Last Monday the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director (DCI) John Ratcliffe and his retinue boarded a US Air Force C-17 Globemaster transport plane at Joint Base Andrews airfield in Maryland, stopped presumably to refuel at the Riga airport in NATO member Latvia,...
One of the great foreign policy disappointments of Donald Trump’s first term was the failure to advance his initial promising initiative to begin normalizing relations with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Trump had abandoned the threats and...
What began publicly as Donald Trump’s lavish, taxpayer-funded vision of a gilded White House ballroom is now being justified by the administration—in and out of court—as a matter of national security. To President Trump, it seems, a ballroom by any other name is...
I’ve been all over the world and have seen both its good and sordid countries. One of the best run, most decent and honest nations I’ve seen is Canada. As George Bernard Shaw noted, Canada is a wonderful country, but it has nine months of winter and three months of...
There is a point in the decline of republics when the problem is no longer that government breaks its own laws. Governments will always behave unlawfully. The deeper problem comes when the constitutional machinery designed to prevent those acts stops functioning --...
Even the richest man in Rome was relegated to the shadows of his contemporaries. Before allying with Pompey and Caeser to form the First Triumvirate, Marcus Licinius Crassus amassed his wealth through shady real estate deals. Often bargaining for pennies on the dollar...
The US military has just announced that it has carried out two more murders on the high seas near South America. This now brings the military’s high-seas murders to more than 200 people. Mind you, in its announcement, the military did not use the term “murder.” The...
I saw a clip going around from the Netflix series “1899” where a woman discovers a crack in the screen of what she had taken to be her world, causing her entire understanding of reality to crumble before her eyes. Someone had captioned the clip, “Every...
The 60-day MoU has expired. The framework of Iranian pre-conditions for any start to negotiations nonetheless lingers on in its comatose state. Instead of the endlessly touted “Iran deal,” the picture is almost the complete opposite of what President Trump sought to...
There was one sentence in Scott Bessent’s Monday sanctions announcement that gave the whole game away. Anyone who launders money for the Iranian regime, the Treasury Secretary warned, “will be removed from the US dollar system.” He meant it as a threat of...
This is what comes of giving a lawless agency unlimited funds to build detention centers, terrorize communities, and act as a secret police force. Anything goes. Masked raids. Unmarked vehicles. Warrantless arrests. Racial profiling. Sweeping surveillance. Detention...
As I have observed in the past, it is possible to be entertained nearly every week by the antics of President Donald J Trump, though one’s amusement often changes to annoyance or even to disgust when the consequences of the behavior become clear. To be sure, it would...
It took around two hundred years for US government debt to reach one trillion dollars. By contrast, in less than half a year a trillion was added to bring the debt total to the 40 trillion dollars it reached last week. According to the Peterson Foundation, US...
A new poll of US voters published on Tuesday offers a warning for congressional lawmakers backing a plan to deepen military ties between the United States and Israel, finding that a clear majority of voters oppose the proposal—which some critics...
In my previous piece — The Walls Have Doors Now — I argued that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s promised “measures like have never been seen in the history of the economic isolation of a country” would push against an open frontier: an Iran with land...
Now that the lofty 250th-anniversary rhetoric about the greatness of our country has faded, it is time to face the reality of our country’s actual behavior. The US fashions itself as a generous and benevolent world leader enforcing the “rules-based order”—a deceptive...
When a government agency comes to an internet service provider demanding information about Americans because of what they have said on social media, the provider should discard the demand, close the door or hang up the phone. The government is not entitled to rummage...
President Trump took Secretary of War Hegseth’s military cheerleading (“US military potency is awesome”) at face value, only belatedly to discover that the US is out of interceptors in a war that hinges on air defences. “The restock mathematics is just as cold. Four...
Murdering foreign leaders is not something any American president should ever do. How can the US uphold its claim to be a champion of laws and political decency while committing murder and sabotage? Alas, Donald Trump is not the first US president to stoop so low. The...
Last week we heard that US sailors and Marines aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and other ships in the Middle East were being fed food that, from photos that surfaced in the media, looked worse than what you would feed a dog. Parents and spouses of service members...
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