On April 17, the U.S. presented Ukrainian and European officials with a framework for peace that declared itself “the final offer.” On April 23, Ukrainian and European officials, denying the “final offer” statement, presented the U.S. with an alternative peace plan of...
How Gaza War Has Exposed Fault Lines Among Israeli Elites
A seemingly strange choice was made by a correspondent for Israel’s Channel 12 this month, when he decided to publish a humiliating video of a relatively large number of Israeli soldiers coming under attack by a single Palestinian fighter. In the incident that was...
End the Ukraine War With This One Simple Trick
The long-debated “minerals deal” was finally signed between the US and Ukraine late Wednesday, after a months-long, whiplash-producing back and forth between the two parties. In the end, Wednesday started with an affirmation that the deal would be signed, then by...
The Drip-Drip of Slanted Gaza Reporting Erodes Our Sense of Right and Wrong
It is quite possible to take apart virtually any report in the Guardian on Gaza – as I have done with a story in today’s paper – and identify the same kinds of journalistic malpractice. Further, I could have taken any paragraph in the article and parsed it in much the...
The Vietnam and Gaza Wars Shattered Young Illusions About US Leaders
Eight years before the U.S.-backed regime in South Vietnam collapsed, I stood with high school friends at Manhattan’s Penn Station on the night of April 15, 1967, waiting for a train back to Washington after attending the era’s largest antiwar protest so far. An early...
The Myth of Conquest: Why Gaza Will Never Be Subdued by Israel
To conquer a place is to fundamentally subdue its population. This must be clearly differentiated from 'occupation', a specific legal term that governs the relationship between a foreign "occupying power" and the occupied nation under international law, particularly...
The Marketplace of Ideas Works Only If We Leave the Doors Open
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...
100 Days: What Trump Told TIME
On April 22, U.S. President Donald Trump did an interview with Time on his first one hundred days in office. On foreign policy he made two bold claims. The first was that he would successfully conclude diplomatic deals in the Ukrainian-Russian war and in Iran. The...
The Path to Peace: Europeanization Then Normalization
Reprinted with permission from The Realist Review. Much has been made of Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky’s tête-à-tête in Saint Peter's Basilica over the weekend. If nothing else, the optics were stunning: The US and Ukrainian president looked to be patching...
Iran and the United States: Nuclear Argy Bargy
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” ~ Voltaire, Enlightenment author and philosopher (1694-1778) Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the United States and Israel have been zealous in their efforts to disempower it. Israel has...


