The Clinton Worldview
Hillary has clarified. She says that she really didn’t mean to attack President Obama’s foreign policies in that Atlantic interview last week. Maybe. But she did very clearly mean to stake out a position to the hawkish right of the ...
Read MoreIraq, Again
A couple of months ago, I said that it was hard to know the right course for the US in dealing with developments in Iraq, and that President Obama’s cautious approach was “about right.” Circumstances have changed, but my basic ...
Read MoreGaza—Where From Here?
Jimmy Carter has sometimes been called the greatest US ex-president. I’m not sure about that—I would probably name John Quincy Adams for that distinction, and William Howard Taft might also be a contender. Still, there is no doubt that Carter’s ...
Read MoreGaza: A War Fought Justly?
In my last post I explained how just war theory (JWT) distinguishes the question of whether a decision to go to war is justified (jus ad bellum) from the question of whether a war is being waged in ways that ...
Read MoreGaza: A Just War?
I had a ticket on a plane to Tel Aviv this evening, joining my wife who would already have been in Israel on a business trip. For obvious reasons, that trip is off. But I did say in my post ...
Read MorePlanes and Propaganda
There’s still a lot we don’t know, but at this point it seems highly likely that the downing of a Malysian airliner over the Ukraine was the work of trigger-happy pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists who literally didn’t know what they were ...
Read MoreIsrael/Palestine: Explaining America’s Failure
In his newsletter yesterday, M.J. Rosenberg succinctly described the obstacle to peace in Israel/Palestine: Everyone knows that the only way to permanently end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is by Israel getting out of the territories occupied after the ’67 war in ...
Read MoreAs Rockets Fall on Tel Aviv
Unless the situation worsens, I plan to be in Israel two weeks from now, and I expect that after I get back I’ll have more to say about this powerful cri de coeur from one Tel Aviv resident, blogger Noam Sheizaf. For ...
Read MoreIsrael/Palestine: The Asymmetry of Terror
The murder of the three abducted Israeli teenagers is a mind-boggling atrocity, for which no justification is possible. But it is almost as stupid as it is immoral, because it lends credence to the standard narrative—accepted no less widely in ...
Read MoreOur Off-Center Supreme Court
In its final round of decision-making for the season, the Supreme Court exhibited some predictable alignments and some surprising ones. To take the predictable ones first: the Court decided that closely-held corporations like Hobby Lobby could on religious grounds refuse ...
Read MoreBuy my book
