History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind– Edward Gibbon Counterfactual history is generally a waste of time because, in the end, it’s just speculation. But it’s fun and it can sometimes illuminate factual history. For example, take the aborted Soviet-French-British alliance to stop Hitler. It came…
The tiny Baltic nation of Estonia is attempting to revive a so-called “border dispute” with Russia in order to position itself as one of NATO’s “frontline states” against the Eurasian Great Power, which Tallinn expects will result in more military support from the bloc that its ruling party could then leverage for domestic political purposes,…
Igor Kolomoysky, the Ukrainian oligarch who financed Neo-Nazi death squads in Donbas, told the New York Times last month that Ukraine could potentially join a “New Warsaw Pact”, but his dramatic words should be seen through the prism of a disgruntled billionaire who has an axe to grind with the West for personal reasons but…
Since a few things became clear to me last year, I’ve consistently forecasted a significant worsening in U.S.-China relations and remained adamant that all the happy talk of trade deals and breakthroughs is just a lot of hot air. What first appeared to be a unique quirk of Donald Trump has morphed into bipartisan consensus…
If we make it out of the climate emergency, we may come to view the few decades usually described simply as the Cold War that followed the Second World War as halcyon days – at least relative to what we are facing now. The Cold War was a power struggle between two economic empires for…
The three smartest words that Donald Trump uttered during his presidential campaign are “NATO is obsolete.” His adversary, Hillary Clinton, retorted that NATO was “the strongest military alliance in the history of the world.” Now that Trump has been in power, the White House parrots the same worn line that NATO is “the most successful…
