Wall Street Journal Washington bureau chief Gerald F. Seib, twittering about an important piece on one of their blogs today: Iran nuclear talks aren't going well, and two former Obama advisers say it's time for tougher talk: http://t.co/mOELeDnoAM — Gerald F Seib (@GeraldFSeib) April 4, 2014 Wow. Not going well? That sounds ominous. I've seen … Continue reading Making the news up as we go along

I have a new entry at Lobe Log on Sunday's municipal elections in Turkey, which handed Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) a fairly substantial victory. AKP obviously remains popular among at least a plurality of the Turkish electorate, in spite of the ongoing corruption investigation swirling around Erdoğan, and the … Continue reading Erdoğan’s Authoritarianism and the Deep State

Jonathan Pollard is a spy. He used his position as a civilian intelligence analyst for the Navy in the 1980s to funnel classified US intel to Israel in exchange for money and jewelry. His insistence that his actions were not about money, but about passing information to Israel that America was withholding in violation of … Continue reading Barack Obama may be about to get rolled in Middle East negotiations, but not by Iran

Well, prepare to welcome our new Cetacean overlords, my friends, because the day John Bolton warned us all about, probably, has finally come to pass: the damn United Nations, via its International Criminal Court, has ordered a stop to humanity's last line of defense against the whales, Japan's "scientific" whaling industry science thing that is … Continue reading BREAKING: International Criminal Court surrenders to global whale syndicate

Foreign Policy has a new entry in the canon of "We Must Do Something about Barrel Bombs, so here are some ideas that won't do anything to stop Barrel Bombs" literature, this time by Lama Fakih of Human Rights Watch. All sorts of caveats apply here, as they did the last time I wrote about … Continue reading Instead of stopping barrel bombs, how about finding a way to end the war?

Why do you keep fighting all the time, Paul Krugman and Nate Silver? Is it our fault? Are you guys getting a divorce? OH GOD PLEASE DON'T GET A DIVORCE WE'LL BE GOOD WE SWEAR!!!!!11! OK, so is this Krugman-Silver pas de dweeb (I kid!) really something we're supposed to care about? The new FiveThirtyEight … Continue reading LEAVE NATE SILVER ALOOONE

I have a new Ukraine/Crimea piece up at Lobe Log, probably my last Ukraine piece there unless something really dramatic happens (I tend to agree with the thinking behind Pavel Felgenhauer's piece in Foreign Policy that argues that if Putin plans on moving against the rest of Ukraine, he needs to do it soon or … Continue reading Crimea: disputed narratives

There's some intense stuff going on in Eastern Europe, in the Black Sea area especially. The leader of a supposed-constitutional republic has been getting out of hand for some time now--suppressing internal opposition, dealing harshly with dissenters, that sort of thing. Lately though, he's not only started tightly controlling the media in his country, but … Continue reading A real Putin’s Putin

If the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, or the UAE actually cared about the safety of migrant workers in the Persian Gulf, this would have been a pretty good rationale for withdrawing their ambassadors from Qatar: A report from the International Trade Union Confederation says 1,200 migrant workers from India and Nepal have died in … Continue reading How many people do you need to kill to host a World Cup?

The Brussels Forum, quoting from their website, "is an annual high-level meeting of the most influential North American and European political, corporate, and intellectual leaders to address pressing challenges currently facing both sides of the Atlantic." It's going on right now. Today there was a panel called "The Fate of Syria Three Years On," which … Continue reading Great arguments for military intervention