Think of it as the all-American version of the human comedy: a great power that eternally knows what the world needs and offers copious advice with a tone deafness that would be humorous, if it weren’t so grim. If you look, you can find examples of this just about anywhere. Here, for instance, is a…
The only new part of the ongoing Trump Administration economic warfare, a calculated assault on friend and foe alike from Russia to China to Iran to Venezuela and the EU, via so-called tariff war, is a President who uses Tweets as a weapon to throw opponents off balance. Since at least the beginning of the…
I was just interviewed by two Temple journalism students, Amelia Burns and Erin Moran, and though they appeared very bright and enterprising, with Erin already landing a job that pays all her bills, I feel for these young ladies, for this is a horrible time to make and sell words, of any kind, and the…
Oil realities in 2018 Donald Trump has Tweeted about a phone call to Saudi Arabia’s King Salman where the elderly monarch is said to have agreed to increase the production of oil to 2 million barrels per day so as to lower fuel prices in the United States, the world’s second largest energy consumer. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1013023608040513537…
Few phobias run deeper in Europe than the fear and hatred of Turks. For at least six hundred years, Europe was locked in innumerable wars with first Seljuk, then Ottoman Turks. My big St Bernard is a descendant of dogs bred to attack Arab and Turkish raiders coming over Switzerland’s St Bernard Pass. Today, by…
History may have registered stranger geoeconomic bedfellows. But in the current OPEC-plus world, the rules of the game are now de facto controlled by OPEC powerhouse Saudi Arabia in concert with non-OPEC Russia. Russia may even join OPEC as an associate member. There’s a key clause in the bilateral Riyadh-Moscow agreement stipulating that joint interventions…
