Three weeks ago, an organization called J.A.C.O.B. — the Jewish Alliance of Concern over Burma — cosponsored a rally in front of the United Nations. The reason: the government of Myanmar (Burma’s current name) is slaughtering its Muslim minority, the Rohingya, on a vast scale. As many as 400,000 Rohingya… Read the Rest »
It doesn’t matter all that much that Bob Corker and Donald Trump are insulting each other via Twitter. Sooner or later, Trump insults almost everyone. What matters is that Corker, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a confidant of the secretary of state, is warning publicly that… Read the Rest »
Why, on Sunday morning, did Donald Trump humiliate his secretary of state by tweeting that Rex Tillerson “is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man”? In policy terms, it makes no sense. If Trump wants to break off diplomatic discussions with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un… Read the Rest »
Historians will record that for about half a decade, between the presidential campaigns of 2012 and 2016, Republicans tussled over whether to welcome anti-Muslim bigotry into their party. The response to Roy Moore’s nomination on Tuesday as the GOP’s Senate candidate in Alabama shows—even more clearly than Donald Trump’s election—that… Read the Rest »
Last week, Bernie Sanders gave a much-touted foreign policy speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, the same location where Winston Churchill delivered his famous “Iron Curtain” address in 1946. The contents of the speech were intriguing. So was its timing. Sanders delivered it on the first day of Rosh… Read the Rest »
Donald Trump lies so frequently and so brazenly that it’s easy to forget that there are political untruths he did not invent. Sometimes, he builds on falsehoods that predated his election, and that enjoy currency among the very institutions that generally restrain his power. That’s the case in the debate… Read the Rest »
It’s easy to throw darts at the speech Benjamin Netanyahu delivered on Tuesday at the United Nations. He bashed the Iranian nuclear deal while depicting himself as a champion of the Iranian people. “My Iranian friends,” he declared, “you will be free from the evil regime that terrorizes you.” But… Read the Rest »
Donald Trump’s first speech to the United Nations can best be understood as a response to his predecessor’s final one. On September 20, 2016, Barack Obama told the UN General Assembly that “at this moment we all face a choice. We can choose to press forward with a better model… Read the Rest »
Ta-Nehisi Coates has published a new essay. It’s about Donald Trump and the enduring power of whiteness in American politics. It doesn’t mention Israel. But it explains a lot about the American Israel debate, and why it may change.
Here’s a rallying cry for Democrats unsure what to say about the North Korean nuclear crisis: The South Koreans are right. On Sunday, in a typically self-aggrandizing and grammatically challenged tweet, Trump chastised America’s longtime ally. “South Korea is finding, as I have told them that their talk of appeasement… Read the Rest »