Columns, pieces and posts
Acrimony, insults, the government shut down. Time to talk to a wise man, someone from the days when government worked. I turned to the famous Mr. Baker—James A. Baker III, U.S secretary of state (1989-92), secretary of the Treasury (1985-88) and White House chief of staff under Ronald Reagan (1981-85) and George H.W. Bush (1992-93). […]
Tom Clancy was a great gentleman, generous and kind. He gave a lot of money away to medical research, and if you wanted to hear him get excited you talked about what doctors were doing to make the world better. They were his heroes. He loved America and worried about her. Our friendship over the […]
The world misses the old America, the one before the crash—the crashes—of the past dozen years. That is the takeaway from conversations the past week in New York, where world leaders gathered for the annual U.N. General Assembly session. Our friends, and we have many, speak almost poignantly of the dynamism, excellence, exuberance and leadership […]
Washington An accomplished American diplomat once said that there are two templates of American foreign-policy thinking. The first is Munich and the second is Vietnam. When America does not move militarily as some people wish it to, they say, “This is another Munich”—appeasement that in the end will summon greater violence and broader war. When […]
Here’s the Starbucks gun request the company made today. The company, which has some 10,000 stores and 160,000 employees in the U.S., is asking customers who carry handguns in open-carry states to please not bring their guns into the store. It’s hard to believe this will be taken as controversial or as anything other than […]
He twisted the knife and gloated, which was an odd and self-indulgent thing to do when he was winning. Vladimir Putin, in his essay in the New York Times, may even to some degree have overplayed his hand, though that won’t matter much immediately. As a public posture, grace and patience would have brought him […]
I wrote a blog post a while back about how sometimes after a column goes up a reader writes and states, more succinctly than you had, your essential point. People find the essence of what you’re saying and give it to you more clearly than you’d given it to them. With today’s column a variation […]
He should have canceled the speech. It was halfhearted, pro forma and strange. It added nothing, did not deepen or advance the story, was not equal to the atmosphere surrounding it, and gave no arguments John Kerry hasn’t made, often more forcefully, in the past 10 days. It was a time filler: The White House […]
This is what I think we’re seeing: The president has backed away from a military strike in Syria. But he can’t acknowledge this or act as if it is true. He is acting and talking as if he’s coolly, analytically, even warily contemplating the Russian proposal and the Syrian response. The proposal, he must know, […]
It is hard, if you’ve got a head and a heart, to come down against a strong U.S. response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons against its civilian population. This is especially so if you believe that humanity stands at a door that leads only to darkness. Those who say, “But Saddam Hussein used chemical […]