Last week Americans were shocked and saddened by another mass killing, this one near a college campus in California. We all feel deep sympathy for the families of the victims. As usual, many people responded to this shooting by calling for new federal gun control...

American politics is largely a series of debates over unimportant details. These debates are conducted far above the fundamental level because the supposed contenders share the same premises. Where they disagree is at the level of application, and so the disagreements...

For over three years, the United States has sought to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by supporting an Al Qaeda-infused opposition that Washington either knew or should have known would fail. Yet, in his commencement address at West Point on Wednesday,...

The new president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, wants a Lend-Lease agreement with the U.S. government, to focus on military assistance and training. If the US agrees, that inserts the US directly into the war currently being waged between Ukraine and fighters for the...

Militarily, Africa is fast becoming an American continent. Barack Obama, who has been president for all but the first year of AFRICOM’s existence, has succeeded in integrating U.S. fighting units, bases, training regimens, equipment and financing into the military...

It’s a sweet irony that declared winner of Ukraine’s presidential election, the billionaire "chocolate tycoon" Petro Poroshenko, proclaimed that his electoral victory "showed that people have chosen the path of European Union integration.” Meanwhile, this week the...

Memorial Day is when we commemorate our war dead. Like the Fourth of July, Memorial Day is being turned into a celebration of war.Those who lose family members and dear friends to war don’t want the deaths to have been in vain. Consequently, wars become glorious deeds...

Growing up in the Soviet Union, I used to approach words like “Voice of America” (Golos Ameriki), BBC, Deutche Welle (Nemetskaia volna) with a certain reverence: they meant hidden, clandestine and therefore precious truth. Truth and news were not found in Pravda or...

President Obama held a press conference last week to express his outrage over reports that the Veterans Administration was routinely delaying treatment to veterans, with some veterans even dying while on alleged secret waiting lists. The president said that, “if these...

For months, the Obama Administration has been dealing with the growing revolt among the states over federal marijuana laws. Twenty states and the District of Columbia legalized medical marijuana use over the opposition of the federal government and medical use. Two...

Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin usually wears a perfect poker face. But last week in Shangahi, the icy-cold Russian president came awfully close to bursting into a big grin.And why not? Putin had just stolen a march on his western rivals. The US-British attempt to...

“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.” —John F. Kennedy Just in time for Memorial Day, we’re once again being treated to a generous serving of praise and grandstanding by...

Good for Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa for kicking USAID out of his country. If only every nation in the world would do that. While part of USAID’s activities ostensibly relate to helping “the poor,” that’s just a cover to disguise the real mission of the agency:...

Eight years ago, in the pages of The National Interest, Flynt Leverett and Pierre Noël identified a “new axis of oil”—a “shifting coalition of both energy exporting and energy importing states centered in ongoing Sino-Russian collaboration”—that was emerging as an...

Just imagine if the democratically-elected government of Canada had been toppled in a Russian-financed coup, in which far-right extremists and neo-Nazis played a prominent role. That the new unelected 'government' in Ottawa cancelled the law giving the French language...

Did you know that 85 to 90 percent of war’s casualties are non-combatant civilians? That is the conclusion reached by a nine-person research team in the June 2014 issue of the American Journal of Public Health. The deaths of soldiers who are fighting the war are a...

Vietnam riots: China ships to evacuate workersBack in the spring of 1968 I also got an invitation to evacuate. It was from Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, suggesting I evacuate my cushy life as a student in East Lansing, Michigan to join his crusade to stop the...