Russia
Three Cheers for Obama and the Dems
Back to Normalcy
Why Did FIFA Choose Russia?
It seems eccentric, to say the least, that the FIFA selection committee chose Russia as the World Cup’s home in 2018, and all the more so as it meant overlooking perfectly serviceable countries such as Britain. (They also chose Qatar over the U.S. for 2022, but that's another counterintuitive story altogether.) READ MORE >>
American Allies Drop Out Drip by Drip
I couldn't believe my eyes as I read Alan Cowell's New York Times report this morning that (as of now) 19 countries would not attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo for the imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. Last year's honoree was Barack Obama, for whom there was a full-court attendance but whom I credit for the shameful deference to Beijing of so-called American allies. READ MORE >>
Bombshell
When faced with a particularly scary, nettlesome problem, there’s a natural tendency in Washington to accentuate the positive and play for time even when the clock has pretty much run out. This is certainly so with Iran’s nuclear program. READ MORE >>
Frenemies
Why Wikileaks Is Bad for Progressive Foreign Policy
Will the latest Wikileaks dump really matter that much? It’s true, as both Laura Rozen and Kevin Drum have observed, that many of the secret messages don’t seem to reveal big secrets. As Rozen wrote yesterday: READ MORE >>
