Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Whenever a new American president takes office, or even well beforehand, analysts and academics rush to discern their foreign policy “doctrine”—a grand theory that connects what might otherwise appear to be a Pollock-like splattering of dots. The Bush doctrine, for instance, was supposedly about the rejection of multilateral constraints on American power, or maybe it…
MOSCOW — A funny thing happened in Russia this past week: President Trump’s face, once ubiquitous on the talk shows and evening news programs that tack closely to the Kremlin’s political agenda, was suddenly absent. Gone. “Like they flipped a switch,” said Alexey Kovalev, a journalist at the Moscow Times who covers Russian state media. It’s not…
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer asserted at Thursday’s press briefing that Iran had attacked a U.S. naval vessel, as part of his argument defending the administration’s bellicose announcement that Iran is “on notice.” National Security Adviser Michael Flynn on Wednesday said he was “officially putting Iran on notice” following the country’s ballistic missile test and…
Donald Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer falsely accused Iran of attacking a United States naval vessel, an incident which – if it had really happened – could constitute an act of war. Mr Spicer made the remarks during a press briefing called to explain a White House announcement that Iran had been officially “put on…
In what an official said was the first military raid carried out under President Donald Trump, two Americans were killed in Yemen on Sunday — one a member of SEAL Team 6 and the other the 8-year-old daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, the New Mexico-born al Qaeda leader who himself was killed in a U.S. strike…
January 31, 2017/in Drones /by emptywheel Back on December 5, 2015, Donald Trump said that if he were elected President, he would take out the families of terrorists. The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They…
The instructions came in a cable from State Department headquarters, just after midnight ET on Friday. Cancel appointments. Halt approvals. Post online “red banner” warnings. These are some of the new operating procedures US foreign service officers had to initiate when dealing with applicants from seven Muslim-majority countries who want a new life in the United…
DULLES, Virginia ― The U.S. government must “permit lawyers access to all legal permanent residents being detained at Dulles International Airport,” a federal judge in Virginia ordered late Saturday. But U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at this airport outside Washington, D.C., are defying the judge’s order, blocking attorneys from talking to the lawful permanent residents CBP…
For the last two years, the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock stayed set at three minutes before the hour, the closest it had been to midnight since the early 1980s. In its two most recent annual announcements on the Clock, the Science and Security Board warned: “The probability of global catastrophe is very high,…
You know the world, including this great nation, is screwed when a nationalist like Donald Trump and a socialist like Bernie Sanders agree on something. That Gage Skidmore via Foterhappens to be the case with the TPP – or the Trans Pacific Partnership — the 12-nation free trade agreement that Barack Obama, in a rare…