Harlan Ullman

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 […]

With the withdrawal from Afghanistan complete and the agreement to end “combat” missions in Iraq before the new year, the question of why the US never seems to learn from its past is so obvious and trenchant that it is unlikely to be fully answered. And the question applies more broadly across the US, domestically […]

If you want to go to space, call the Russians, Chinese or the Indians. Anyone but the US government as it is out of that business. Or, instead, call one of the three Rocket Men who can actually deliver. And Little Rocket Man, North Korea’s Kim Jung Un, is not one of them. Three multi-multi-billionaires, […]

Why was the United States able to conquer the polio virus beginning in the late 1940’s, vaccinat- ing over 90% of all American children and in a month vaccinate virtually all New Yorkers against a return of smallpox in May 1947 when today we are hard pressed to inoculate even half of all Americans against […]