“Whoever can conquer the street will one day conquer the state, for every form of power politics and any dictatorship-run state has its roots in the street.” – Joseph Goebbels, Third Reich Minister of Propaganda “I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump. I [...]
“The earth from which the first man was made was gathered in all the four corners of the world.” –The Talmud Amid growing horrors of the Coronavirus, it is easy to forget a very basic human lesson: We are all creatures of biology. By extrapolation, we are all stunningly fragile, closely interrelated and irremediably interdependent. [...]
“At the beginning of the pestilence and when it ends, there’s always a propensity for rhetoric….It is only in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth, to silence.” – Albert Camus, The Plague Trump presidential debilities are more serious than simple policy missteps or errors. This administration is far more [...]
“Is it an end that draws near or a beginning?” – Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age (1951) There are times when a grievous threat can menace friends and enemies alike. Still, in these conspicuously “bad times,” such a potent threat can also bring adversaries to once-unimagined levels of cooperation. The current and ongoing [...]
Abstract: Although US President Donald Trump may eventually be content with achieving only modest operational successes against Iran, there is reason to believe he would still prefer some notion of a military “victory.” Any such notion would likely be starkly injurious to overall US security interests. Derivatively, as shall now be argued, any such erroneous [...]
US President Donald Trump’s expanding crises with both North Korea and Iran, and his apparent willingness to withdraw from a second US-Russia nuclear arms control treaty, are just some currently prominent examples of a longer standing problem with world politics and international law. This problem is the continuing US inclination to base American national security [...]
In apparent response to US President Donald Trump’s unilateral American withdrawal from the July 2015 Iran Pact (JCPOA), the Islamic Republic has seemingly reinvigorated its active nuclear program. In turn, this has led to a more-or-less continuing cycle of threat and counter-threat between the two adversarial countries, and has been reinforced by both US Secretary [...]
Though rarely understood, there can be no greater form of power on this earth than power over death. Ominously, this always-preeminent form of power in world politics remains unrecognized by American foreign policy-makers. The perilous result is that this country’s counter-insurgent strategies will become less and less adequate. It’s not an enviable situation for the [...]
“Any attack by Iran on anything American will be met with great and overwhelming force. In some areas, overwhelming will mean obliteration.”-US President Donald Trump, June 23, 2019 “The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies we will have no choice but to totally [...]
Targeted killing campaigns are still accelerating under the Trump administration, with fewer constraints and even less transparency. More precisely, it seems that the Obama-era Presidential Policy Guidance has been relaxed in two very meaningful ways: targets of “kill missions” are being expanded to include more Jihadist “Foot Soldiers” (rather than just identifiable terrorist leaders) and directed drone [...]
