To prepare the streets for Donald Trump’s walk to St. James Church in Washington, DC on June 1, 2020 – an apparent public relations stroll where he held up a Bible – the US Secret Service engaged in highly unusual and plausibly illegal behavior. More precisely, in ironic contrast to its proper statutory authority, which [...]
“The man who laughs has not yet heard the terrible news.” -Bertolt Brecht Any explicit comparisons of the Trump presidency with the Third Reich will elicit multiple cries of horror and execration across the United States, even when it had first been admitted that this American administration is similarly misleading and existentially dangerous. Nonetheless, to [...]
From the beginnings of his crudely acrimonious presidency, Donald Trump has actively undermined US foreign policy relationships. On urgently key matters of world politics and international law, Mr. Trump’s typically invalid conclusions have generally been drawn from narrowly belligerent premises. Truly, the main problem with such faulty presidential arguments, however, has not been Trump’s gratuitously [...]
“What does not benefit the entire hive is no benefit to the bee.” -Marcus Aurelius, Meditations From the beginning, Donald Trump’s ideology of “America First” has been misconceived. In essence, any concocted presidential notion that exploitative and self-aggrandizing American postures can propel the United States in gainful directions is grievously fanciful. Looked at somewhat differently, [...]
“Whoever can conquer the street will one day conquer the state, for every form of power politics and any dictatorship-run state has its roots in the street.” – Joseph Goebbels, Third Reich Minister of Propaganda “I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump. I [...]
“The earth from which the first man was made was gathered in all the four corners of the world.” –The Talmud Amid growing horrors of the Coronavirus, it is easy to forget a very basic human lesson: We are all creatures of biology. By extrapolation, we are all stunningly fragile, closely interrelated and irremediably interdependent. [...]
“At the beginning of the pestilence and when it ends, there’s always a propensity for rhetoric….It is only in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth, to silence.” – Albert Camus, The Plague Trump presidential debilities are more serious than simple policy missteps or errors. This administration is far more [...]
“Is it an end that draws near or a beginning?” – Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age (1951) There are times when a grievous threat can menace friends and enemies alike. Still, in these conspicuously “bad times,” such a potent threat can also bring adversaries to once-unimagined levels of cooperation. The current and ongoing [...]
Abstract: Although US President Donald Trump may eventually be content with achieving only modest operational successes against Iran, there is reason to believe he would still prefer some notion of a military “victory.” Any such notion would likely be starkly injurious to overall US security interests. Derivatively, as shall now be argued, any such erroneous [...]
US President Donald Trump’s expanding crises with both North Korea and Iran, and his apparent willingness to withdraw from a second US-Russia nuclear arms control treaty, are just some currently prominent examples of a longer standing problem with world politics and international law. This problem is the continuing US inclination to base American national security [...]
