Harlan Ullman

America’s police are under assault. There have been a litany of police shootings targeting Afro-Americans, largely men. Indeed, last year’s killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked a widespread civil rights movement under the Black Lives Matter banner. This week, Derek Chauvin, the police officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck was convicted of murder. Against […]

The beginning of the week marked the 160th anniversary of the start of the American Cvil War. Violence erupted when Confederate forces opened-fire on Fort Sumter, a sea port built on an artificial island in Charleston in the Deep South. The initial death toll for 1861-1865 was put at 620,000 soldiers; including those who died […]

President Joe Biden was dealt the worst hand of any newly elected president since Lincoln and a nation as polarized perhaps as it was in 1861. This a 51% nation, intractably split and both parties are at each other’s throats. With no Republican votes, the Democrats muscled a $2.2 trillion American Relief Package through Congress. […]

Over the past week, the testimony of America’s two most senior admirals in Asia, Philip Davidson Commander Indo-Pacific Command and John Aquilino Commander Pacific Fleet, before Congress was chilling. Both cited the growing threat of China to the region and especially to Taiwan. Admiral Aquilino contended that a Chinese “military takeover” of Taiwan sometime in […]

Last week was not an example of stellar American diplomacy. The meeting in Anchorage, Alaska between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Special Assistant for Asia Kurt Campbell and China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi and senior foreign policy advisor Yang Jiechi turned into a public display of charges and counter-charges, […]

Conventional wisdom, shared by members of Congress in both parties and the Interim National Security Strategy released last week, considers China “the pacing threat” and America’s strongest competitor. The reasons at first examination look compelling. China’s economy may overtake America’s. China may be ahead in game changing technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, 5G and other […]

Lenin, rephrasing Marx and Hagel, was fond of observing that the world was filled with contradictions. President Joe Biden and his administration are indeed consumed with the predicaments and consequences posed by contradictions in this case from abroad. Meanwhile, Republicans must wrestle with their greatest contradiction: Donald Trump. The murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi ordered […]

The symptoms are unmistakable yet hidden in plain sight. The massive disruption of Texas and what turned out to be a highly vulnerable power grid to a super snow and ice storm last week should have been no surprise. Nor should the Covid-19 pandemic and the massive cyber intrusion of the Solar Winds software been […]

Is it over? Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial ended well short of the necessary 2/3 of senators present voting to convict the ex-president of “high crimes and misdemeanours.” Trump was acquitted of inciting an insurrection to disrupt the federal government and illegally reverse an election he lost by seven million votes. The magnitude of the […]

No matter one’s opinion of Donald Trump, it is unarguable that the former president’s monumental use of lies, distortions, misstatements and other misinformation was unprecedented historically exceeding that of all his predecessors. The Trump years made mockery of truth and fact. Of course, all presidents misrepresent fact and truth. George Washington never had a cherry […]