“This is in a way the anger presidency.  Anger defines Mr. Trump’s decade on the political stage.  Mr. Trump is not the first president with a temper.  Even the genial Dwight D. Eisenhower was known to be sharp behind closed doors.  Lyndon B. Johnson’s tantrums were Texas size.  Richard M. Nixon seemed to be on More

Kiran unlocked her dosa shop in Bangalore before sunrise, a morning ruotine she had followed for many years. Only, this time she was not able to open for business. The price of gas had surged again, and deliveries of a LPG cylinder had become uncertain. Thousands of kilometers away in Meru, Hassan postponed harvesting his crop due to rising diesel prices. In Berlin, Anna has begun lowering the heating to cope with rising energy bills. More

In early reporting on the Iran War as “the ultimate war of choice,” the New York Times spoke, as usual, in the sanitizing language of political realism. This is the lingua franca of the foreign policy elite in the Atlanticist alliance, consisting of the self-anointed ‘liberal democracies.’ It is definitely a more refined and less objectionable manner of labeling an unprovoked ‘war of aggression’ than the brazen utterances of the U.S. president, Donald Trump, who had the audacity to trivialize the bloodshed and devastation traumatizing Iran’s innocent population as ‘an excursion.’ More

When I joined the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Intelligence in the summer of 1966, the Soviet Division was in great turmoil because of the failure to predict the fall of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev two years earlier.  Because of that analytic failure, the chief of the Soviet Domestic Branch had been replaced along with several of his veteran analysts.  Most of the new and remaining analysts were without significant intelligence experience.  My immediate reaction to this bureaucratic turmoil was “how would CIA analysts in McLean, Virginia, anticipate the coup against Khrushchev if it came as a surprise to Khrushchev?” Nevertheless, I learned from that experience that there were significant consequences for successes and failures in the intelligence community. More