Tag: Foreign Affairs

The Israeli Activists Aiding Palestinian Victims of Settler Violence

Efrat Reubinof, one of Bnei Avraham’s founders, spent her teen years at a girls’ boarding school she described a “flagship” of hard-line Orthodoxy and nationalism, and later continued her religious studies at an academy for young women in a West Bank settlement where the curriculum included visits to outposts. In a process of “questioning all […]

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Meet the Italian Socialist Who Just Might Take Down Giorgia Meloni

Schlein, who won her party’s leadership unexpectedly in 2023, is hardly the prototype of an Italian politician. A gay woman with a Jewish Ukrainian American father and an Italian mother, she was raised in Lugano, Switzerland. She holds triple citizenship: American, Italian, and Swiss. She attended the University of Bologna, the oldest university in the […]

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Ten Years After Brexit, Every Grim Prediction Has More Than Come True

A riveting two-part BBC program, Brexit: A Very British Civil War, is the latest in the long line of brilliant documentaries produced by Norma Percy, an American adornment of British broadcasting. Her oeuvre includes important additions to our knowledge of the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia and conflicts in the Middle East, but my favorite may […]

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Trump and Netanyahu Have Royally Screwed Each Other Over

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu share a lot of traits. They are both solipsistic, mendacious, narcissistic, and paranoid megalomaniacs who perceive themselves as victims of a cabal of elites. Now they share something else: They have lost a war together. Driven by vanity and hubris, the U.S. president and Israeli prime minister miscalculated Iran’s mettle, […]

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Trump’s Humiliation in Orbán Defeat Stunner Is Only Just Beginning

The extraordinary defeat of Viktor Orbán in Hungary has unleashed much mockery of JD Vance, and it’s richly deserved. The vice president’s last-minute rally in Budapest cast the Hungarian election as a referendum on global illiberal movements, which makes Orbán’s epic defeat all the more humiliating for him—and for Donald Trump, who dispatched Vance and […]

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Guess Who Else (Besides Orbán) Lost in Hungary’s Wipeout Election?

And while Trump’s candidate in Hungary losing an election doesn’t do much for those of us in the U.S., it’s another indication that neither the U.S. nor the rest of the world is destined to adopt right-wing authoritarianism. We are far from the dark days of 2024, when far-right parties made huge gains in the […]

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In Beirut, Old Anger at Israel, but a Newfound Rage at Hezbollah

So it’s not as if this current behavior by the group was suddenly unlawful and extra-constitutional. It is, rather, that the government leaders concluded that there was suddenly an unprecedented political opportunity to speak, and hopefully act, against Hezbollah because of the outpouring of outrage against the organization for once again subjecting the country to […]

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Trump Accidentally Reveals What He Really Thinks of MAGA Voters

That’s just not sustainable. To see why, just look at the gyrations of JD Vance. Asked this week to reconcile his support for Trump’s war with his long-stated suspicions of previous foreign entanglements, Vance said: “One big difference is that we have a smart president, whereas in the past, we’ve had dumb presidents.” Trump, said […]

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Iran, Not Trump, Decides When This War Is Over

Many on Wall Street probably still expect this war to follow the usual script. In the past, Trump has used U.S. military might in bold, often reckless ways. He has embraced large-scale bombing campaigns (dropping the “Mother of All Bombs” in Afghanistan during his first year in office in 2017, and bombing Iranian nuclear facilities […]

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Want Something to Feel Hopeful About? It Just Happened in Nepal.

This victory is not just another election story. It is the story of a generation that refused to accept the same tired faces and the same old excuses. The election result reflects deep frustration with decades of political instability, corruption, underdevelopment, nepotism, and youth unemployment. After years of Nepal’s politics being dominated by a triumvirate […]

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The Implications of Iran Mining the Strait of Hormuz Are Many—and Ugly

Once mines are in the water, they’re very difficult to find, even with modern gear. The process of finding them is slow and painstaking, leaving the ships and aircraft conducting the search as sitting ducks in the middle of a hot war. It also requires multiple sweeps of the same area to ensure that all […]

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Netanyahu Finally Found a President Willing to Buy Into His Iran Dream

Political critics and detractors will point to Netanyahu’s tedious fixation with Iran posing an imminent existential threat as a manifestation of his authoritarian, populist, and even quasi-fascist political character and persona. Authoritarians need an enemy; they need to stir existential anxiety in the public and unite it against that enemy; they habitually evoke existential threats; […]

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The MAGA Plot to Take Down Canada

But Smith is now increasingly herself under threat from separatists, whose power within her United Conservative Party, or UCP, has grown massively since reforms that have made it easier for fringe groups to challenge the party leadership. “The core people driving this are perennially aggrieved. They are always angry about something,” said Jason Kenney, Smith’s […]

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Donald Trump’s Lawless Regime-Change War in Iran: No. Not in Our Name.

Trump scored endless political points, and won more than a few votes, by promising Americans repeatedly that he wouldn’t start wars. And now, what has he done? He’s launched another preemptive regime-change war, America’s second this century, if you’re counting; and he’s launched it against a country three times the size of Iraq and with […]

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Trump’s Fury at Canada Backfires in Surprise Blow to GOP’s 2026 Hopes

The numbers are significant. Around 10 million fewer Canadians traveled to the United States in 2025 relative to the previous year, the story notes, adding that this is hitting Michigan and other nearby states “especially hard.” The impact on the Wolverine State is particularly acute: Canadian visits to southeast Michigan fell 30% from 2024 to […]

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While No One’s Looking, Netanyahu Tightens His Grip on the West Bank

The upcoming election is a greater hurdle: Unreliable as polls may be, they consistently show Netanyahu’s coalition losing to a disparate bloc of opposition parties. Many right-wing voters, it appears, see Netanyahu as corrupt, or as evading responsibility for the catastrophic Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, or both. In a multiparty system, their options […]

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Did Mike Huckabee Just Green-Light Israel to Invade Half the Levant?

Carlson, the former Fox News host who was fired from the network in 2023 and began his own independent network that routinely features interviews on various topics of interest to the MAGA-verse, has a massive following. He also maintains close relations with Trump and others in his inner circle and is, along with other right-wing […]

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