23 Items

Gen. Joseph Dunford prepares to testify on Capitol Hill

AP

Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Policy

This Is How Great-Power Wars Get Started

| June 21, 2017

To avoid escalations of this sort, the Trump administration should now lay out a positively defined political vision for the Middle East, which would accompany and tether its negatively defined anti-Islamic State and anti-Iranian goals. At this time, the fundamental part of this vision must be a clear U.S. position on the future of Kurdish-held areas in Iraq and Syria.

Jeremy Corbyn

AP

Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Policy

That Time Theresa May Forgot that Elections Come With Opponents

| June 09, 2017

"The biggest hole in the Tory battle plan should have been obvious: Whether or not one thinks Brexit is a good idea, it is plainly not about stability, or continuity. It’s potentially the most radical change in U.K. domestic and foreign policy in half a century, a step that will change the daily lives of everyone in this country and that of their children."

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump visit Yad Vashem

AP

Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Policy

Jared Kushner's Growing Stench of Treason

| May 27, 2017

"But it's the very legitimacy of wanting better relations with Russia, given Trump's democratic mandate to pursue such a course, that makes Kushner's desire to hide the Trump transition team’s connections with the Kremlin from U.S. intelligence so dubious, especially if he did intend for the backchannel to continue, or to start, after the inauguration. That is the kernel of the illegitimacy here: not the effort to improve relations through a backchannel, but the extraordinary measures to keep it secret from one's own side."

Donald Trump Melbourne Florida rally

AP

Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Policy

Ego-Maniac Revolutions Don't Last

| Mar. 01, 2017

"Trump's power has depended on his control over his Make America Great Again movement. And that's why he needs the Bannons of this world to keep pumping the zeal, in permanent campaign mode. But how long is it before the overthrow-the-world stuff that propelled a political insurgency starts to sound like tired regime propaganda uttered by tedious apparatchiks?"

Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Policy

The Two-Hundred-Year Era of 'Left' and 'Right' Is Over

| November 14, 2016

"...[I]t was the globalization of the 1990s, inspired by the neoliberal economics of the 1980s, that pushed the West into a postindustrial phase in the first place, as manufacturing jobs moved to emerging markets. That was great for western shareholders; not so great for western factory workers. The left and right model of political normality started to come apart; 30 years later, we have Brexit, President Trump, and the prospect of Président Le Pen."

Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, meets with Saudi Arabia Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the Hangzhou International Expo Center in Hangzhou in eastern China's Zhejiang province, Sept. 4, 2016.

AP

Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Policy

Vladimir of Arabia

| November 2, 2016

"Despite being on different sides of the Syrian civil war, Putin has managed to bring Riyadh into its diplomatic orbit through cooperation on oil policy, given how both Saudi-led OPEC states and Russia need substantially higher prices for government budgets to break even."

Smoke rises as people flee their homes during clashes between Iraqi security forces and members of the Islamic State group fleeing Mosul, Iraq, Oct. 18, 2016.

AP Images

Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Policy

Mosul and Aleppo Are Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing

| October 17, 2016

"Trying to predict the long-term outcome of conflicts of the sort that have engulfed Iraq and Syria is a fool's game. While the conflicts in Syria and Iraq have dragged on for years, the complex religious wars in Europe they resemble lasted more than a century. Although the fall of Mosul and Aleppo would mark the boundary between one military phase of the conflict and another, the underlying politics of the conflict are still in a mess."

Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Policy

OPEC is in its Death Throes

| October 11, 2016

"...Saudi Arabia's energetic and ambitious young deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, appears to see beyond the immediate threat of U.S. shale to the Saudi oil industry....He is focused on the broader need for major reform of the Saudi economy.  Climate change will plainly be a major problem of the 21st century, and the world is moving away from fossil fuels: game over for an unreformed Saudi Arabia."