08/28/2020
Between his meetings in Jerusalem on Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recorded a short address for the Republican National Convention in which he discussed many of the Trump administration’s foreign policy accomplished. By the time his remarks were broadcast in the U.S. Tuesday night, Pompeo had already landed in Khartoum, Sudan, the second stop on his week-long shuttle…
08/28/2020
Many eulogies of Brent Scowcroft, president George H.W. Bush’s national security advisor who died on August 6, have referred to him as a foreign policy realist. Whereas the question of his putative realism boils down to how you define the term, it is very clear that Scowcroft was an institutionalist. His institutionalism passed away at the UN Security Council last…
08/21/2020
Since Israel was established, the Palestinian veto doomed all efforts to forge peace between the Arab world and the Jewish state. The Palestinian veto rests on a toxic proposition that Israel’s right to exist is contingent on its satisfaction of Palestinian claims against it. So long as the Palestinians say they are unappeased, Israel cannot expect the Arab world to…
08/14/2020
On Tuesday, two notable events occurred in the Democratic Party. Joe Biden announced he selected California Senator Kamala Harris to serve as his running mate in November; and Rep. Ilhan Omar won her primary, all-but guaranteeing her return to Congress for a second term. On the face of things, Harris’s selection seems like the more significant of the two events.…
08/14/2020
Two days after the port of Beirut was destroyed last Tuesday, the first of three U.S. military C-130 cargo planes arrived in the devastated city. U.S. relief from the three shipments is valued at $17 million. U.S. commander of Central Command (Centcom), Marine General Frank McKenzie, called the chief of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) Gen. Joseph Aoun and expressed “U.S. willingness…