The Price of Empire

One can understand the shock, the horror, the unbelief as the war most Americans didn't know was going on or didn't choose to acknowledge came home in such a brutal, deadly fashion in lower Manhattan and the Pentagon. This was obviously a coordinated attack, carried...

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War on X … When the Metaphor Becomes Too Real

Beyond the day-to-day news out of Palestine or Macedonia, Sudan or Indonesia, a question keeps nagging at some of us. Why is it that politicians, and particularly American politicians, seem so compliant and lackadaisical about the ramifications of endorsing war as a...

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Sticking with an Andean Disaster

Asa Hutchinson, who left his job as a Republican Congressman from Arkansas to take the position, was confirmed as head of the Drug Enforcement Administration by a 98-1 vote, probably as a courtesy to a congressional old boy. While he has made a few noises suggesting...

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Middle East Status is Quo

Most Americans have still not gotten beyond the end of the Cold War and associated changes in the nature of the world when it comes to thinking about the Middle East. For decades, both before and after the formation of Israel, the United States has believed it has had...

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A Macedonian Fantasy?

There are essentially two types of peace agreements: those that ratify a peace that is in place for whatever reason (conquest, surrender, war-weariness) and those that seek to push forward a "process" that has not yet brought anything resembling an actual peace. One...

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FBI Taking Wrong International Path

It is a symptom of the consensus disease in American politics that veteran Justice Department bureaucrat Robert Mueller was confirmed as head of the FBI without a single dissenting vote in the U.S. Senate. Despite a good deal of posturing in the Judiciary Committee,...

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Defining Terms Unilaterally

Our political culture – insofar as it is intelligible to speak of such a concept – seems to have a gift for asking the wrong, mostly irrelevant, questions and then obsessing about them at great and usually unhelpful length. Thus in recent weeks we have heard...

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European Overtures

It is tempting to have a sneaking admiration for the "anti-globalization" protesters who assembled in Genoa, Italy to protest the leaders of the world's industrialized nations meeting at their G-8 summit over the weekend. They showed up and they took the spotlight...

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Further into the Colombian Morass

The House of Representatives on Thursday will give as much consideration as it is likely to give this year to the ongoing US involvement in Colombia's civil war and cocaine manufacturing and trafficking crisis. At issue will be the government's foreign operations...

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Taiwan Changes More Important Than US Policy?

You can make a case that while Taiwan is mentioned often as a key player in US-China relations, relatively little current reporting is done about the island itself. That’s the impression I got from talking with Ambassador John R. Malott, a retired career...

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