Jan Marco Müller, the European Commission official who drafted the EU’s new science diplomacy framework, just said the quiet part out loud: “Science diplomacy is not about being nice to each other.” Yes, it is, dumbass. That was the whole point. For centuries, science...
Antiwar.com wasn’t established in response to Iraq or Afghanistan. It was founded in the 1990s by critics of NATO’s bombing campaign in the former Yugoslavia, a “humanitarian intervention” celebrated at the time, then airbrushed from polite memory. Hindsight is a...
Try this sometime: say that NATO bombed civilians in Serbia, and Russia did the same in Ukraine. Don’t take a side, don’t justify it – just note the symmetry and watch the room explode. You’ll be accused of whataboutism, as though you’d just farted in church during a...
On May 1, when this site published my OpEd, "The Marketplace of Ideas Only Works if We Leave the Doors Open," I expected it to be the least controversial piece of my life. It was an old-fashioned, red-white-and-blue libertarian defense of free speech for everyone,...
Earlier this week, North Korea officially confirmed what had long been rumored: its troops fought and died alongside Russian forces in Kursk to help repel the Ukrainian invasion. Kim Jong Un announced the construction of a memorial in Pyongyang, saying, "Before the...
In 1958, Soviet intellectuals Alexander Yakovlev and Oleg Kalugin arrived at Columbia University as Fulbright scholars for a year of graduate studies. They weren't defectors. They were loyal Party apparatchiks, sent to study how America’s “propaganda machine” worked...
The Republic of Abkhazia is back in the news following the conclusion of its presidential runoff elections. Former President Aslan Bzhania resigned in late 2024 amid civil unrest sparked by a proposed Russian-Abkhazian “investment agreement” widely perceived as a...
After three years of stagnation, this past week saw clear steps towards peace in Ukraine. Trump and Putin spoke on the phone, and US and Russian negotiators met face to face in Saudi Arabia for the first time in years. Trump said explicitly that he was “okay” with...
One of my favorite places on Earth, Greenland, has suddenly become the center of worldwide attention as US President Donald Trump reiterated his 2019 proposal that the US should do whatever it takes to acquire Greenland from Denmark. Trump’s interest stems from...
Donald Trump’s recent flirtations with acquiring Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal are not new ideas. They all relate to a single strategic objective: controlling shipping lanes between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The US has long been a champion of “freedom...
