Congressional investigators were rocked this weekend when the FBI notified them that five months of text messages from a top FBI investigator into the Trump campaign’s Russian connections had mysteriously vanished.The FBI-issued cell phone of Peter Strzok, whose...
Here’s what we can say about the Trump administration’s just-released National Defense Strategy: it’s not a strategy and its subject is not defense. Bearing the imprimatur of Pentagon chief James Mattis, the NDS—at least the unclassified summary that we citizens are...
Relations between North and South Korea have taken a surprisingly positive turn this year. Bilateral negotiations between the North and South began the thaw just after the New Year, and then an announcement of unprecedented North/South joint participation in the...
The first pathetic pieces of wreckage from North Korean fishing boats known as “ghost ships” to be found this year are washing up on the coast of northern Japan. These are the storm-battered remains of fragile wooden boats with unreliable engines in which North Korean...
The Donald Trump administration is planning to install a 30,000 strong armed “security force” in northern Syria along the borders with Turkey and Iraq. This presumably will tie together and support the remaining rag-tags of allegedly pro-democracy rebels and will fit...
Are we supposed to believe that a critical five months of text messages between two plotting (and illicitly connected) anti-Trump FBI agents have disappeared due to technical errors? Much more likely -- and more commonly, as Jim Bovard points out in a recent Hill...
While President Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans battle to reopen the federal government, Vice President Mike Pence traveled to Israel this week to meet with dignitaries and visit a handful of historic sites - including the Holocaust Memorial.But during a...
Early on Sunday, Turkish ground forces crossed the border and pushed into northern Syria’s Afrin province on Sunday, Ankara said after launching artillery and air strikes on a US-backed Kurdish militia it aims to sweep from its border.Turkey sent armored divisions...
It’s deja-vu all over again, as baseball legend Yogi Berra might have said. The politicians and media are telling us the world is coming to an end because a “compromise” could not be made at the 11th hour to keep the Federal government in business.Republicans blame...
On Wednesday morning last week, I, as a research fellow with the Hoover Institution, got to attend a speech by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. It was followed by a Q&A session with former Secretary of State and my Hoover colleague Condoleezza Rice....
With Ankara's recent military incursion into Syria to fight Afrin-based Kurdish forces, the US finds itself in a bizarre proxy war with its longtime NATO ally, Turkey. Turkish airplanes are literally taking off from the same airbase to bomb the Kurds as American...
A new episode of Five Minutes Five Issues is out. You can listen to it, and read a transcript, below. You can also find previous episodes of the show at Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube, and SoundCloud.Listen to the new episode here:Read a transcript of the new episode,...
Donald Trump took office as president of the United States one year ago this week. It is a good time to evaluate what his leadership has meant for US foreign policy. Has Trump moved US foreign policy toward noninterventionism as some people had hoped he would due to...
I have previously written about the endless calls for impeachment from Democratic members for everything from Trump criticizing NFL players to comments made about protesters. The Framers saw the great abuses caused not only by tyranny of nobility, but tyranny of the...
Defense Secretary James Mattis unveiled the new US National Defense Strategy which has shifted the focus away from terrorism as the main threat to looking at Russia and China as the main threat to the US. It is a move back to the neocon "Wolfowitz Doctrine" of the...
Much has been written about our Twitterer-in-Chief and the tortured response to his presidency, particularly within the GOP. As a recent example, Frank Bruni of the New York Times lamented the fate of Senator Lindsey Graham, who has now become one of Donald Trump’s...
The rise of Trump has dredged up old and bitter debates surrounding the concept of "America First," a position Trump frequently advocates almost unconsciously and using his own peculiar terms. Consider this tweet, from 2013, as an example of Trump expressing a...
There is a growing consensus among many observers in Washington that the national security agencies have become completely politicized over the past seventeen years and are now pursuing selfish agendas that actually endanger what remains of American democracy. Up...
Why are the rich getting richer? Are they just smarter than the rest of us? Or do the "too big to fail" connected corporations have a hotline to Washington for government assistance? And what about the US involvement in the Middle East? Will it increase or decrease...
Continuing from my OpEd of the 11th January entitled "Libya Update: Power Struggles Continue - Will the UN Get its Way?", dramatic further evidence of my assessment came in the form of reports of intense fighting that started over the weekend and dramatically...
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