07/12/2018
Due to an unusual conflation of events, over the past two weeks we’ve caught a rare glimpse of the face of European foreign policy. We shouldn’t let it pass unremarked. Last Friday, the European Union’s foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini presided over a curious summit in Vienna. In the same hall where she and her colleagues concluded the nuclear deal…
07/10/2018
Is President Donald Trump going to destroy the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) when he attends its summit in Brussels on July 12? To watch and read the commentary being broadcast and published by the foreign policy elite on both sides of the Atlantic, it certainly seems like it. One of the interesting aspects of the hysteria is that NATO’s supporters never seem to think it is necessary to explain…
07/08/2018
Since President Donald Trump entered the White House, hardly a day has gone by without Israel receiving a warning from a Democratic politician or a liberal American Jewish leader that it had better curb its enthusiasm and be reticent in its support for Trump and his policies. The partisan split is clear. A Pew survey of American support for Israel in January…
07/08/2018
On Monday, seven former US ambassadors to the UN sent a letter to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insisting that the administration restore full funding to UNRWA, the UN agency that funds so-called Palestinian refugees. Since UNRWA was established in 1949, the US has given nearly $5 billion to the agency tasked with perpetuating refugee status among descendants of…
07/04/2018
When Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the green light to Russian aerial bombing of rebel-held positions in southwestern Syria two weeks ago, he knew he was asking for trouble. And he appears to be getting plenty of it. Putin knows that in approving the operation, he wasn’t simply enabling Syrian President Bashar Assad and his Syrian military forces to extend…
06/29/2018
News coverage of the large and growing anti-regime protests in Iran this week has included warnings by Iran “experts” insisting that the vocal support the protesters are receiving on social media from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is counterproductive. Israeli and US statements of support for the Iranian people and their desire to rid…
06/28/2018
Turkey’s elections last Sunday did not produce any surprise results. The vote saw President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reelected with an outright 52 percent majority, as expected. Erdogan’s AKP Justice and Development Party retained control over the Turkish parliament (albeit in conjunction with the ultranationalist, anti-Kurdish MHP party). The results will not change the trajectory that Erdogan launched Turkey upon some 15…
06/27/2018
President Donald Trump will soon meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. When he does, he must respond to a challenge Putin threw down in Syria, on the heels of Trump’s diplomatic breakthrough with North Korea. How Trump and his administration respond to that challenge will affect not only the future of U.S.-Russian relations, but also Trump’s ability to operate credibly…
06/26/2018
National Security Advisor John Bolton said last Wednesday that while discussion of President Donald Trump’s decision to leave the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has centered on the administration’s revulsion with its institutional anti-Israel bias, the move was really about restoring American control over U.S. foreign policy. In his words: “We did talk about Israel [in setting out our reasons for leaving…
06/22/2018
A Google search of the terms “Trump Nazi,” brings up 70,900,000 results. There are a number of distressing aspects to this state of affairs. First and foremost, it is pure libel to call US President Donald Trump a Nazi. His daughter Ivanka is Jewish. His daughter-in-law is Jewish. Half his grandchildren are Jewish and his non-Jewish ex-daughter-in-law is half…