In our latest, @benjaminfriedman.bsky.social and I argue that the Trump administration has the wrong approach in Europe—not, as many say, because it pushes to withdraw from the continent, but precisely because it is *not* serious about disengaging from Europe. warontherocks.com/misguided-an...

Good lord that is not how escalation dominance works.

We'd all be better off if all the time spent worrying about the Thucydides trap went into thinking about security dilemmas. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

SCOTUS in the Prize Cases (1863): "The proclamation of blockade is itself official and conclusive evidence to the Court that a state of war existed..."

Whether or not there is any factual basis to his statement, notable that POTUS is workshopping victory narratives.

TACO time in Iran I argue here. www.theamericanconservative.com/let-iran-be-...

No one who ever met Epstein is allowed to work anymore I guess. What is even the rationale for caling for Wasserman's head? Sexting with Ghislaine Maxwell 20 plus years ago? Going on Epstein's plane to a Clinton Foundation meeting? www.espn.com/olympics/sto...

Trump's 2024 campaign saw some voter angst, in its data, about him getting elected and being obsessed with revenge. He used a Fox town hall, programmed against the final GOP primary debate to say he would be "too busy" for revenge. (He also got the Q in advance.) www.nytimes.com/2024/01/10/u...

And he didn’t. He tried to help a woman who’d just been assaulted. There was nothing rash, stupid, or radical about what he did. He showed kindness. And they killed him for it.

Let's see if this thing works. Our Man in Havana no longer satire? www.cnn.com/2026/01/13/p...

What are the odds Maduro gets acquitted? Seems like the drug trafficking charges in his indictment may be pretty flimsy and he could walk. What happens then? Drone strike in Manhattan?

Sad to see Shapiro, who got his start trafficking in conspiracy and dishonesty for Breitbart, slamming the door in the face of the young grifters following in his footsteps. @daveweigel.bsky.social slate.com/news-and-pol...

With this today the death toll now passed 100. 104 if I have my math correct. 104 people killed with zero evidence since Sept. 2. Two people have survived and been repatriated and released. 104 people dead under dubious legality.

It's pretty wild that someone at the Institute for the Study of War falsified their widely-cited war map to win a Polymarket bet. ISW fired the employee but didn't say why. responsiblestatecraft.org/isw-polymark...

Trump national security strategy says US should stop "hectoring" repressive nations in the Middle East about human rights then goes on to hector democratically elected European nations about their domestic policies. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/w...

I partially disagree. Good writing is related to cleat thinking yes, but not necessarily deep expertise or insightfulness. I changed my mind on this due to various professional writers--reporters and magazine types--becoming abominable but compelling foreign policy pundits.

Being honest about what happened here, the Europeans and the US Secretary of State managed to insert poison pills into the peace deal Witkoff had put out, making it more unacceptable to Russia and thus ensuring the war continues. www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/1...

Even worse than this bit is how he went on to call the reporter embarrassing and "insubordinate" and threaten her employer's ABC's license. Just autocratically bullying the media to show off to MBS.

This is the 16th strike of its kind this year — and at least 66 people are dead because of the government’s rash actions. These extrajudicial strikes are illegal under both international and domestic law.

See the promise and peril of the right's emerging anti-Israel politics here. This guy asks Vance why we support Israel, sensibly suggesting we shouldn't while flashing Christian Nationalism by saying they have a different religion than "us" and are hostile to ours. www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9Bn...

If we can't stop this shit, let's at least all call them stormtroopers. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

A security guarantee by executive order is not much of a security guarantee. And even if it were a treaty, no US President can't he trusted to restrain Israel. Next president can and should ignore. www.axios.com/2025/10/08/t...

The war on drugs keeps getting more literal. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/u...

This is extremely similar to what Duterte did in the Philippines. Killing of supposed drug dealers without due process. Dictator level stuff, scary.

I wrote in my book that "Trump had learned the foremost lesson of 9/11: the terrorists were whomever you said they were." Now "terrorism" is what he's using to apparently provoke a war with Venezuela.

