For months after the attacks of 9/11, when people would be asked, "What did you learn?" they invariably responded, "Spend more time with family." That answer has reverberated in my mind throughout these two months of idyllic scenes of parents and children jumping on trampolines, riding bicycles and walking dogs.
In times of major crisis, one always hears two familiar questions: "Whom to blame?" and "What to do?"
The coronavirus pandemic is in the full swing around the globe and no one can predict when it will be over or at least largely contained. We can only hope and pray that this happens sooner rather than later.
When the Antonov cargo jet departed from Reno on April 1st, it kicked up such a cloud of dust that locals called the fire department reporting a wildfire. While there's no official confirmation, it's possible the Russian AN124 carried a delivery similar to the ventilators, masks and respirators that landed the same day in the same kind of plane at JFK International, an offer accepted days earlier by President Trump from President Putin. Or, as U.S. media call it, "a public relations coup for the Kremlin."
One would assume that in times of major upheavals all of us realize how fragile this beautiful planet Earth and its entire living species are.
One side effect of the SARS Coronavirus-2 appears to be a diminished appetite among Americans for war with Russia. Given the overreaction by my fellow Americans, thanks to whom I may have to go back to Soviet toilet paper (newspaper) -- and am once again getting into any line I see -- one would hate to see how they'd react in a real crisis
It would take desperation to find something heartening in the Russian portion of National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien's comments last week at the Meridian International Center, which were replete with the typical projections and inversions between us and them. But amid Washington's unhinged nonseriousness (President Trump selling Alaska to Russia as a bargaining chip, Rep. Adam Schiff?), a desperate grab for sanity is better than none at all.
Now that President Trump has been acquitted after the three-year-long impeachment ordeal, some of us expect him to start this dialogue that he pledged to initiate during the past electoral campaign and kept repeating many times over without following up.
Not to add to apocalyptic associations with the year 2020, but we now find ourselves officially in the Year of the Rat, according to the Chinese calendar -- characterized by chaos. Thanks only to my obscure interest in the Balkans, sparked in 1999 by the shock that a war could be started by the world's superhero nation and my family's refuge from inhumanity, I learned the Serbian word for war: rat.
While U.S.-Russian relations keep sinking in a seemingly bottomless ditch, optimists aren't ready to give up and wonder whether there is anything to reverse or at least to stop this process before Armageddon.
At a time of one of the greatest political upheavals in American history that could spill over into foreign affairs, especially U.S.-Russian relations with unpredictable and devastating results, I thought Christmas might offer a chance for all of us to take a pause and search for an exit from the megacrisis.
On a recent episode of "Life, Liberty and Levin," Hoover Institution fellow Niall Ferguson told host Mark Levin, "The problem at the moment is partly that we are on a kind of permanent war footing with respect to Moscow ... It's also partly that President Putin simply cannot bring himself to trust the United States."
The ongoing impeachment inquiry of President Trump can certainly compete with Hollywood's most successful drama or comedy shows. However, when we deal with national security issues one expects the actors, in this case members of Congress and witnesses, to tell the truth. In this case, some do, but some regrettably do not.
We all heard former Ukraine Ambassador William B. Taylor at the impeachment hearings say -- as so many do daily -- that "Ukraine is on the front line in the conflict with a newly aggressive Russia."
For anyone interested in the prospect, however remote, of improved U.S.-Russia ties, get this straight: It isn't going to happen anytime soon, if ever.
As the political temperature in Washington rapidly rises to unprecedented boiling levels, when accusations of attempted coup and state treason are exchanged between the president and the speaker of the House, what's the danger of spillover into the foreign policy arena?
The world has changed since the establishment of the G-7. No longer are these economies the most important in the world. Italy, Canada, even Germany and France, have drifted into socialist zombie land, unable to grow or realize their potential.
At the August Group of Seven summit in France, President Trump suggested inviting Russian President Vladimir Putin to the next such summit that the U.S. will be hosting in 2020. Mr. Trump added that Mr. Putin might decline the invitation "psychologically" since Russia was kicked out of the Group of Eight in 2014 for the annexation of Crimea.
I had some dealings with Sam Nunn several decades ago, when he was Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia. Growing up in Savannah, I applied to be a cadet at the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1981. Consequently, I had to drive multiple times by myself to be interviewed by Mr. Nunn's staff in Atlanta for consideration for a USAFA appointment, which in the end was a successful quest.
Nowadays it is hard for anyone much under the age of 50 to imagine, but once upon a time the threat of nuclear war and the prospect of planetary extinction were things people actually worried about.
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