Boston Globe: ‘Can the US accept allies as equals?’
BY EXPELLING the CIA station chief in Berlin recently, Germany hoped to jolt the United States into paying attention. Germans are outraged by reports that American spies may have been working inside their security services. Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that hostile operations like this “contradict everything that I understand to be a trusting cooperation […]
Boston Globe: ‘Iraq, Syria: Borders aren’t endlessly flexible, but they change’
IF NOT for one fateful act, history would little note Mark Sykes, a British socialite who was master of a mansion the size of Downton Abbey and loved horse breeding. It would pay even less heed to Francois Georges-Picot, an obscure French diplomat whose highest post was consul general in Beirut. Yet with a few […]
Boston Globe: ‘Iraq delivers bloody lesson on blowback’
AFTER MANY decades in the covert-action business, Americans have come to learn what “blowback” means. Often our foreign interventions produce quick victory. Then things go bad. Short-term success dissolves into long-term failure. Many of our interventions have not only thrown target countries into violent upheaval, but weakened our own security. The recent explosion of militant […]
AlJazeera America: ‘Iraq crisis should bring the US and Iran together’
The resurgence of violence in Iraq has a sliver lining: forcing old enemies to cooperate
Boston Globe: ‘Europe’s wimpy servility is really wisdom’
THE UNITED STATES and Europe are drifting slowly apart. This may be to the benefit of both, but the prospect of a more independent Europe distresses some in Washington. They complain, ever more loudly since Russia’s seizure of Crimea, that Europe refuses to take enough responsibility for its own security. Some European countries are not […]
