Decoding Biden’s UN Speech

On September 21, President Biden addressed the United Nations General Assembly for the first time. His speech was a confusing combination of boasts followed by lines that refuted those boasts. Here is an attempt to decode some of the biggest confusions. We Are Not...

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Biden Shelves Diplomacy To Confront Russia and China

On September 8, 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that the US was getting tired of waiting for Iran: "I’m not going to put a date on it but we are getting closer to the point at which a strict return to compliance with the JCPOA does not reproduce...

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Ukraine, USA, Russia, and Spheres of Influence

On September 1, 2021, President Biden met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House and continued the American push into Russia’s sphere of influence that has made Russia feel so threatened. Zelensky has been frustrated because he has been pushing...

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Look Who’s Pivoting to China Now

America may famously be pivoting to China, but so is everyone else: and not in the intended way. Vice President Kamala Harris’ invitation to Vietnam to join the US against China was coldly rejected by an unaligned Vietnam who wishes to enhance relations with China....

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Why US Negotiations Always Fail

From Cuba to Korea, from Iran to Russia and Palestine, there is a long history of failed negotiations and wasted time. The negotiations are all different, but a clear pattern establishes the reason why all of them fail. In each case, US negotiations fail because the...

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Living With Brzezinski’s Mess

If you walk down the road of many of today’s worst crises, you will find, far up ahead of you, the foot prints of President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Some of the key cold war moves that Brzezinski made triggered events that still...

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US-Cuban Relations: How It All Got Started

Although Fidel Castro would eventually become a Soviet allied communist, and although the US ultimatum to Cuba would eventually take the form of the often repeated mantra that there were only two non-negotiable demands, that Cuba cut ties with the Soviet Union, and...

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America Never Cared About the People of Cuba

The Embargo On January 25, 1960, President Eisenhower suggested that the US navy "quarantine" Cuba. "If they are hungry," the President fumed, "they will throw Castro out." His ambassador to Cuba, Philip W. Bonsal, chided him with a moral...

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