Fear and loathing of Russia is all the rage in Washington, D.C., as both liberal Democrats and neoconservative Republicans unite in a campaign to demonize the Kremlin as “the premier and most important threat, more so than ISIS," as Sen. John McCain recently...
Sikkim Stand-Off: China and India Collide in the Himalayas
India’s ultra-nationalist government under Prime Minister Nahendra Modi is engaged in an aggressive face-off with China that could end in a large-scale military conflict. Although the strip of land, called Donglang, that is at the center of the dispute has long been...
Anti-Interventionist Voters Elected Trump
How did Donald Trump defy all the pollsters, the pundits, and the Twitterverse “experts” and take the White House? According to the Democrats, it was all a Russian plot – Kremlin-directed Twitter “bots” spread “misinformation” and “fake news,” Russian hackers stole...
Happy Independence Day!
I’m taking the July 4 holiday weekend off, so there’s no column today. However, in lieu of that, here’s something you might find interesting: my contribution to The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories, edited by John V. Denson, “Defenders of the Republic: The...
Why The Elites Hate Putin
As the “Russia-gate” farce continues to dominate the American “news” media, and President Trump’s foreign policy veers off in a direction many of his supporters find baffling, one wonders: what the heck happened? I thought Trump was supposed to be “Putin’s puppet,” as...
Vladimir Putin: A Suitor Spurned
Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump kept repeating a line that stuck in the Establishment’s craw like a cherry pit stuck under a denture: “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get along with Russia?” Russia and specifically Russian President Vladimir...
Who Tried to Kill Putin – Five Times?
Oliver Stone’s series of interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin – conducted between July 2015 and February 2017 – has garnered a lot of attention, albeit in most cases not for the right reasons. In a much-noted appearance of Stephen Colbert’s comedy show, the...
A Brief Missive
I’m involved in a time-consuming research project, the results of which will show up in this space sometime next week, and so there’s no column today. But I’ll be back on Monday. In the meantime, I want to give you something to read that you might find illuminating,...
Our Rush to War in Syria
The downing of a Syrian fighter jet by the United States – and, more recently, of an Iranian drone – augurs a confrontation that could take us down the road to World War III. The US media is echoing the Pentagon’s explanation, which is that the Syrian jet bombed (or...
Hodgkinson’s Disease: Politics and Paranoia in the Age of Trump
James T. Hodgkinson, the would-be assassin of Republican congressmen, wasn’t a radical. If you look at his published output – a series of letters to his local newspaper in Belleville, Illinois, as well as the majority of his Internet postings – it’s mostly about...


