Who Is Making American Foreign Policy—the President or the War Party?

§ The preceding 40-year Cold War witnessed many instances of high-level attempts to sabotage détente policies of US and Soviet leaders. Considering that US warplanes knew the area very well and that the Department of Defense, headed by Ashton Carter, had openly expressed opposition to the Obama-Putin plan for a US-Russian alliance against terrorist forces in Syria, the American attack on Syrian Army forces, which blatantly violated preconditions of the agreement, may not have been “accidental,” as DOD claims and as US media similarly reports. If the attack was intentional, we are reminded of the power of the American war party, which is based not only in DOD but in segments of the State Department, in Congress, and in the mainstream media, notably The Washington Post. Judging by Ambassador Samantha Power’s tirade against Russia at the UN, not even Obama’s own team fully supports his overtures to Moscow, undertaken, no doubt, to enhance his desultory foreign policy legacy.

Ambivalent Hillary Voters: Don’t Assume Someone Else Will Stop Trump

This is a column for all you leftists, liberals, progressives, feminists, Democrats—whatever you call yourselves—who are feeling passive, underwhelmed, downhearted, or paralyzed about the upcoming election. All right, you say, you’ll hold your nose and vote for Hillary Clinton, but you haven’t been knocking yourself out like you did for Barack Obama in 2008 or even 2012. “This election is getting really scary, yet I do not feel motivated to get active,” wrote one friend when I sent out a call for comments about enthusiasm, or the lack thereof. There are a lot of you out there.