‘Now we can get back to normal.’ That was the sigh of relief, tinged with at least a frisson of Schadenfreude, with which many international-relations commentators greeted the defeat of President Trump. The subsequent arrival of effective Covid-19 vaccines added to their mild delight that an extraordinary final year of a singular four-year US presidency…
It was the end of October 2001. Two friends, Max Elbaum and Bob Wing, had just dropped by. (Yes, children, believe it or not, people used to drop in on each other, maskless, once upon a time.) They had come to hang out with my partner Jan Adams and me. Among other things, Max wanted to get some instructions from…
Ever since November third the American political/media class have been keeping Democrats fixated on Trump’s post-election shenanigans with garment-rending urgency, now going so far as to call for yet another oxygen-sucking impeachment as he’s on his way out the door while millions of Americans are struggling just to meet their basic needs. You wouldn’t know…
Perfumed and tailored for a certain brand of folksy, identity politics, Pete Buttigieg hoped to blast his way to the White House having run a community of 102,000 constituents in South Bend, Indiana. Mayor Pete was hoping for the best, though his effort did not so much stall as fall over early on before the…
For the second consecutive year in a row, Estonia once again rang in the New Year by having one of its senior officials bring up a debunked border scandal with Russia, which is nothing more than a desperate attempt to generate attention from its distracted American ally and promote ultra-nationalist narratives at home. The most…
President Recep Tayyip Erdoganushered in the new year, pledging to employ his country’s military to secureTurkey’s place in a rebalanced new world order. Mr. Erdogan spelledout his vision when he inserted himself on December 30 into anaddress by his defense minister, Hulusi Akar, to several hundred masked Turkishand Azeri military officers in the Azerbaijani capital…
