While I can say there isn’t a formal class at the American State Department called Diplomacy 101, some training offered to new hires comes pretty close. Those basic tenets of statecraft, largely unchanged from Thucydides to Bismarck to Pompeo, are important to review...
Peter van Buren
The US is Playing with Fire if It Walks Away from the Iran Nuclear Deal on May 12
by Peter van Buren | May 5, 2018 | Featured Articles
A foreign policy crisis is coming May 12. President Donald Trump’s likely decision on that day to not continue waiving sanctions on Iran under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action will significantly increase the chances of war.The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of...
Review: A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership is Mostly About Making Jim Comey Rich
by Peter van Buren | Apr 25, 2018 | Featured Articles
Despite the lofty title, in A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership James Comey comes across in turns petty, smug, sanctimonious, bitter, and most of all, pandering.Comey feeds the rubes exactly what they paid the carnival sideshow barker in front at Barnes and...
FARA: Freedom of the Press, But On the Government’s Terms
by Peter van Buren | Apr 3, 2018 | Featured Articles
A bipartisan group of lawmakers called for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate if Al Jazeera, the news outlet connected to the Qatari government, should register with the Justice Department as an agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA.)This...
Politics, Justice, and the Surveillance State
by Peter van Buren | Mar 12, 2018 | Featured Articles
The role pervasive surveillance plays in politics today has been grossly underreported. Set aside what you think about the Trump presidency for a moment and focus instead on the new paradigm for how politics and justice work inside the surveillance state.“Incidental...
What Mueller Has, and What He is Missing
by Peter van Buren | Mar 5, 2018 | Featured Articles
Each week brings a new indictment from Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller along with the same question: when will he produce evidence that the president of the United States committed treason?Because that’s what this is really about; Some Russians somewhere may have...
Christopher Steele: The Real Foreign Influence in the 2016 Election?
by Peter van Buren | Feb 15, 2018 | Featured Articles
Leaving aside the validity of what has become known as the “Steele dossier,” it’s important to look at how Christopher Steele was able to guarantee that the information in it would play a significant and ongoing role in American politics. Steele, who is British, did...
State Department, Meet the New Boss, Same/Worse as the Old Boss?
by Peter van Buren | Dec 9, 2017 | Featured Articles
The rumors of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s demise may finally not be greatly exaggerated.A marked man, it was only about a month ago the media speculated on how soon United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley would replace Tillerson. Two weeks ago a trial balloon...
What If Trump Dismantled the State Department, and It Didn’t Matter?
by Peter van Buren | Nov 30, 2017 | Featured Articles
Bad news: President Donald Trump may be dismantling the State Department. The good news? No recent president has made much use of those diplomats, so they are unlikely to be missed. And that’s really bad news.Recent stories try hard to make the case that something new...
The Trump Era and Weaponization of the Media
by Peter van Buren | Nov 29, 2017 | Featured Articles
Donald Trump's victory was so loathsome to many journalists that instead of acknowledging their cultural and partisan blindness lead to them misreport the election, they doubled down, growing two overlapping myths to delegitimize a presidency they never wanted to...
Sour Grapes: Iran Wins the Iraq War, and I Scooped the NYT by Six Years on the Story
by Peter van Buren | Jul 24, 2017 | Featured Articles
The New York Times is featuring a piece stating Iran is the big winner of the US-Iraq wars, 1991-2017.So what does winning in Iraq look like, asks the Times? About like this:A Shia-dominated government is in Baghdad, beholden to Tehran for its security post-ISIS. Shia...
How Accidental are America’s Accidental Civilian Killings Across the Middle East?
by Peter van Buren | Jul 1, 2017 | Featured Articles
US Secretary of Defense James Mattis has said “civilian casualties are a fact of life in this sort of situation,” referring to America’s war against Islamic State. How can America in clear conscience continue to kill civilians across the Middle East? It’s easy; ask...
Groundhog Day in Iraq? Nope, Worse
by Peter van Buren | Jun 23, 2017 | Featured Articles
It’s a helluva question: “Tell me how this ends.”It was a good question in 2003 when then Major General David Petraeus asked it as the United States invaded Iraq, an ironic one in 2011 when the US withdrew, worth revisiting in 2014 when the US reinvaded Iraq, and...
America’s Real Loss of Prestige and Leadership Abroad
by Peter van Buren | Jun 19, 2017 | Peace and Prosperity Blog
Because we traded the smooth talking guy for the clumsy boob with no manners, it is popular to bleat that America has given up its role as leader of the free world, to say other nations don’t respect us anymore, or look to us for moral guidance — in the extreme, that...
Understanding the Cost of War: Moral Injury
by Peter van Buren | Jun 12, 2017 | Featured Articles
“My guilt will never go away,” former Marine Matthew Hoh explained to me. “There is a significant portion of me that doesn’t believe it should be allowed to go away, that this pain is fair.” If America accepts the idea of fighting endless wars, it will have to accept...
Hey Intercept, Something is Very Wrong with Reality Winner and the NSA Leak
by Peter van Buren | Jun 7, 2017 | Featured Articles
NSA "leaker" Reality Winner An NSA document purporting to show Russian military hacker attempts to access a Florida company which makes voter registration software is sent anonymously toThe Intercept. A low-level NSA contractor, Reality Winner, above, is arrested...
Five Bad Arguments the Left is Using to Restrict Speech from the Right
by Peter van Buren | Jun 1, 2017 | Featured Articles
Without free speech people stop thinking, losing out on all but a narrowing band of ideas. Open discussion, debate, and argument are the core of democracy. Bad ideas are defeated by good ideas. Fascism seeks to close off all ideas except its own. Yet all of these most...
ProPublica Attacks First Amendment, Cloudflare Edition
by Peter van Buren | May 8, 2017 | Featured Articles
You’re almost certainly interacting with Cloudflare right now. Feel OK?Cloudflare is a web services company that, among other things, protects sites against various malicious attacks and hacks. They don’t “host” data in most cases, but work as a kind of middleman...
How Berkeley and NYU’s Anti-Free Speech Actions are as Unconstitutional as Hell
by Peter van Buren | May 6, 2017 | Featured Articles
Ann Coulter will not speak at Berkeley this week because the threat of mob violence lead campus authorities to claim they could not protect her. The same threats led New York University (NYU) to cancel Milo Yiannopoulos’ appearance in February. These are shameful...
Do American Airports Suck? Yes, Yes They Do
by Peter van Buren | Apr 28, 2017 | Featured Articles
Traveling by air in America is one of the best ways to see the country, although it is not always the nicest view. I recently took a fresh look, with the goal of advising my foreign friends what to expect when they drop by the United States.Our Air PalacesYou’ll enjoy...
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