Last Saturday, The New York Times devoted more than two pages of its first section (in print) to a lengthy hit-piece, with the headline shown above. The article was also published in full online. The editors/management had assigned no fewer than nine reporters (and two “researchers”) to preparing this piece, the main argument of which can be encapsulated as follows: A 69-year-old leftist who’s a U.S. citizen named N. Roy Singham made a fortune by selling the software company he had built and then donated “at least $275 million” of that money to various left-leaning, anti-war, and anti-imperia ..read more

Now comes (yet another!) book by one of the hordes of nation-security technocrats who dominate West Asian policymaking in Democratic administrations here in Washington. In this case, it is Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East, a recent book by Steven Simon, a guy who has worked as first a career civil servant and then a political appointee in U.S. administrations going back to Pres. Ronald Reagan, and who between government stints has transited through DC’s ever whirling revolving door into presumably lucrative positions in all the “usual” kinds of militari ..read more

My distinguished colleague and friend Melvin Goodman has had some terrific pieces up at Counterpunch recently, including great, searing critiques of Pres. Biden’s rehabilitation of Eliott Abrams, and of David Ignatius’s latest piece of compacent lunacy regarding Ukraine and Russia. So imagine my surprise when I read Goodman’s latest piece there, in which he proposed that, “Implementing a grain airlift for Ukraine would be the obvious way to celebrate the 75th anniversary year of the Berlin Airlift, which was conducted from June 1948 to September 1949.” This would be to deal with the global “cr ..read more

Back in November, I wrote a bit here on JWN about my struggle to get back to doing my own writing after spending some 12 years of working mainly as an impresario for the work of others. I also wrote about my plan to start a whole new writing project, “to write and publish a weekly essay in which I’ll look at some of the very biggest, “world-order” (or geopolitical) aspects and implications of the ever-evolving international scene.” So I did launch that project, having built a special new dedicated platform, at Globalities.org, and set to work diligently to publish one significant and well-craf ..read more

On January 25, the Rand Corporation issued a short-ish study of the conflict in Ukraine, titled “Avoiding a Long War: U.S. Policy and the Trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict.” The Rand Corporation was initially founded as a think-tank that would provide “Research & Development” (R-and-D) advice to the U.S. military and it still remains strongly, though not wholly, focused on military analysis. Thus, this latest study made some waves, especially since its non-hawkish tenor stood in contrast to that of a lengthy (354-page) report that a gaggle of Rand experts released in 2019 that had ..read more

The history of World War 1 continues to be eerily relevant today. In 1928, the leftwing British war resister Arthur Ponsonby published a book titled Falsehood in War-time, Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War, whose lessons have massive relevance today. In 2001, a leftwing Belgian philosopher called Ann Morelli codified the main themes of the pro-war propaganda Ponsonby had identified into a 10-point list as follows: We do not want war. The enemy alone is to be blamed for the war. The enemy is inherently evil, resembling the devil. We defend ..read more

The history of World War 1 continues to be eerily relevant today. In 1928, the leftwing British war resister Arthur Ponsonby published a book titled Falsehood in War-time, Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War, whose lessons have massive relevance today. In 2001, a leftwing Belgian philosopher called Ann Morelli codified the main themes of the pro-war propaganda Ponsonby had identified into a 10-point list as follows: We do not want war. The enemy alone is to be blamed for the war. The enemy is inherently evil, resembling the devil. We defend ..read more

Hi. I’m just letting everyone here know about my new writing project, Globalities.org. Do check it out. I set it up to be a bit more “serious” and professional-looking than what goes on here at JWN. My plan is to put a new essay onto Globalities each Friday… and meantime I’ll use this space here at JWN for more informal writings. And check out the “About” page there, too. I haven’t quite finished the design of the space at Globalities, but I’m nearly there. I’m experimenting with having Comments over there. I got a lot of pleasure from the Comments section I had at JWN back in the old days. Bu ..read more

Over the New Year’s break, North Korea’s military test-fired some short-range (350-400 kilometer) ballistic missiles, while the country’s news agency reported that it was testing a new 600 mm multiple rocket launcher system capable of carrying nuclear weapons. On Saturday, the often erratic-seeming North Korean leader Kim Jong-un expressed his commitment, “to respond with nuke for nuke and an all-out confrontation for an all-out confrontation.” He said he had ordered more powerful weapons to “absolutely overwhelm the U.S. imperialist aggressive forces and their puppet army.” But actually, just ..read more

On December 13, the House Financial Services Committee held a long-awaited hearing into the collapse of the FTX crypto empire. FTX’s disgraced former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried could not, as he had hoped to, testify there in person because he was sitting, as Inmate 14-372, in a jail in the Bahamas. Instead, the committee heard an interim report from John Ray III, the seasoned bankruptcy lawyer installed by the Chancery Court in Delaware as the CEO of FTX.US and its dozens of affiliates when FTX declared bankruptcy November 11. In his testimony, Ray said he had never “seen such an utter failure of c ..read more