Trump Talks to Putin, and Suddenly Ukraine’s in Play
Fighting erupted in Ukraine after many months of uneasy but consistent calm after Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the U.S. and Russian presidents, finally spoke for the first time last weekend by telephone. Instantly, the Trump White House is faced…
How Romney or Giuliani Would Shape Trump’s Russia Policy
President-elect Trump’s behaving like a 70-year-old Hamlet these days: Will he or won’t he name Mitt Romney his Secretary of State? Or will it be Rudy Giuliani, David Petraeus, Bob Corker or an “outsider.” This is big and Trump must…
John Kerry’s last hurrah: With the Syrian cease-fire, the secretary of state takes a parting swipe at Russophobia
The cease-fire ends his successful skirmish with the Pentagon, but the war will grind on long after Kerry is gone Secretary of State John Kerry now gives us another “cessation of hostilities” agreement — a not-quite-cease-fire — as signed with…
War in the media age: Hysteria over Trump’s supposed Russian ties made headlines, but the “story” is remarkably flimsy
A case study in how a co-opted press manufactures foreign policy consent From one week to the next, I note with mounting anxiety the media’s habit of using innuendo, loaded suggestion, assemblages of proximate facts, implication short of assertion and omission…
Bashing Trump Is Easy. Seeing His Foreign Policy Is Smart Takes Guts
Is Donald Trump “dangerous,” as 50 G.O.P. national security “experts” asserted in an open letter—the second this year—published last week? Would he be “the most reckless president in American history,” as they also warned? Jeffrey Goldberg calls Trump “a de…
Trump Is Wrong About Russia, but He Does Get One Thing Right
We may never know who hacked 20,000 Democratic National Committee email messages, or why they were made public. But we know a lot more now about where our two presidential candidates stand on Russia. No matter whether Hillary Clinton or…
The real story about Syria and Libya: Behind a new agreement with Moscow, and the insidious way the New York Times protects Hillary
A new accord with Moscow on Syria clears up little. And a new Times series on Clinton and Libya has a messy agenda Hardly does the Syria accord announced jointly in Washington and Moscow last week clarify the swamp of…
How the US and Russia Can Make the Syria Ceasefire Deal Last
We have a serious “cessation of hostilities” in Syria, finally, and it’s the best chance for peace since protests became violent four years ago. But there was no sliver of daylight between the joint announcement of the U.S.-Russian agreement last…
This is how we spooked Putin: What the New York Times won’t tell you about the American adventure in Ukraine
The failure of Washington’s most adventurous power assertion in post-Cold War period can no longer be papered over All of a sudden, straight out of nowhere, Ukraine creeps back into the news. There is renewed fighting in the rebellious eastern…
A New World War? Russia and the US Look for a Way to Cool Down Syria
Two things emerged from the Munich security conference last week, which seem to make little sense when considered side by side. One, the major powers agreed to a “cessation of hostilities” in Syria. Skeptics think this will amount to little…
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