I can't speak for Ukraine, but the fact that Europeans feel compelled to call their proposed force for post-war Ukraine a "reassurance" force suggests it is not gonna be backed by a credible threat and won't be reassuring at all. apnews.com/article/russ...

Blowing up a boat and killing 11 people and in the name of stopping a drug shipment is a depraved act of needless violence. If it's a drug shipment, stop it with the Coast Guard. www.reuters.com/world/americ...

This news is a throwback to the aughts, with Marco Rubio doing his best to resurrect the dumbest parts of the war on terror, conflating Islamism and terrorism. www.jns.org/muslim-broth...

Despite everything autocratic thing that's happened this year, it's still shocking to me that these huge law firms are agreeing to be subordinated to Trump: working pro bono on an insane protectionist agenda. Corrupt, autocratic, and barely even a scandal. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/u...

This article asserts baselessly that Putin is already reordering the world in Russia's favor just by having a summit with Trump. The implication is Russia isn't a major power unless we treat it as one, an idea Ukraine war should have disabused people of. www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...

For @forward.com, I wrote about how we know that Israel has been withholding food as a military tactic because Israeli officials have said versions of “we are withholding food as a military tactic” for the entirety of the war and pretending otherwise is willful ignorance forward.com/opinion/7586...

Both the US strikes on Iran and their retaliation today seem partly theatrical. The US didn't do the sustained campaign likely in the can to really cripple Iranian nuclear weapons program, and the Iranians shot at well-defended bases with warning. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06...

This binary view is wrong. The third choice is to live with Iran as a nascent nuclear weapons state, as we've been doing for a while, or fully nuclear one, and pressure Israel to not destabilize the situation by bombing. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/u...

Under no circumstances should we get sucked into Israel's preventive war on Iran, which will likely prove counterproductive. The question is how bad it gets.

If Israel bombs Iran in an attempt to kibosh US negotiations and drag us into a war, can we stop underwriting their military? Or at least acknowledge we shouldn't pay them to screw us? www.timesofisrael.com/us-begins-ev...

Long and short of this is Israel is considering striking Iran in order to screw up US diplomacy and expecting US help if they do. What is stronger than chutzpah? www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/u...

News article advocating endless US war in Somalia, in part by overstating Al Shabab's threat to the west. www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...

If Trump indeed agreed to get the last US hostage freed in exchange for getting the blockade of Gaza lifted and then ignored the obligation, it's no favor to the remaining hostages. If the US won't honor its own agreement, who will push Israel to honor theirs? www.dropsitenews.com/p/witkoff-ha...

Is Trump being bribed by Qatar good because it somewhat reduced the odds of a war with Iran? www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcn...

Seems like Trump either jumped the gun, prematurely announcing Houthi deal before it was finalized or threw Israel under the bus by making a separate peace with the Houthis just as their fight with the Houthis escalates, or both. www.cnn.com/2025/05/06/p...

A political prisoner in other words.

Some real Kenny Powers energy from Hegseth here. youtu.be/vf7-d9mIGvA?...

Is there anyone in or out of the Trump administration who truly believes that drone strikes on cartels would work to limit fentanyl flows or really in any sense beyond just showing that we remain committed to illegal and unpredictable violence? www.nbcnews.com/politics/nat...

Make him veto it!

Predictably, Trump's campaign against the Houthis seems to be going as poorly as Biden's, only at greater cost. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/u...

For @wpr.bsky.social, Rose Kelanic and I argue that the real Signal chat scandal should be the war it discussed. We show why it's unnecessary and bound to fail. www.worldpoliticsreview.com/houthis-us-t...

Throwing students out of the country for speech is a terrible offense to American values in any circumstance, but what makes this worse is how it's done in abject service of a foreign power where a fascist organization is bragging about how it is manipulating US immigration policy.

A nation of yapping infosec inspectors who don’t know and don’t care about first-order strategic choices, policies, acts of war

Also the war they are so casually green lighting is stupid. It's not going to work, and it's not remotely necessary.