World War Gorka

Reprinted from The Realist Review. News comes this weekend that the ‘Department of War’ now has Nigeria in its crosshairs. Taking to Truth Social on Saturday, Trump let loose on the Nigerian government, warning that, …If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the...

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What Happened to America First?

Reprinted from The Realist Review. A quarter of a century ago, a newly elected Republican president, who campaigned on a promise of a more humble, less arrogant foreign policy was putting together his Cabinet and national security team. By the time he was finished,...

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Ukraine’s Embrace of Suicidal Nationalism

Reprinted from The Realist Review.  The recent assassination of the Ukrainian neo-fascist politician Andriy Parubiy are a grim reminder of the far-right origins of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution — a revolution which eventually gave way to the full-scale Russian...

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The Decline of American Diplomacy

Reprinted from The Realist Review.  A few years ago at a panel discussion at Washington DC’s venerable Tabard Inn, I spotted a face I hadn’t expected to see. But Thomas R. Pickering, even at 90 years of age, stood out. A legend in the annals of American diplomacy,...

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Sixty-Three Years, Nothing Has Changed

Reprinted from The Realist Review.  Exactly 63 years ago, on a summer afternoon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Kennedy White House adviser, Arthur Schlesinger, returned to Harvard where he had, until recently, been a professor of history. Schlesinger had come at the...

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Toward a Policy of Restrained Pessimism

Reprinted with permission from The Realist Review. The discursive rhetoric President Trump deploys when speaking about Russia and its apex-leader, Mr. Putin, risks lending the impression that once the unfortunate business of the war wraps up, he and Mr. Putin will at...

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The Vance Doctrine

The last vice president to serve during wartime was also the last president to have done so: George H.W. Bush (1924-2018). Bush’s presidency, unlike that of his son’s, was marked, mainly, by a prudential approach to foreign affairs. Bush’s warning about the dangers of...

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