Clifford D. May

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

Putin only understands strength: Time for Trump to show it

A year ago, amid indications that Iran's rulers were preparing to launch a direct attack on Israel, President Biden publicly warned them: "Don't!"

April 29, 2025

Truth matters: Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks now documented for history

The atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, were recorded by the terrorists themselves on their hip GoPro cameras, their mobile phones and even the phones of their victims.

April 22, 2025

A ‘Reverse Kissinger’ would be a fool’s errand for Trump

You probably know what a reverse mortgage is because you've seen Tom Selleck selling them on television commercials, and you may recall what a reverse half-nelson is from high school gym class.

April 15, 2025

Israel’s second War of Independence

It has been 18 months since Hamas' invasion of Israel and the barbaric pogrom that followed. Hamas is still holding and torturing hostages.

April 8, 2025

Obama and Biden’s failed Russia policies

In 2008, Vladimir Putin's troops invaded neighboring Georgia and seized control of two regions. That chilled Russia's relations with the United States.

March 25, 2025

Trump’s Ukraine diplomacy faces Putin test

First, President Trump muscled Volodymyr Zelenskyy into accepting, without guarantees, a 30-day ceasefire in the brutal war that Vladimir Putin has been waging against Ukraine.

March 18, 2025

The clean energy revolution that never happened

Cast your mind back to Sept. 6, 2019, when candidate Joseph R. Biden took the hand of a 24-year-old activist. "Kiddo," he said, "look in my eyes. I guarantee you. I guarantee you. We're going to end fossil fuel."

March 11, 2025