Foreign Policy
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During a 5 October, 2026 candidate forum in Durham, New Hampshire, one of the Granite State’s contestants for United States Congress, in response to a question about upcoming elections in Israel stated, “Foreign policy is not top of mind for the people of New Hampshire.” While the candidate might truly believe that assertion, the purpose…
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The world is awash in sectarian violence. From the bloody killing fields of eastern Ukraine to the powder keg that is the modern Middle East, ethnic, religious, and cultural differences among groups continue to manifest in spasms of organized brutality. Unbeknownst to many in America, however, purportedly resolved clashes from the recent past simmer dangerously…
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Those of us who were of age on September 11, 2001 will never forget where we were or what we were doing when we learned of the terrorist attacks in New York city, Washington, D.C., and rural Pennsylvania. Al Qaida’s bloody introduction to the American public a quarter century ago was our generation’s Pearl Harbor,…
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Expressing U.S. plans for dealing with Iran in his standard banal vulgarity, our commander in chief declared to Fox News on 29 July that “We are going to beat the (expletive deleted expletive deleted) out of them.” While his sophomoric bravado may resonate with a mulish base that confuses such schoolyard bombast for sound policy,…
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Lord Ismay, the first Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), famously remarked in the early 1950s that the purpose of the nascent alliance was “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” The conclusion of the recent NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, provides a propitious opportunity to…
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I was asked by the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) to contribute a short piece for inclusion in a compilation of expert opinion on the recent NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. The longer article, in which my analysis of the Czech participation at the summit is included, can be found here.
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I have recently been working on a longer, analytic piece for the think tank world. The subject, highlighted in the title above, has been percolating in my Central European-centric brain for some time. The article went live yesterday at Delphi Global Research Center, a new think tank out of Wilmington, DE that was founded by…
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Barbara Tuchman, one of America’s preeminent historians of the 20th century, wrote an analysis of some of the most consequential failures of leadership in world history. The March of Folly, published in 1984, deconstructs the egregious errors made by rulers, popes, kings, and presidents in four specific situations. The final chapter of the book, detailing…
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Sitting in a comfortable rental apartment in Liptovský Mikuláš, looking out on the majestic Vysoké Tatry (High Tatras) mountains in north central Slovakia, it is hard to imagine that less than two hundred miles to the east, a savage, and at this stage seemingly pointless, war continues to engulf Ukraine. Currently on a short “sabbatical”…
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I write this post from Terminal E of Boston’s Logan Airport, awaiting my flight to Copenhagen and then on to Prague. Before starting my European adventure, I wanted to share my latest analytic piece for the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), which was published online earlier today. The article addresses the recent elections in Bulgaria,…
