History
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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 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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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,…
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The rapturous celebrations on the banks of the Danube in central Budapest on the night of April 12, 2026 were testament to the political earthquake that the small Central Europe nation had just experienced. After 16 years of increasingly autocratic rule by Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party, the Hungarian populace voted overwhelmingly to move…
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Given the significance of the recent (April 12) Hungarian elections, I put together a quick analysis for the Foreign Policy Research Institute of their ramifications for Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. The piece went live today and can be accessed here. I will also be posting a second article—for the local papers—on this blog…
