First Greece, Now Spain: Is Europe in for a Political Earthquake?
It took a mere six days for the election victory of the anti-austerity Syriza party in Greece to start ricocheting around Europe like a stray bullet in a concrete bunker. And already the fight between northern Europe’s austerians and their…
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…
Recent Comments