OK, Tucker Carlson and Fox News, I get it: How can the U. S. have as a priority the defense of the sovereignty of Ukraine and its borders when we can’t find a way to protect our own borders?  Good point. I see the cognitive dissonance here and I condemn the Biden administration for its […]

“The Afghan withdrawal is one of the sorriest American failures in decades.  Its consequences will play out for years, if not decades, as friends and foes recalibrate their views of U. S. political will in general, and Mr. Biden’s in particular.”–Wall Street Journal Editorial Board I couldn’t agree more with this assessment, and the worst […]

As the first flight evacuating over 200 Afghans who worked with Americans in Afghanistan touched down at Dulles Airport in Virginia this past week, I couldn’t find much news to support the assurances from the Biden administration that this U. S.  withdrawal from an “endless war”, precipitated by President Trump and sustained by President Biden, […]

If there was ever any doubt about where things stand right now with the most important major power relationship of this century, the recent meeting between senior Chinese officials and top Biden administration foreign policy officials in Anchorage should have cleared that up right away.  China’s director of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, Yang […]

My cautious optimism that President Biden’s deeds might have a chance to be consistent with his rhetoric on policy with the Chinese falls flat when it comes to policy in Iran.  Even the rhetoric is bad.  It looks like a return of Obama/Biden, where the courting of Iran continues as though that regime and its […]

“President Ronald Reagan said that he dealt with the Soviet Union on the basis of ‘trust but verify’.  When it comes to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), I say we must distrust and verify”.  With these words in a major speech delivered at the Richard M. Nixon Library on July 23, Secretary of State Mike […]

In our complicated response to the many transgressions perpetrated by China, not least of course their duplicity in the birth and spread of the Coronavirus pandemic, there is possibly one magic bullet that would have more significant impact on them than other types of power, and that is the power of freedom.  The Wall Street […]

Count me very skeptical about the Afghan deal that President Trump has just signed–“an agreement for bringing peace to Afghanistan”.  I agree that it’s the best deal with the Taliban we have seen and I like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s thinking and bearing on the deal, but I would have liked to have heard […]

I was wrong last month when I wrote that, when finally making a strategic policy choice on troop withdrawals, President Trump would not prefer a legacy in the Middle East as the President who vacated leadership in that region to Russia, Iran, and ISIS.  Only days after I wrote he made what I consider to […]

“Hong Kong is part of China.  They’ll have to deal with that themselves.  They don’t need advice.”–President Donald Trump. “Only one capital is responsible for what is unfolding in Hong Kong: Beijing……It is critical to recognize that the dynamics that led to this crisis didn’t begin in Hong Kong and won’t end there.  The turmoil […]