Nobody in their right mind would advocate what is called ‘first use’ of nuclear weapons. ‘Nuclear winter’ is defined in Britannica as “the environmental devastation that certain scientists contend would probably result from the hundreds of nuclear explosions in a nuclear war.” One immediately direct effect of such a conflict would be to block out…
Professional sports is a cutthroat business. Succeed and the people running the show reap rich rewards. Fail to meet expectations and you get handed your walking papers. American-style war in the twenty-first century is quite a different matter. Of course, war is not a game. The stakes on the battlefield are infinitely higher than on…
Three decades after the Cold War officially ended, the U.S. is setting a new record high for annual expenditure on its armed forces. As this year ends, U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law military spending of $770 billion. That’s just for the next year alone. The scale of wastefulness and bloated corruption is eye-watering….
Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin spent an hour and 14 minutes in a video conversation on Wednesday. Geopolitically, paving the way for 2022, this is the one that really matters – much more than Putin-Biden a week ago. Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov, who generally carefully measures his words, had previously hinted that this exchange…
Discussions of war with China over Taiwan often assume a short, regional war won by superior American technology, after which things go on approximately as before. A few observations: First, overconfidence is an occupational disease of militaries and militarists. Wars very often fail to proceed according to the expectations of the aggressors and not infrequently…
The good news is that today is Pearl Harbor Day, which brought about the US entry in World War II, a war that never would have been fought if sanity had prevailed among leading statesmen of that era. The lesson-learned for today should be about the steps that could have and should have been taken…
