Building on its reputation as an unreliable diplomatic partner, the United States announced on October 12 that it was pulling out of the deal that would have granted Iran access to $6 billion of its money in exchange for the release of five American prisoners. This...
More than a decade ago, Israel started to understand that its occupation of Gaza through siege could be to its advantage. It began transforming the tiny coastal enclave from an albatross around its neck into a valuable portfolio in the trading game of international...
Complaining of “media bias,” Hamas spokesperson Dr. Basim Naim denies allegations that its members intentionally murdered civilians and non-combatants in their assault on Israel last week. The operation “targeted only the Israeli military bases and compounds,” he...
It is a sad reality that the establishment news media’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas fighting may be even more shallow, biased, and hawkish than the coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war or previous international conflicts. The willingness of most prominent news outlets...
Those who called Hamas’s attack on Israel “Israel’s 9/11” were more accurate than they realized. Just as the US reacted to 9/11 by fulfilling Osama bin Laden’s wish that the US would get bogged down in no-win wars, Israel’s reaction to the Hamas attack fulfills...
There are two competing narratives about the origins of the Ukraine War. According to one narrative, Vladimir Putin is a Hitler-like aggressor. He wants to reestablish the Soviet empire by swallowing Ukraine and threatening the Baltic countries, Poland, and the...
During his address to the plenary session of the Valdai International Discussion Club, Russian President Vladimir Putin told his audience of scholars and diplomats that “The Ukraine crisis is not a territorial conflict, and I want to make that clear…[W]e have no...
It’s not a real war. The bloody carnage in Israel and Palestine that we now witness is a large prison uprising being crushed by Israel’s military might. M-16 lightweight rifles against Merkava tanks; home-made rockets (little more than flying pipe bombs) versus...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. The ancients were wise to make war a god. Violent, unpredictable, destructive, seductive, brutal, and capricious. And of course very, very powerful in its hold on the human mind. I trained as a historian,...
