Part of the problem is that many U.S. ambassadors do not know what their job consists of, Phil Giraldi writes. Whenever one gets into discussions about the decline of America’s ability to positively influence developments around the world a number of issues tend to surface. First is the hubristic claim by successive presidents that the…
Jonah Goldberg and Michael Ledeen have much in common. They are both writers and also cheerleaders for military interventions and, often, for frivolous wars. Writing in the conservative rag, The National Review, months before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Goldberg paraphrased a statement which he attributed to Ledeen with reference to the interventionist…
Each century of international relations is marked by the initiatives of a few exceptional men. Their approach to their countries’ foreign relations is based on common principles. Let us take as recent examples the cases of the Indian Jawaharlal Nehru, the Egyptian Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Indonesian Soekarno, the Chinese Zhou Enlai, the French Charles…
The recently inaugurated Israeli government, the Coalition-for-Change, the wet dream of Israeli and American liberals, Biden-approved-and-blessed after fifteen years of Bibi Netanyahu’s tyranny and four rounds of elections in the last two years – barely surviving a vote of confidence in cliffhanger-fashion – 59:59. It came to power on a slim ‘majority’ of 59.5:60.5 in…
On the domestic front, Joe Biden is flirting with transformational policies around energy, environment, and infrastructure. It’s not a revolution, but it’s considerably less timid than what Barack Obama offered in that pre-Trump, pre-pandemic era. When it comes to foreign policy, however, the Biden administration has been nowhere near as transformational. The phrase Joe Biden…
The world can learn a lot from President Putin’s leadership style and approach to tackling today’s key issues. Russian President Putin held his yearly Direct Line question and answer session with the Russian people on Wednesday which lasted for nearly four hours this time. He covered topics as important as COVID-19, foreign and domestic affairs,…
