politics
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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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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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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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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…
