(Rendering Yale-NUS College | Source: Yale-NUS) U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Robert O. Blake performed the diplomatic equivalent of gold-medal figure skating last April in a meeting at the authoritarian central Asian nation of Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University when a student asked him about warnings by American critics and human-rights monitors that “a democracy cannot have […]

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There is a new normal in America: Our government may shut down, but our wars continue. Congress may not be able to pass a budget, but the U.S. military can still launch commando raids in Libya and Somalia, the Afghan War can still be prosecuted, Italy can be garrisoned by American troops (putting the “empire” […]

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(Source: Tate) On the BBC a couple for weekends ago, I heard an expert on the Middle East describing how the civil war in Syria was worsening by the day. He said something like, “Some of the opposition are not nice middle class liberals, you know.” The clear implication was that working-class rebels were the […]

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(Source: Haaretz) Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu gave a major speech the other day at Bar Ilan University. Most of it was saber rattling at Iran, but enough of it was about the Palestinians to steel my belief that negotiating with Netanyahu is a waste of time and that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s […]

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(Source: ABC) I have always believed that, at some point, the Israeli prime minister and his lobby would lose their grip on U.S. Middle East policy, at least I’ve believed that since 1982 when Tom Dine, AIPAC’s most successful executive director, explained how it would happen. It was during my four year stint at AIPAC […]

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