The RPI Challenge

President Donald Trump’s announcement of an imminent withdrawal of US troops from northeastern Syria summoned a predictable paroxysm of outrage from Washington’s foreign policy establishment. Former Secretary of State and self-described “hair icon” Hillary Clinton perfectly distilled the bipartisan freakout into a single tweet, accusing Trump of “isolationism” and “playing into Russia and Iran’s hands.” Michelle Flournoy, the DC apparatchik who would have been Hillary’s Secretary of Defense,...

Sources are everything to a journalist. Without them, their stories would be hollow. Imagine there was a ready-made list of experts always willing to bring that crucial air of credibility to any story about...Russia, for example. Well, it turns out there is — and that list can be found on the website of the Atlantic Council — a think tank well-known for its ceaseless and enormous hostility toward Russia. Wherever there is an opportunity to throw balance and fairness to the wind in a story...

From the wailing and gnashing of teeth among the mainstream media and officialdom over General Mattis' (welcome) departure, you would think that the Rapture had come and Washington's ruling class was being unjustly left behind to eternal perdition. And if not that, then the Mattis Affair is alleged to be at least its secular equivalent— an unwarranted and unforgivable affront to the good and the brave of the Imperial City. Then again, exactly what was so existentially harmful to America's...

President Trump’s foreign policy appointments have frequently been difficult to reconcile with the views he has often expressed. The most disappointing was the appointment of John Bolton as National Security Advisor. Bolton is a long-time and very vocal advocate of regime change and military initiatives overseas - particularly in the Middle East and certainly regarding our presence in Syria. He signed the Project for the New American Century’s 1998 letter advocating the invasion of Iraq and...

The co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, has apologized to Republican Roy Moore for funding an organisation that faked a "Russian bot" involvement to mar his election campaign in Alabama. American Engagement Technologies (AET), which Hoffman gave $750,000 to, put $100,000 of the entrepreneur’s money towards New Knowledge, a cybersecurity firm which fabricated some 1,000 Russian language Twitter accounts to follow Moore. The company used the tactic to link the controversial Republican to...

The resignation letter of Secretary of Defense James Mattis that was published last Thursday revealed much of the Deep State mindset that has produced the foreign policy catastrophes of the past seventeen years. Mattis, an active duty general in the Marine Corps who reportedly occasionally reads books, received a lot of good press during his time at Defense, sometimes being referred to as “the only adult in the room” when President Donald Trump’s national security and foreign policy team was...

On December 17, two reports detailing ongoing Russian interference operations commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee were made public. They generated a week’s worth of headlines and sent members of Congress and cable news pundits into a Cold War frenzy. According to the report, everything from the Green Party’s Jill Stein to Instagram to Pokemon Go to the African American population had been used and confused by the deceptive Facebook pages of a private Russian troll farm called the...

President Donald Trump’s order to withdraw from Syria has been greeted, predictably, with an avalanche of condemnation culminating in last Thursday’s resignation by Defense Secretary James Mattis. The Mattis resignation letter focused on the betrayal of allies, though it was inevitably light on details, suggesting that the Marine Corps General was having some difficulty in discerning that American interests might be somewhat different than those of feckless and faux allies like Israel and...

The idea Mattis was the “adult in the room,” the moral and intellectual restraint on Trump’s evil wishes, is tired. We’ve been recycling that one for two years and more now, as various “adults” were christened as such and rose and fell in the eyes of the media — Flynn, McMaster, Tillerson, Kelly, and now Mattis (the media regards Pompeo and Bolton as “dangerous” and thus not adults. Nobody else seems to make the news.) Despite these adults’ irregularly scheduled regular departures, there has...

We all had a big shock this week when, seemingly out of the blue, President Trump announced that he was removing US troops from Syria and would draw down half of the remaining US troops in Afghanistan. The president told us the troops were in Syria to fight ISIS and with ISIS nearly gone the Syrians and their allies could finish the job.All of a sudden the Trump haters who for two years had been telling us that the president was dangerous because he might get us in a war, were telling us that...

On December 17, Ankara was notified of President Trump’s decision on troop withdrawal from Syria. During an earlier phone conversation between him and President Recep Erdogan on Dec 14, Trump had pointedly asked and elicited a positive response from the Turkish leader as to whether Turkey would have the capability to eliminate the remnants of the ISIS in the Syrian tract east of the Euphrates in the event of a US withdrawal from Syria. Erdogan reportedly “reaffirmed” Turkey’s commitment to...

President Trump's strategic decision to withdraw US troops from Syria creates some significant fallout. The US and international borg is enraged that Trump ends an occupation that is illegal under international as well as US domestic law. "That's un-American!"Defense Secretary James "Mad Dog" Mattis resigned from his position effective February 28. He disagreed with the president's decision. It was the second time in five years that an elected commander in chief had a serious conflict with...

This has been an extraordinary week. After two years of getting rolled by the Washington establishment, it seems that President Donald Trump woke up and suddenly realized, “Hey – I’m the president! I have the legal authority to do stuff!” - He has announced his order to withdraw US troops from Syria. - His Defense Secretary James Mattis has resigned. There are rumors National Security Adviser John Bolton may go too. (Please take Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with you!) - He announced a start...