President Donald Trump inexplicably took his first foreign trip to Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy with neither religious nor political freedom. On that trip in March 2017 he began to subcontract U.S. Mideast policy to a trio of self-serving regional leaders....
For someone so disparaging of "losers" President Donald Trump certainly has a lot of losing policies. His reliance on sanctions to inflict "maximum pressure" has failed everywhere. Yet the administration continues to double down on this losing...
The People’s Republic of China is rapidly regressing on human rights, returning to the sort of political totalitarianism of the mad "Red Emperor" Mao Zedong. Personal autonomy remains largely unfettered, but Xi Jinping has created an expansive and brutal...
On December 2, 1823 President James Monroe enunciated what became known as the Monroe Doctrine. It was a fantastic mix of presumption and chutzpah: the U.S., and only the U.S., was entitled to intervene whenever and wherever it desired for whatever reason it decided...
As President Donald Trump prepares to leave office, Iran is leading the news after the assassination of a top Iranian nuclear engineer, likely by Israel with U.S. knowledge if not assistance. The Obama administration criticized a similar Israeli hit in 2012, but Trump...
In Washington foreign conflicts are to policymakers what lights are to moths. The desire to take the U.S. into every political dispute, social collapse, civil war, foreign conflict, and full-scale war seems to only get stronger as America’s failures accumulate. There...
President-elect Joe Biden says Americans might have to die for the Senkaku Islands. You know, the 51st state. Er, a distant U.S. territory. Er, a vital geographic outpost blocking invasion routes into America. Er, some uninhabited rocks claimed by both China and...
The Trump presidency has been a wreck. An unqualified, unprepared narcissist with a nanosecond attention span and compulsion to tweet, while holding a multitude of ill-considered opinions, became the world’s most powerful and important person. It sounded like the...
Washington’s bipartisan War Party, encompassing most Democratic and Republican foreign policy analysts, is horrified by President Donald Trump’s decision to appoint loyalists to the Department of Defense. No one seriously expects him to launch a coup attempt. Rather,...
Imagine being Joe Biden. The good news is that you have been elected president. You are about to become the most powerful and famous person on earth. You will have the ability to lay waste to anyone and anything, even to destroy the world as we know it. You will be...
