Iran’s missile attack last night on bases where American forces in Iraq are stationed offered the latest evidence that the Trump administration has done something extraordinary. By killing Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s most powerful military leader, at a Baghdad airport, it has turned both Iranian and Iraqi nationalism against the United States. …
Over the past 18 months, Donald Trump has picked a fight with Iran that he won’t end and can’t win. That fight has had horrifying consequences for the Iranian people, led Tehran to restart its nuclear program, and now left parts of the American embassy compound in Baghdad in flames. In the days and weeks to come, Trump’s policy will likely lead either to war ...
Locked in a close race for first place in both Iowa and New Hampshire with only weeks to go before Democratic presidential-primary voting begins, Pete Buttigieg, along with his advisers, is talking about bringing people together. In a recent New Yorker profile, Benjamin Wallace-Wells quoted Buttigieg as welcoming “future former Republicans” into “our movement” and pledging to “unify the American people” once Donald Trump is ...
Washington, DC isn’t necessarily known for self-reflection. In fact, you can probably throw a stone in #ThisTown and hit someone who wholeheartedly supported the Iraq War, never admitted they were wrong, and yet continue to pontificate on television and in the nation’s most prominent newspapers, not just about U.S. foreign policy, but also U.S. wars in the Middle East. Peter Beinart isn’t one of those people ...
Given Bernie Sanders’ endurance as a top-tier presidential contender, and his support for Palestinian rights, it was almost inevitable that conservatives would start labelling his campaign anti-Semitic. Last week’s election in Britain—and the alleged similarities between Sanders and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn—provided the pretext. …
When it comes to the furor surrounding British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s supposed anti-Semitism, three unsettling things are true. First, Corbyn is not the major party candidate most complicit in bigotry. That ugly distinction goes to Britain’s current prime minister, Boris Johnson. Second, the British Jewish establishment has largely given Johnson a pass, which suggests — as does much other evidence — that its ...
A bitter irony underlies Kamala Harris’s exit from the presidential campaign. She lost, in part, because she couldn’t forthrightly defend her record as a prosecutor. She couldn’t forthrightly defend that record because party activists deemed it insufficiently progressive. They portrayed her as complicit in the unjust incarceration and killing of black and Latino men. Yet had Harris—especially as a black woman—been the crusading criminal-justice reformer ...
Near the end of the latest Democratic debate, Cory Booker did something unusual for a presidential candidate: He admitted that his campaign was in trouble. “I have not yet qualified for the December stage,” the senator from New Jersey confessed, “If you believe in my voice and that I should be up here, please go to CoryBooker.com. Please help.” The plea worked. A surge of ...
Yesterday the Trump administration said Israeli settlements in the West Bank don’t violate international law. That’s absurd. Among international lawyers, the consensus that settlements are illegal rivals the consensus among international scientists that humans contribute to climate change. As UCLA’s Dov Waxman has pointed out, the legal advisor to Israel’s own foreign ministry admitted that “civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes explicit provisions of ...
Nikki Haley has a theory about the post–Donald Trump GOP. It’s that Republicans will want to move on from Trump without repudiating him. They’ll want a candidate who promises healing without accountability. Haley auditions for that role in her new memoir, With All Due Respect. A former South Carolina governor who served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, Haley is a bellwether for her ...