Many pundits have drawn parallels between the last decade and the 1930s. Though the precise sequence of events eight decades ago is not being repeated, the kinds of events that transpired in the years 1933 to 1937 have been repeated in broad brushstroke during the Obama years. And events of 1938 to 1941 appear on the horizon as increasingly likely Read More ›
President Obama concluded visits with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and King Salman of Saudi Arabia with predictable news media queries about whether he had raised specific human-rights cases with his hosts. The president spoke in general terms about human-rights issues when in India and acknowledged he had not raised specific cases in either country, including that of the Read More ›
Just before he was elected president in 2008, Barack Obama declared, “We are just five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” He may not succeed in his aim to transform the domestic landscape. Instead his legacy may be a different transformation entirely: a tectonic shift in America’s position in the world, diminishing America’s status abroad to Read More ›
Modern societies run on a set of networks whose hardware and software represent a modern technology Faustian bargain: achieve unparalleled efficiencies of economic cost and social interconnection at the price of equally unparalleled exposure to several forms of catastrophic “cascade” failure. Specifically, the hardware and software infrastructures that enable prosperous modern life in advanced societies are relatively simple—and hence increasingly Read More ›
We in the West have been coming to wrong conclusions in answering the above questions. Our “war” confusion is that we aren’t necessarily at war with countries and/or terror groups whose leaders have declared war on us. Thus the Islamic Republic of Iran established in February 1979 by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini has avowedly been at war with the West Read More ›
Why “reset” is a superficial, even puerile, idea…. Team Obama has viewed Russia through the faux lens of “reset”: So when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton greeted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva Friday before sitting down to their working dinner, she was all smiles when she presented him a small green box with a ribbon. Lavrov opened it Read More ›
Begin with one of the most famous (to some, infamous) quotations from a generation ago: California Republican Senator S. I. Hayakawa (served 1977-83) said during the election preceding the 1977 signing of the Panama Canal Treaty, “We should keep the Panama Canal. After all, we stole it fair and square.” Yet in 1978 the senator would help shepherd the treaty Read More ›
Tsar Vlad the Bad may have more in mind…. Ukraine’s Ill Wind. Begin with President Obama’s flaccid remarks re Ukraine, ISO common ground with Vladimir Putin, delivered yesterday, announcing sanctions so weak the WaPo editors ridiculed them–“…we’ll know that the president’s calibrations are adequate when they cause Russia’s markets to plunge rather than rally.” They led Russia’s deputy PM to Read More ›
Eastern Ukraine is now a Russian lake…. Latest News. Crimea’s referendum favored reunion with Russia, final Russian “count” at 97 percent for, but the choices were rigged, in a display of the 19th-century cynical geopolitics SecState John Kerry thinks obsolete. In West Ukraine, people are scared of Moscow but also angry at the West for its tepid response to Russia’s Read More ›
No, not the terrorism; it’s NBC’s propaganda…. At NRO ace reporter John Fund collects depressing examples of NBC toadying up to Russia & Vladimir Putin. NBC’s contemptible conduct evokes not the terrorism that irremediably scarred the 1972 Munich Games, but instead another shameful episode, which Fund cites: British pre-WW-II prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous appeasement of Adolf Hitler upon their Read More ›
Bravest in battles, whether at war or at peace…. A giant passes on, who looms especially large compared to the pygmy who sits in the White House. Readings well worth it: Times of Israel obituary: Israel’s indomitable protector. How Sharon narrowly escaped near-certain death in the 1948 war. Elliott Abrams, who worked closely with Sharon for five years, “His Eye Read More ›