America

Twenty eight hours or so into the new war against Iran, and America’s Vice President J.D. Vance has yet to declare his support in public. His social media account on X, which is normally so lively, has been conspicuously silent for the last two days.  He seems keen to position himself apart from the administration’s more ardent hawks when it comes to the Middle East It’s likely that will all change today and Vance, as he did after the Venezuela operation, will take to the airwaves for the big Sunday news shows in order to once again repeat that administration’s line that Donald Trump, the ultimate decider, has boldly done

Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill austerely complied with a House Oversight Committee subpoena in order to explain their ties to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Yet Hillary’s testimony today didn’t exactly go to plan. Proceedings were halted after a breach of the hearing’s protocols – by a member of the committee. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert took two surreptitious photos of the closed-door hearing… and sent them to conservative influencer Benny Johnson. Johnson, in turn, plastered his watermark all over them and posted them on X. The Clintons had agreed to testify in a gambit to demonstrate that presidents and cabinet secretaries are not above congressional scrutiny – to put pressure on

Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, the longest in history, served as a reminder of the relentless will and unstoppable energy he brings to the office of the presidency. In a coup de grâce he humiliated congressional Democrats, securing footage of them remaining seated en masse as they refused to accept that the role of the government is to prioritize American citizens. He gently chastised the Supreme Court judges, assembled in the front row, for declaring his tariff program unlawful last Friday. Our political right should take heed: for all its roughness, this agenda isn’t going away The President’s opponents may be celebrating the judgment, but the Donald is

Americans took a break from their partisan vituperation in February to mull over newly revealed testimony that Richard Nixon gave to grand jury investigators in 1975, a year after the Watergate scandal drove him from power. James Rosen, a veteran Washington journalist and the biographer of Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell, revealed the episode in the New York Times. Nixon had argued that his program of wiretaps had been made necessary by another spying operation that senior American military commanders were carrying out against him and his top aides. The outline of this story has been known to historians since James Hougan laid it out in Secret Agenda (1984): a

It was a banner day for Donald Trump. On Thursday, at the Justice Department, a long perpendicular banner with his stern visage was unfurled, proclaiming “Make America Safe Again.” And just across from the State Department, Trump convened his shiny new Board of Peace at the former US Institute of Peace, which has a dove-shaped white roof. It was seized in 2025 by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and renamed after Trump. “I had no idea,” Trump said. But for all his disclaimers, Trump was not shy about expressing his delight at the new name that adorned the building’s entrance. A bevy of strongmen, including Vietnam’s General Secretary To Lam

The talks are still alive. Just. Iranian and US diplomats, engaging indirectly through Omani intermediaries, have yet to make any substantive progress toward a framework of understanding that governs further talks – as Kafkaesque as that might sound – but they are talking, and that is the best that the diplomats can hope for right now.  What separates Iran and America is a vast chasm between their respective red lines, and beyond that, the very substance of the talks themselves. The US is not willing to countenance an Iran that enriches uranium, has a ballistic missile program and arms proxies throughout the region.  Iran, for its part, perhaps unwisely – as

Is the latest round of Russia-Ukraine peace talks, sponsored by the United States and currently under way in Geneva, likely to hasten the war’s end? Donald Trump seems to believe so. On Friday, President Trump claimed that “Russia wants to make a deal, and Zelensky will have to hurry. Otherwise, he will miss a great opportunity. He needs to act.” Europe, for its part, remains deeply skeptical and is urging Ukraine to fight on. As the EU’s Foreign Affairs chief Kaja Kallas told the Munich Security Conference last week, “the greatest threat Russia presents right now is that it gains more at the negotiation table than it has achieved on

As Marco Rubio boarded his flight for Munich on Thursday night, he sought to reassure nervous Europeans that they weren’t about to be berated by America. “We’ll be good,” he said. It appears the Secretary of State kept his word when he addressed the Munich security conference this morning. Rubio kicked off his speech by harking back to 1963, the year Munich played host to the first security conference. Back then, he said, “the line between communism and freedom ran through the heart of Germany. Soviet communism was on the march and thousands of years of western civilization hung in the balance.” Triumphing over communism had, however, allowed the West