Monadnock Ledger-Transcript
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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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As the Persian Gulf war enters its second month, President Trump continues to frequently vacillate between threatening more “fire and brimstone” on the Iranians and proclaiming that the two sides are on the cusp of a major agreement to end the fighting. As of this writing (29 March), hostilities persist between the primary combatants in…
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The American and Israeli joint strike against Iran, beginning with the 1 March assassination of the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has plunged the entire Middle East into a violent vortex with seemingly no end on the horizon. The hostilities, called “A War Without Strategy” in the 7 March edition of the Economist, have…
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While the Beatles feature in the title of this commentary, the lyrics from another British rock and roll band offer a practical framework as the warring sides in the ongoing conflict in Eastern Europe probe for an acceptable offramp after four years of bloodshed. You can’t always get what you want But if you try…
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At a recent speech in Detroit, President Trump summed up his first year in office thusly: “I told you we were going to do a lot of things, Nobody thought it was going to turn out like this. This has been crazy.” When it comes to Trump 2.0’s foreign policy over the past 12 months,…
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In a Mar-a-Lago press conference on the morning of January 3rd, President Trump stated that the United States would “run” Venezuela until a proper transition to a new government can occur. The president’s announcement came in the wake of a lightning U.S. military raid on Caracas, leading to the apprehension on drug-related charges of Venezuelan…
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It was a decidedly down year for democracy across the globe. From the battlefields of eastern Ukraine to the smouldering conflicts in south and southeast Asia to the coup-infected states of sub-Saharan Africa to America’s gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean, the putative gold standard of representative government took a beating over the past twelve months. …
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The world is brimming with crises. Leaders across the globe are burning the midnight oil, trying to find acceptable solutions to seemingly intractable strategic dilemmas, from the ongoing bloodshed in the historic lands of Kievan Rus to the unsettled prospects for a lasting peace in the Middle East to the dangerous sabre-rattling between Tokyo and…
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This is the final article in a four-part series on U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century, the focus of which is to explain how America went from being the self-proclaimed “indispensable” leader of the free world in the 1990s to today’s more conflicted and introspective great power. Nine years ago, when Donald Trump was…
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This is the third in a four-part series on U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century, the focus of which will be to explain how America went from being the self-proclaimed “indispensable” leader of the free world in the 1990s to today’s more conflicted, hesitant, and introspective great power. “I’ve come here to Cairo to…
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