If Iran’s behavior supporting friendly proxy groups in the Middle East isn’t exactly stabilizing, the behavior of U.S. allies, Saudi Arabia and UAE, certainly hasn’t been any better.

Despite President Trump’s aggressive stance toward Iran, the encouragement from Saudi Arabia is out of line for several reasons.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to participate in a debate on the PBS program, Point Taken with Carlos Watson. The program brings together four experts in different fields to debate relevant and controversial topics. The goal of the show is to inform, to present viewers and the live audience with different...
Read More »

Venezuela is the world’s most miserable country, according to a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University who have calculated a World Misery Index. “Misery” is measured as the sum of a country’s inflation rate, unemployment rate, and interest rate, minus the annual percentage change in real GDP per capita. The higher the total...
Read More »

Will the collapse of oil prices benefit or erode petrodictators in the Middle East, Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America? At first glance, the answer would seem obvious. Venezuela, Nigeria, and Iran need crude prices as high as $110 per barrel to fund their states in their present condition. Russia, half of whose government budget...
Read More »

Responding to their customers’ increasing demand for privacy in the aftermath of revelations by whistle-blowers that the government is capturing and indefinitely storing every conversation, email, location, online transaction, and more, Apple, Google, WhattsApp, and others are developing new encrypted phones and services to thwart this now-universal warrantless spying. Simultaneously, a bill that would...
Read More »

One remarkable aspect in the recent fall in global oil prices is that Saudi Arabia has not cut production to prop them up. Much of the speculation about why the Saudis have sat by passively and allowed the oil price decline has been that they are trying to undermine higher-cost producers in the US...
Read More »

...that 9/11 was successfully carried out because American government agencies with very large budgets, and with more than sufficient spying authority, ignored multiple reports that had been spoon-fed them by their own agents: In a memo from the Phoenix FBI to headquarters, the agents recommended an urgent nationwide review of flight schools “for any...
Read More »

The buying and selling of human organs was in the news this weekend, via an investigative report in the New York Times. People tend to be moved when they learn about someone donating an organ to someone else who needs it, but they also tend to be disgusted by the notion of a market where people...
Read More »

President Obama tries to have it both ways when talking of American foreign policy. He sold himself to the public in 2008 as a more prudential steward of U.S. power. He would avoid “dumb wars,” as he had called the Iraq fiasco in a speech years before. He would save money by bringing the...
Read More »