The RPI Challenge

Jeffrey Goldberg’s newly published book-length article on Barack Obama and the Middle East includes a major revelation that brings US Secretary of State John Kerry’s Syrian diplomacy into sharper focus: it reports that Kerry has sought on several occasions without success over the past several months to get Obama’s approval for cruise missile strikes against the Syrian government. That revelation shows that Kerry’s strategy in promoting the Syrian peace negotiations in recent months was based...

During her appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, Attorney General Loretta Lynch admitted that she asked the FBI to examine whether the federal government should take legal action against so-called climate change deniers. Attorney General Lynch is not responding to any criminal acts committed by climate change skeptics. Instead, she is responding to requests from those frustrated that dissenters from the alleged climate change consensuses have successfully blocked attempts...

The nonprofit Food Tank recently posed 10 questions on food policy to the presidential candidates in the 2016 race. Joel Salatin throws his hat in the ring and answers. This query just came across my desk and provides good food for thought. I thought just for fun I’d answer these as if I were running for President. Some answers will infuriate, some will inspire. I can assure you that my only agenda is to see a million Polyfaces displace all the Monsanto and USDA demons. Enjoy. – Joel Salatin...

Maidhc Ó Cathail: In your latest book, you dub Hillary Clinton the “Queen of Chaos”. Can you explain why you chose this derogatory sobriquet to describe Hillary? Diana Johnstone: Libya, in a word. Hillary Clinton was so proud of her major role in instigating the war against Libya that she and her advisors initially planned to use it as basis of a “Clinton doctrine”, meaning a “smart power” regime change strategy, as a presidential campaign slogan. The Libyan catastrophe actually inspired me to...

The final results of the local elections in the central German state of Hesse last Sunday were a cold shower for the ruling coalition. The new opposition party Alternative for Germany (AfD) won seats in every municipal council in that state, receiving an unprecedented 16.2% of the vote in Hesse’s capital of Wiesbaden. They even pulled in approximately 12% in cosmopolitan Frankfurt am Main – the largest city in Hesse, where voter turnout was a record low (37.3%). All in all, the AfD picked up...

Any doubts that the US government views the nature of its relationship with the UK on foreign policy as one of subservience can be finally put to rest after the visit to London last week of Evelyn Farkas, former US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia. Farkas, who was relieved of her position in the Obama administration some months ago, addressed the UK’s foreign policy elite at Chatham House, the Royal Institute for International Affairs. Farkas’s oversight of the...

When the Ankara government carried out a brutal media crackdown at the weekend and then saw minimal Western protest as a result, President Erdogan knew he had the upper-hand – to leverage the refugee crisis. It seems more than strange that, only three days before a high-profile summit was to take place between European Union leaders and Turkey on Europe’s refugee crisis, the Ankara authorities carried out an audacious assault on democratic rights. The violent police seizure of Turkey’s biggest...

FBI Director James Comey Yep, you should care. Very much. Hang up the phone and listen. What This is All About The FBI wants Apple to help unlock an iPhone used by one of the attackers who killed 14 people in the December San Bernardino shooting. Specifically, the Bureau wants Apple to create new software that would override a security system on the phone designed to erase its contents after ten unsuccessful password tries. The new software would also eliminate the built-in pause required...

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has emerged as the leader of the pro-sovereignty opposition to the dictates of the EU's Brussels bureaucrats. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel swung open Germany's doors to hundreds of thousands of migrants (mostly from places "liberated" by Germany's ally, Washington), Orban quickly saw the disaster that was coming and rushed to defy Brussels and build a border fence at lightning speed. When Brussels told Budapest that it had to take in its "fair...

Despite the fact that we’ve been burned before, most Americans continue to allow themselves to be bamboozled into casting their votes for one candidate or another, believing that this time they mean what they say, this time they really care about the citizenry, this time will be different. Of course, it never turns out differently. We are as easily discarded the day after the elections as we were wantonly wooed in the months leading up to the big day. Those same politicians who were once so...

The Republican presidential debates have become so heated and filled with insults, it almost seems we are watching a pro wrestling match. There is no civility, and I wonder whether the candidates are about to come to blows. But despite what appears to be total disagreement among them, there is one area where they all agree. They all promise that if elected they will “rebuild the military.”What does “rebuild the military” mean? Has the budget been gutted? Have the useless weapons programs like...

A renewed Western military ‘commitment’ to Libya will not be enough to defeat ISIS – but it might be enough to establish the permanent military presence in North Africa the West has been hankering after ever since 1970. On 19th February, the US launched an airstrike on an ISIS training camp in Sabratha, Libya, killing an estimated 40 people. While the attack was widely reported as a ‘new front’ in the West’s ‘war on terror’, the reality is that the Western military presence inside Libya has...

Obama's so-called "pivot to Asia" has always meant one thing and one thing only: Provoking China and threatening its sphere of influence. And luckily for Obama, the US has perfected the art of military provocation. It's now been confirmed that the US Navy has sent a "small armada" consisting of "the carrier John C. Stennis, two destroyers, two cruisers and the 7th Fleet flagship" to the South China Sea in order to "confront" China. Some might wonder why China needs to be "confronted" in the...

Washington has a long history of massacring people, for example, the destruction of the Plains Indians by the Union war criminals Sherman and Sheridan and the atomic bombs dropped on Japanese civilian populations, but Washington has progressed from periodic massacres to fulltime massacring. From the Clinton regime forward, massacre of civilians has become a defining characteristic of the United States of America.Washington is responsible for the destruction of Yugoslavia and Serbia,...

“We came, we saw, he died,” exclaimed an ebullient Hillary Clinton, as she exulted over the horrific death of Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, who was sodomized with a bayonet before being brutally murdered by rampaging militiamen. Visiting Tripoli, the Libyan capital, the American Secretary of State was eager to take credit for the “liberation” of yet another Muslim country by Western powers acting in concert. An extensive and quite revealing New York Times investigation (Pt. 1 here, Pt. 2...