hen Rahm Emanuel told audiences that former President Barack Obama should “never let a serious crisis go to waste,” he was applauded. Emanuel was referring to the Obama Administration’s response to the Great Recession. Clearly, President Obama agreed. Obama ushered in the greatest reorganization of the American socio-economic order under the auspices of resolving the […]
hroughout American history, presidents have made public pronouncements about their desire to avoid war even as they also embraced conflict as a viable tool of national policy. This was the case with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s posture toward the Japanese Empire. And it could also be the case with President Donald J. Trump and Iran. As […]
ast year, President Trump agreed to a “Phase One” trade deal with China. As a result of this tentative agreement, the president paused a “trade war” that had begun to harm American farmers. But China hawks believed (and still believe) that whatever damage America sustained in the near-term was worth the longer-term changes President Trump […]
China has overcome its last significant hurdle to spaceflight. The Chinese have successfully launched their much-anticipated Long March V heavy-lift rocket. China can now place the modules to construct the Tianhe-1 space station (meant to rival the International Space Station) in orbit and, more importantly, Beijing can attempt its first interplanetary mission to Mars in late 2020. […]
During the Raisina Dialogue in India this summer, Spanish Foreign Minister Joseph Borrell observed, “In Europe, there are countries that are small and countries who don’t know that they are small.” Although he didn’t come out and say it, he was talking about Great Britain and Brexit. Many Britons want the United Kingdom to be […]
Since Friday, according to Pensacola, Florida officials, the small northern Florida town has been crippled by a systemic cyberattack. This comes in the wake of an actual terror attack at the Pensacola Naval Air Station one day earlier. The perpetrators of the cyberattack are unknown, and it has yet to be confirmed that this malicious […]
In 1902—just a few short years after Queen Victoria’s momentous Diamond Jubilee celebration and at the height of British imperial power—London was fretting about its strategic position. British strategists, according to the late Oxford historian Michael Howard, were concerned that year about “Imperial weakness: of commitments all over the world to be defended, of well-armed […]
Canada doesn’t make sense from a geopolitical perspective. Think about it: geopolitics “provides the link between geography and strategy.” Geopolitics also seeks to “establish the links and causal relationships between geographical space and international political power, for the purpose of devising specific strategic prescriptions.” Canada is a huge country geographically—the world’s second-largest behind Russia—but it’s […]
From the end of the 19th and throughout the 20th century, Russian leaders believed that rapid, mass industrialization would modernize Russia, and make their country competitive with the West. Yet, Russia (and, later, the Soviet Union) was never able to match the productive powers of the Western states. By 2000, as George Friedman assessed, “Russia […]
This year has been an historic first for American women in space. Not only has an American female astronaut committed the world’s first cybercrime from space (directed against her wife—so stunning and brave!) but the world was also treated to NASA’s first all-female spacewalk. Of course, the pesky patriarchy at NASA reared its ugly head, […]
Have you noticed an uptick in the appearance of a specific talking point from the political and military elite about President Trump’s recent drawdown in northern Syria? It goes something like this: Yes, the president was in a tight spot in Syria—caught between Turkey, a NATO ally, and the Kurds, who we were allied with […]
Going back to the time of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled from present-day Turkey and presided over a dominion which stretched across much of the Middle East and parts of North Africa, the Muslim world was divided between two sides of the Islamic coin: the first was that of the majority Sunnis and the second […]
Last week, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) took center stage to become the withering face of the ongoing Democratic Party push to impeach their great bugaboo, President Donald J. Trump. As she closed her meandering remarks, Pelosi invoked America’s greatest moderate, Benjamin Franklin, when she reminded audiences that Franklin was asked by an […]