It says something about the complexity of language (and me perhaps) that I took so long to realize that Donald Trump’s “America First” slogan, which I found off-putting from the start, consists of the same words as the name of the pre-World War II...
President Trump’s budget proposal would increase military spending $54 billion, not quite a 10 percent increase over the current level. According to Quartz, the increase alone is more than all but two countries – China and Saudi Arabia – spend on their...
As Donald Trump demonstrated in his first address to Congress, no matter how loathsome a ruler may be, he can bring an assembly of politicians to its feet and disarm some critics simply by invoking the quasi-secular faith – Americanism – and eulogizing the...
A few libertarians and other principled opponents of the warfare state assured us we likely would sleep easier with Donald Trump, rather than any neoconservative or humanitarian interventionist, in the White House. How’s that working out? Not so well. I’m...
The death of former Israeli prime minister and president Shimon Peres (age 93), the last major figure of Israel's founding generation, has brought an outpouring of tributes for a man who reputedly had, as President Obama put it in his eulogy, "the capacity to see all...
Benjamin Netanyahu has been perhaps the most anti-Palestinian Israeli prime minister in a large rogue's gallery dedicated to driving the aggrieved Palestinians out of the land they and their ancestors have lived in and worked for millennia. This oppression –...
Again Trump has it backwards. According to NATO's internal logic, the US should pay the members – not the other way around – for providing services to the empire and a tripwire for war. The empire doesn't protect; it provokes and endangers. Who would...
Is Brexit a move toward British independence? Some Leave and Remain partisans may believe so, differing only over whether that's good or bad. But, as usual, things are more complicated. We should hope that, in one respect, Britain's exit from the EU will create a kind...
After the terrorist violence in Brussels many people, including Barack Obama, said we should not change our way of life and live in fear because that is what terrorists want. Maybe, but is that all they want? It seems that something important is left out of the...
The key to Donald Trump's presidential campaign – the feature that explains nearly everything else about that toxic dump – is his aggrieved-nation shtick. Just about everything Trump says (when he's not adoring himself or belittling others) is about how...
