Clifford D. May

‘What is the purpose of the United Nations?’

When I was in graduate school, back in the previous century, I took two courses simultaneously on the United Nations.

September 30, 2025

Qatar: Not an Arab Switzerland but a Muslim Brotherhood terrorist haven

A disturbing thought experiment: Imagine your children have been kidnapped and are being tortured in a dungeon.

September 23, 2025

Twenty-four years after 9/11, the war on the West expands not contracts

Last week, we remembered the almost 3,000 victims of the al-Qaida terrorists who, on Sept. 11, 2001, hijacked passenger aircraft and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

September 16, 2025

The art of lying about Israel

For centuries, Jews have been the targets of lies. I'll mention just three.

September 9, 2025

How Biden’s failed clean energy revolution weakened America’s national security

"A clean energy revolution is helping to save this planet." Thus spoke President Obama in 2015.

September 2, 2025

The long U.N. war against Israel

As a foreign correspondent roving around Africa years ago, I often met United Nations personnel.

August 26, 2025

Alaska summit revealed Putin’s neo-Soviet goals

Friday's summit meeting in Alaska was short on substance but long on symbolism.

August 19, 2025

European leaders siding with Hamas make Gaza ceasefire harder for Trump

At a United Nations Security Council meeting on Sunday, U.S. Amb. Dorothy Shea offered an observation about the Gaza conflict: "This war could end today if Hamas would let the hostages go."

August 12, 2025

Vladimir the Terrible: Trump must make Putin recalculate the costs, benefits of war

President Trump now sees Vladimir Putin through clearer eyes. I suspect first lady Melania Trump deserves much of the credit.

August 5, 2025

Syria’s endangered minorities deserve protection

The Arab Spring was the media's name for a wave of protests -- some peaceful, some violent -- against various Middle Eastern dictatorships from 2010 to 2012.

July 29, 2025

History shows tyrants in Iran, Russia and China only respond to decisive force, not empty talks

"You don't make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies." That aphorism, attributed to former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, has always struck me as more hopeful than convincing.

July 15, 2025

Law and disorder: Interpol does the bidding of bad guys

Interpol is such a cool idea: Cosmopolitan cops chasing criminals around the world. The reality, I'm sorry to tell you, is rather different.

July 8, 2025

America wins, media spins: Why liberal news outlets hate Trump’s success against Iran

President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth were hopping mad last week over attempts to minimize what they had achieved against the nuclear weapons facilities in Iran

July 1, 2025

No more appeasement: Trump took out Iran’s nuclear crown jewel while others only talked

The uranium enrichment plant at Fordow was known as the jewel in the crown of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader.

June 24, 2025

Roots of the Middle East conflict trace back centuries

In 1979, I spent several months in Iran covering what was then called the Iranian Revolution.

June 17, 2025

What a Stalin statue in a subway station should tell Trump about Putin

A statue of Josef Stalin was recently unveiled in Moscow's Taganskaya subway station.

June 10, 2025

A secular jihadi brings the intifada to Washington

Not so long ago, homicidal antisemitism in America was widely regarded as peculiar to neo-Nazis, White supremacists and other far-right extremists.

May 27, 2025

What Qatar wants, Qatar gets

Lots of people have been duped by the Qataris. I was one of them.

May 20, 2025

Trump halts the Indo-Pakistani conflict

President Trump has long been eager to stop armed conflicts. He succeeded last week, but with two asterisks.

May 13, 2025

The Iran nuclear deal Trump wants

A fourth round of talks between Tehran's envoys and Steve Witkoff, President Trump's lead negotiator, did not occur in Rome over the weekend as expected.

May 6, 2025