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    The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Faces Its Most Consequential Decision in Decades

    Uncertainty hangs over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pending decision on whether to annex as much a 30% of the West Bank, including the possibility of all existing Israeli settlements there and the entire Jordan Valley. Should he proceed, the proposal will go before the Israeli cabinet and the Knesset, where it will likely win […] More

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    The Trump Campaign Fears John Bolton

    Unreliable narrators are a staple of literature. Consider the delusional, self-serving narrator of Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” or the way Humbert Humbert used his cultured references and gorgeous prose to dress up his crimes in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.” Now along comes John Bolton and his account of time served in the Trump administration as national security adviser. Bolton’s […] More

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    Panic on the American Right: Notes on Neocon Desperation

    Johns Hopkins University’s Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC, is one of these institutions of higher learning that prides itself on being close to the locus of power, particularly to the who is who of American foreign policymaking. Or, at least, that was the case in the past. I should […] More

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    The Stirring Case of Mary Elizabeth Taylor

    Although the assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, Mary Elizabeth Taylor, was not a high-profile member of the Trump administration, her resignation last week gathered the attention of the media due to the reasons she cited. It was all about what one of the rare black remaining members of the administration was willing to […] More

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    The Sudan Conference Presents an Opportunity

    A little more than a year has passed since the coup that toppled Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir. On June 25, the Sudan Partnership Conference — convened by Germany in concert with Sudan, the European Union and the United Nations — will coordinate action to overcome the country’s economic difficulties. The timing is favorable for Sudan’s […] More

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    Trump administration places restrictions on four more Chinese news organisations

    The Trump administration has announced that it is designating four more Chinese state-run media organisations that have operations in the United States as foreign missions, in a new round of restrictions likely to lead to some form of retaliation from China. State Department officials said they were taking the action to make it clear to […] More

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    Understanding the Dynamics of the Far Right

    While this article is not about the extreme right’s responses to COVID-19, thinking about this issue briefly does give us a clear example of what it does focus on: the groupuscular dynamics of the extreme right. Across the globe, myriad extreme-right organizations have been finding ways to capitalize on the coronavirus crisis, from arguing it […] More

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    Police Brutality: It’s About More Than Defunding

    Every democratic society takes pride in having open discussion and debate, even when their governments prefer to keep certain subjects off the table if not out of sight. Freedom of thought and expression stands as a fundamental precondition to keep people involved in the business of government. In most modern democracies, the only effective power […] More