Columnist.
How did the Democratic Party of FDR and JFK get Menshevik-Bolshevik in 2026?
The weather question is practical if you know anything about the eastern front. General Winter is coming.
I think France and the U.S. both face an enemy waging plausibly deniable disintegrative war against them.
Reducing energy revenues is a legitimate war aim, though one that risked it in 2022 and in 2026 still risks alienating Germany, a key Ukrainian ally.
Bureaucrats usually avoid facts. Dead certain fact: We live in The Age of Proximity.
Russian oligarchs want to keep their billions. As long as Vlad runs the Kremlin, those billions are at risk.
“Greenland will forever be part of the strategic defense area of North America.”
Sketching the map helps explain the strategic security and economic issues.
The debt is a major security problem. But so are emerging air and space technologies that threaten the physical security of the U.S.
It appears bin Laden’s 9/11 propaganda still has ugly echoes, even within the U.S.
“There will be no minimal breathing space for the regime to rebuild its capacity to inflict terror against America and the world.”
Biden ordered a withdrawal based on the calendar and not on battlefield conditions.
Tehran believes regime change in Washington will allow the ayatollahs and their terrorist cults to survive ... and then get a nuclear weapon.
Wealth buys ammo. The wealth to buy and manufacture ammo scares bad guys with sense.
Major warfighting question in Tehran: Does the regime have enough money to continue to pay its proxies to do more than bluster?
To the chagrin of European Union negotiators, the Greek government of Prime Minister George Papandreou decided to ask the Greek public to give its yea or nay regarding the terms of the European Union’s latest bailout agreement. Three days later, under intense political pressure, he canceled the referendum.
The people of Tunisia, Arab Spring 2011’s first revolutionaries, have earned their chance to struggle with one of the 21st century’s most essential political, social and cultural questions: Will democracy moderate political Islamists, or will political Islamists undermine democracy? Note I wrote “struggle,” not “answer.” The Tunisian people have embarked on a murky process that will take years (perhaps decades) to conclude. Exaggerated optimism as to the outcome is as foolish as exaggerated pessimism, though I am certain the threats of militant violence and sleazy, destructive corruption will haunt every passing second. Violence and corruption haunt every revolution.
For almost two decades, Joseph Kony, senior commander of the Ugandan rebel Lords Resistance Army, has practiced a peculiarly evil brand of the sociopathic warfare that curses central Africa. Listing the horrors committed by Kony and his thugs numbs the mind, but also substantiates the case for dispatching U.S. special operations soldiers to help Ugandan forces combat the killers. The very public deployment of such a small but technically capable U.S. force also sends a diplomatic signal. There are bad actors in central and east Africa who benefit from violent instability throughout the region -- bad actors who encourage and seed LRA-style vicious anarchy.
Militant Islamist extremists murdering Egyptian Christians offer one criminal version of change amidst the Arab Spring 2011 revolutions. Islamist extremists, many linked to Iran or al-Qaida, are using assassination and violence to intimidate and kill moderates committed to peaceful, democratic modernization. The Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran certainly offers a model for changing culturally Islamic societies. After three decades, the Iranian regime is a clerical dystopia. Moreover, the Islamist revolutionaries established a new tyranny. Al-Qaida’s Muslim future lies in recovering lost glory. Restoring the caliphate, this time on a global basis, is part of al-Qaida’s model.
