What Is ‘The Trump Doctrine’?
WIB politics July 24, 2018
As presidencies approach their midpoints, pundits begin the inevitable search for that elusive creature. The doctrine. It’s often a quixotic quest, since presidents rarely boil down their foreign-policy visions — if they even have them — to some pithy essence. Then there’s Donald Trump. Conjuring up the current president’s... Read more
We Need to Talk About the Middle East
WIB politics July 20, 2018
My father and I always had a tacit agreement. We would never speak of “that part of the world.” He’d grown up in an Orthodox Jewish family in Norfolk, Virginia. His own father, a refugee from early-20th-century pogroms in what is now Ukraine, had been the president of his... Read more
The U.S. Navy Is Struggling to Grow
WIB politics July 18, 2018
In late 2016, the U.S. defense establishment arrived at a consensus: with just 275 frontline ships, the U.S. Navy was too small to maintain a forward presence across the world’s oceans, deter Russia and China and support combat operations in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. Both the Obama... Read more
The Full Scale of Chicago’s Gun Violence
WIB politics July 6, 2018
It was a scene played out over again and again on Chicago’s West Side. Shocked and dazed from the bullets that just entered his body, a young black man was carried into an ambulance on a stretcher and whisked away to the nearest emergency room. The window of the... Read more
Pump Up the Pentagon
WIB politics July 5, 2018
Other than shouting about building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, one of Pres. Donald Trump’s most frequently proclaimed promises on the 2016 campaign trail was the launching of a half-trillion-dollar plan to repair America’s crumbling infrastructure, employing large numbers of workers in the process. Eighteen months into his... Read more
Credit-Card Wars
WIB politics June 29, 2018
In the name of the fight against terrorism, the United States is currently waging “credit-card wars” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere. Never before has this country relied so heavily on deficit spending to pay for its conflicts. The consequences are expected to be ruinous for the long-term fiscal... Read more
This story originally appeared on April 24, 2015. For decades, the United States had sought to destabilize and overthrow the Cuban government. But the most recent attempt to antagonize the Castro regime may have been the strangest. The effort involved the United States Agency for International Development and its... Read more
A Children’s Gitmo on the Border
WIB politics June 27, 2018
By the time Donald J. Trump threw in the towel, who among us hadn’t seen or heard the chilling videos in which U.S. border officials shamelessly grabbed uncomprehending children and toddlers from their pleading mothers and fathers? Some were told they were being taken to bathe or shower by... Read more
Nicaragua at the Barricades
WIB politics June 26, 2018
On April 19, 2018, university students in Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, exploded onto the streets. Their initial demand? A more effective government response to wildfires burning out of control in the country’s most precious repository of biodiversity. Soon, a social wildfire took hold in Managua and then spread across the... Read more
Leaders are routinely confronted with philosophical dilemmas. Here’s a classic one for our Trumptopian times. If you make enemies out of your friends and friends out of your enemies, where does that leave you? What does winning or losing really look like? Is a world in which walls of... Read more
