"...[T]here are some voices, on both sides of the Atlantic, who are advocating, as a possible option, teaming up with the Assad regime to attack ISIS. I would note that negotiations expert Robert H. Mnookin (Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), while acknowledging that as a principle one should not refuse to negotiate with one's enemies, points out that in certain circumstances this may not be wise."

"When we observe on television the tragic scenes in Ferguson, Missouri, we get a idea of just how damaged our society is: what we see, in large part, is a black underclass living for the most part apart."

"The extreme jihadi fringe of Sunni Islam, in its incarnation as ISIS (now the Islamic State) has embarked on a policy of forced conversion or alternatively death against the minority Kurdish sect, the Yazidis and against Iraqi Christians. This leaves the rest of Muslims in no position to object to attacks on an obscurantist organization — ISIS — which is carrying out wholesale murder of minorities representing other religions. Furthermore, it is a situation utterly intolerable to the international community."

"The Gaza war, which hopefully will end soon, has caused so far some 1,900 Palestinain deaths and 67 Israeli deaths. However, the message of Prof. Sheinmam was not well received and has become a national news issue in Israel. Indignant students complained to the university, saying they were offended because he had equated Palestinian war deaths with Israeli ones."

"It is all the more tragic in that it is in Israel's best interest to end the Palestinian occupation and agree to a two-state solution, rather than simply continue ad hoc and without a strategy or plan for peace for the last nearly 50 years since the end of the Six Day War."

"...[R]estricting the access, firing guns into the air to prove a point, and looting bodies in some cases, the followers of the so-called Donetsk Peoples Republic in southeastern Ukraine did nothing but heap shame on themselves and indirectly, on their Russian sponsors."

This book is a collection of the author's blogposts from 2008–2013, almost all of them from the Huffington Post and reposted on the website of the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs by the International Security Program. Most of them deal with the author's particular area of expertise, from Morocco to Bangladesh, but also with Europe and transatlantic issues. A few are film reviews, and others deal with the U.S. Presidency and the Congress.

"The skyrocketing popularity of Putin in Russia after his illegal annexation of Crimea and his tactic of 'hybrid war' (which we in the U.S. would call covert action), is a measure of just how wronged the Russian people feel about how the post–Cold War world has turned out...."

"What some perceive as a new era of weakness is rather, to borrow the title of a Tennessee Williams play, a period of adjustment, in which we are becoming a power among others. Certainly a military power superior to all the others, but no longer in a position, nor with the disposition, to intervene anywhere and everywhere in the world."

"...German immigration is the largest of all the European immigrations to the U.S., and this makes for a certain predisposition in favor of Germany....[T]he American protector role in Germany during the Cold War led to an intimate relationship between the political classes in the two countries, reaching its apotheosis at the moment of German reunification...."