In 2010, I was invited to hold a presentation titled “Will Russia someday close the gas tap?” It was a rookie mistake, early in my career, so I didn’t think about how the presentation would be advertised. I just suggested general topics I wanted to talk about in the broader context of...
Until recently, France appeared to be on the way out, the Australian-American betrayal on the submarine deal the coup de grace, the ultimate humiliation for what once was known as the grande nation. Grand no longer, a nation at risk, collective psyche in the dumpster: autumn in France. Things...
The Republican Party is facing an existential crisis. Will their traditional base of small-government, low-tax party members endure, especially as they come under increasing attacks from, anti-immigrant, anti-science MAGA fundamentalists? Democrats face challenges of their own trying to figure...
Gulf Arab states are in a pickle. They fear that the emerging parameters of a reconfigured US commitment to security in the Middle East threaten to upend a pillar of regional security and leave them with no good alternatives. The shaky pillar is the Gulf monarchies’ reliance on a powerful...
Political news in the US often begins with legitimate debate and then quickly tends toward the competition between extravagant personalities that can only delight the media. They don’t even have to pay the actors. Occasionally it can rival reality TV, attaining the gold standard of the...
In early September, with the war in Afghanistan officially over and the Middle East retreating from the media’s landscape, The New York Times began preparing the American public for the next theater of war. This time it will be just off the coast of mainland China, in Taiwan. There will be no...
US President Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress are facing a crisis as the popular domestic agenda they ran on in the 2020 elections is held hostage by two corporate Democratic senators: fossil-fuel consigliere Joe Manchin and payday-lender favorite Kyrsten Sinema. But the very week before the...
In a discussion concerning a new law that restricts the attribution of French visas to North Africans, French President Emmanuel Macron accused Algeria’s leadership of the crime of using the history of French oppression during the colonial period as an excuse for fomenting what he deems an...
Turkey went through a terrible summer from an ecological point of view. The country has been experiencing unprecedented wildfires caused by heatwaves and droughts that have devastated forests in the southwestern part of Anatolia, while floods have been hitting the north and east. The disasters...
Jair Bolsonaro gave a speech at the UN General Assembly last month. It was full of the usual misstatements and exaggerations for which the Brazilian leader has become notorious. But the most noteworthy part of the speech had nothing to do with its contents. It was Bolsonaro’s refusal to take a...
In December 2019, I wrote an article on Fair Observer titled, “Climate Change: One Step Forward, While Standing Still.” It was a cheeky piece, looking somewhat depressingly at the progress of the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change (UNFCCC) meetings, otherwise known as the...
