This article originally appeared on Memorial Day 2012 We might as well get rid of Memorial Day, for all the good it does us. Originally “Decoration Day,” the last Monday in May has been the designated time for us to remember the war dead and honor their sacrifice –...
I’ve written a lot about Donald Trump in this space, basically arguing that his views signify a sea change in the foreign policy discourse in this country. His rise, I’ve averred, augurs the end of the neoconservatives as a viable political force within the GOP, and...
Kosovo is Clinton Country: a 10-foot-high statue of Bill overlooks “Bill Clinton Boulevard” in the capital city of Pristina. Hillary is also memorialized in what has become the crime capital of Europe: right off the street named for her husband is a store named...
As Bob Dylan put it, “the times they are a changing!” – and that is certainly the case when it comes to the debate over US foreign policy this election season. A recent article in the Boston Globe, summarizing the observations of a group of Brown University students...
Poor Eliot Cohen: one of the principal architects of the Iraq war, and chief ideologue of Bushism in foreign policy – remember the “freedom agenda”? – he’s miffed that “This campaign shows that the foreign policy consensus that has framed this country’s work overseas...
Tens of thousands of Central Americans, many of them unaccompanied children and teenagers, have flooded into the US illegally in recent years: they are a growing part of a human tsunami that has hit the southern border and caused what many refer to as a humanitarian...
In early April, a battalion of senior military officials appeared before a Senate panel and testified that the US Army is “outranged and outgunned,” particularly in any future conflict with Russia. Arguing for a much bigger budget for the Army, they claimed that,...
How do we account for the fact that the pundits and media outlets who have been wrong about everything are still considered reliably “mainstream” – and still get to determine the parameters of allowable debate? Let’s take the most egregious case imaginable – Bill...
I was struck by a tweet from libertarian Republican congressman Justin Amash, who has become the “new Ron Paul” now that the three-time presidential candidate and libertarian icon has taken a well-deserved rest from politics. The other day he tweeted: “Patriotism...
In the summer of 1998, just as this web site was getting off the ground, I wrote the following for Chronicles magazine: “As the U.S. stumbles, or is pushed, into another unwinnable land war in Asia, the anti-war protesters of the future will come from the ranks of the...
