Harlan Ullman

Interestingly, the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations have pursued remarkably similar foreign policies based on a Great Power Competition with Russia and principally China as what is now, according to the Pentagon, “the pacing threat.” Obama decided in 2011 to “pivot” to Asia, subsequently softened to “rebalancing.” And it toughened its military strategy to read […]

Constanta, Romania: This past weekend was spent aboard the Romanian Navy’s Danube going cruise ship, engaging in a European-American Security Dialogue. The focus was the Black Sea and its vital geostrategic importance to Russia, NATO and Europe. However, the Black Sea poses a fundamental contradiction for NATO. Only relatively recently has NATO been devoting greater […]

En route Paris: Members of Congress are already describing this past week as one from hell! The debt ceiling crisis that can shut the government down; two very contentious infrastructure bills; and hearings on the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle and charges that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Mark Milley exceeded his authority […]

An abundance of retrospectives and eulogies marking September 11th, some insightful, others pro forma, filled the airwaves and print media commemorating the 20th anniversary of the destruction of New York’s Twin Towers and part of the Pentagon’s second wing. But despite this outpouring, every commentary seemed to have missed the most crucial consequence of that […]

Every country, whether a vast superpower of its time or a tiny state in an inaccessible part of the globe, suffers hardships, chaos and depression-psychological and economic-as well as good times. The United States was born from revolution. It suffered numerous economic depressions and recessions; a civil war; acts of terror as old as the […]

Writing in the London Times on September 3, 2021, Iain Martin’s fear about the end of Pax Americana and America leaving the rest of the world in the Cold after the Afghanistan debacle would have been mitigated had he referred to two of the US’s greatest humourists: Mark Twain and Jack Kennedy. As we all […]

Bucharest, Romania: In thinking about Afghanistan, pick a date over the next four or five months. That could well be when it became absolutely clear that the Taliban were incapable of governing Afghanistan and its 38 million people. The immediate symptoms: electricity, water, food, medical supplies and money became vanishing commodities. Other signs of failure […]

Given America’s poor record in winning wars over the past seven decades and other foreign policy blunders that do not distinguish between Democratic and Republican administrations, last week’s column argued that a major cause had to be a missing or flawed gene in the nation’s strategic DNA. There is, however, another factor. That factor is […]

The stunningly rapid Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was years in the making.  It was made inevitable by the Trump administration’s “deal” in February 2020 to withdraw all US forces in 14 months that also called for releasing 5000 Taliban prisoners and then President Joe Biden’s commitment setting September 11 as the new deadline.How could this collapse […]

Linking New York’s embattled and now former governor, Andrew Cuomo, Donald Trump, Covid and today’s American politics may sound a bridge too far. But there certainly is one. It is history. No matter how deplorable the governor’s conduct may have been in harassing some eleven women, it does not share the same history with the […]