The story of America's war the American-enabled war in Yemen took another twist yesterday, when former Yemeni president and current Houthi ally Ali Abdullah Saleh appeared to invite Russian intervention into the conflict: A newly-formed governing council in Yemen could work with Russia to "fight terrorism" by allowing Moscow use of the war-torn country's military … Continue reading Obama’s most unforced error

My latest at LobeLog is an extended interview with former State Department official Wayne White, talking about the big failure of the war against ISIS. Although ISIS itself is being driven back on almost every front, the underlying condition that facilitated its rise, the disenfranchisement felt by large numbers of Sunni Arabs in both Syria … Continue reading Treating the symptom while the disease festers

So this is very interesting: Foreign Policy reported yesterday that, happy public reconciliation aside, in private Turkey and Russia are still not getting along when it comes to Syria: But there have been few signs so far of a major thaw at the United Nations, where Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin used a closed-door session of … Continue reading Phony bromance?

On Monday, a suicide bomber struck a hospital in Quetta, Pakistan, where a group of lawyers had gathered to protest the murder of the head of the Baluchistan Bar Association, killing at least 74 people. Responsibility for both the murder and the bombing was claimed by Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) splinter group that also … Continue reading The Quetta bombing and ISIS in Pakistan

What's happening right now in Aleppo, which is frankly even worse than I made it out to be yesterday, has always been one of the nightmare humanitarian scenarios in terms of how Syria's civil war might play out. Aleppo was Syria's largest city before the war and has still been home to somewhere between one … Continue reading The unsolvable problem of Aleppo

Obviously I have no way of knowing the exact worst place to be on the entire planet at this very moment. Being at the bottom of the Mariana Trench would probably suck, for example. But I can't imagine anyplace being consistently more terrifying an abode for most of the past ~5 years than the city … Continue reading The worst place on Earth right now?

I'm sure most of you have heard the legend that Scipio Aemilianus sowed the fields of Carthage with salt at the end of the Third Punic War (c. 146 BC) to ensure that nothing would ever grow there again. This is, as you probably also knew, fiction, a legend invented in the 19th century as … Continue reading Root and branch

Tayyip Erdoğan was in St. Petersburg today, bro-ing it out with fellow sort-of-democratically-elected autocrat Vladimir Putin: Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russian trade sanctions on Turkey would be phased out "step by step". "The priority is to get back to the pre-crisis level of co-operation," he told Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in St Petersburg. … Continue reading Changing BFFs

I realize the old blog here has been light on what you might call "substantive" content today, but in my defense I probably got about 3 hours of uninterrupted sleep last night because our new puppy decided that our backyard was suddenly a scary place, and so instead of going to the bathroom every time … Continue reading Schrödinger’s Siege

Hey everybody, big news! "Principled Conservatives," a term that Bill Kristol has used so often lately I wouldn't be surprised if he's had it tattooed across his back, have finally found their man to make an independent run against Donald Trump, and it's big. Which intrepid and clearly well-known (otherwise it would be total folly … Continue reading Meet the heretofore unknown “Never Trump” candidate who might just hand the election to Trump