The accession of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency brings us face-to-face with a question that many have tried to avoid since 1945: Should anyone have the right to plunge the world into a nuclear holocaust? Trump, of course, is an unusually angry, vindictive, and mentally unstable American president. Therefore, given the fact that, acting …
Continue reading “Why Should Trump – or Anyone – Be Able To Launch a Nuclear War?”
Originally posted at TomDispatch. If you had asked Americans about Afghanistan before 1979, it’s a reasonable bet that most of us wouldn’t have known much about that country or even been able to locate it on a map. Perhaps only to the “freaks” of that era, in search of a superb hashish high, would its …
Continue reading “In Afghanistan, America’s Biggest Foe Is Self-Deception”
I once had an online conversation with a journalist whose name you would instantly recognize that started with a question for me: “Why Russia?” Why, this person wanted to know, are we witnessing a hate campaign aimed at Moscow, decades after the implosion of international communism and the breakup of the USSR? I tried to …
Continue reading “Enemy of the Year: Why Russia?”
2,748 people were killed and 1,224 were wounded in Iraq during February.
Four weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote that “nothing he has done since the inauguration allays fears that he is in effect a Putin puppet.” The liberal pundit concluded with a matter-of-fact reference to “the Trump-Putin axis.” Such lines of attack have become routine, citing and stoking fears that …
Continue reading “The Risk of Baiting Trump on Russia”
It can be a challenge to follow the pronouncements of President Trump, as he often seems to change his position on any number of items from week to week, or from day to day, or even from minute to minute. Consider his speech last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). It was reported …
Continue reading “On Military and Spending, It’s Trump Versus Trump”
The founding fathers of the Munich Security Conference, said John McCain, would be "be alarmed by the turning away from universal values and toward old ties of blood, and race, and sectarianism." McCain was followed by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov who called for a "post-West world order." Russia has "immense potential" for that said Lavrov, …
Continue reading “Lavrov vs. McCain: Is Russia an Enemy?”
Authorities believe then number of civilians who have fled western Mosul has already reached 10,000 peopel.
Opponents of the Trump administration have generally accepted as fact the common theme across mainstream media that aides to Donald Trump were involved in some kind of illicit communications with the Russian government that has compromised the independence of the administration from Russian influence. But close analysis of the entire series of leaks reveals something …
Continue reading “How ‘New Cold Warriors’ Cornered Trump”
Donald Trump’s appointments have provoked a uniform level of hysteria from his “progressive” opponents – “the Resistance” routinely goes to Defcon 1 in response to the President’s every tweet. Yet the virulence of their denunciations has an especially sharp edge to them when it comes to the foreign policy realm. Mike Flynn was portrayed as …
Continue reading “Michael Anton and the Limits of Trumpism” 
