I have to admit that the killing of Osama bin Laden on Sunday put me in a halfway good mood. It seemed to me not only a victory against resolute and still dangerous enemies, but also an event that could help galvanize the national spirit at a time when so many Americans think that our […]

Well it’s (expletive deleted) about time! That is both my analytical and emotional bottom line on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden yesterday, on May 1, 2011. It is embarrassing, even humiliating, that it took the US government, notably the CIA, nearly a decade to chase down and take out of play this horrible […]

Tuesday’s newspapers made for some interesting reading on the subject of the Middle East. First, I take note of a New York Times op-ed called “Finish the Job” by James M. Dubik, who is described as a retired Army Lieut. Gen. who oversaw the training of Iraqi troops from the 2007 to 2008. General Dubik […]

To all appearances, U.S. foreign policy in the Obama Administration has now definitively gone down the rabbit hole. It is intoxicated with an advanced form of Wilsonian madness, one shorn of all sensitivity to the consequences of the U.S. government’s behavior. Like Alice with her pills, some things are getting or will soon get bigger—risks, […]

OK, now things are finally starting to get interesting in the Middle East. Tunisia was noteworthy, but not critical. Egypt has been very dramatic, though wildly misinterpreted by most observers in the United States. Jordan is still more or less stable, but is in fact more portentous a stake in some ways than Egypt. But […]

There is no consensus about what plutocracy and democracy mean, or how they interact to shape 21st-century American politics.

A dear friend, colleague and mentor, Harvey Sicherman, passed away on the evening of December 25 after a fairly brief illness. Times like these make me struggle yet again with the apparent impossibility of reconciling the intensity of feeling we know deep down to be real and of enormous importance with the coldness of a […]

Yesterday’s North Korean attack on South Korea has evidently frightened many people. That’s natural, for there is some incalculable but not trivial prospect that the fighting could escalate into a huge bloody mess. The attack, and the South Korean response, seems to have led to an emergency National Security Council meeting from which the President […]

For all the grand speeches, President Obama has little of substance to show on the foreign policy front.

In today’s New York Times, former President Jimmy Carter tells us that the North Korean regime is ready for a deal. Should we believe him? We don’t have to answer on the basis of mere supposition. There is some history here.On June 22, 1994, after Carter’s return from Pyongyang carrying what became known as the […]