s neighbors handle what…
“Literally pointless”: Charles Krauthammer and disastrously wrong neocons misread Obama, again
Neocons blast West Point speech, miss the obvious: Obama’s foreign policy problem is stagnantly thinking like them President Obama has just advised us that the front edge of our country’s foreign policy has shifted — shifted again, that is to…
Cold War By Other Means
Ukraine: the Crisis in Context It is never easy to see the present as history: Being inside events, being the stuff of which events are made, makes distance and the perspective that comes of it difficult. It is not a…
The Fight to Win the Confidence of the Continent
Elections to the European parliament ended Sunday with far less commotion than those held in Ukraine the same day. In Ukraine, the polls were no more than politics as war by other means, while the EU just registered a seismometer’s…
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