The Necessary Man
What are we to make of Jordan’s King Abdullah and his dedication to the fight against ISIS? He was in the President’s Cabinet room recently along with a group of lesser Arab lights, all as solemn as...
View ArticleA Realist Raised from the Dead
We are in an undisclosed location. Machinery needed to re-animate the dead, developed and installed here for the benefit of a certain former high official, hums quietly in the corner. On one side of...
View ArticleCool Hand Brent
The Strategist: Brent Scowcroft and the Call of National SecurityBy Bartholomew SparrowPublicAffairs, 2015, 752 pp., $37.50 In the mid-1970s the State Department sent me to a job on the National...
View ArticleLeaving Iraq
Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacyby Christopher R. HillSimon & Schuster, 2015, 448 pp., $30 The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq by Emma...
View ArticleNotes from the Edge
My Journey at the Nuclear Brink by William PerryStanford Security Studies, 2015, 276 + xxi pp., $16.00 The ancient Greek lives chronicled by Plutarch exhibit the perfidy of human beings in all its...
View ArticleThe Invisible Arms Race
An arms race is under way in space—insidious, invisible, and at this point probably inevitable. The Bush Administration’s dream that the United States could control access to earth orbit as the British...
View ArticleThe Ballad of Barack and Hillary
Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle over American PowerBy Mark Landler Random House, 2016, 432 pp., $28 Anyone looking for a handy guide to foreign-policymaking in...
View ArticleThe Secret of Success
This article will reveal the secret of life, describe a liaison with a star of Broadway and the silver screen, and provide all politicians—and especially Hillary Clinton—with a guide to success in...
View ArticleShooting Missives in the Air
If you’re a Republican of even the faintest stripe and haven’t signed an open letter urging somebody somewhere to do something about Donald Trump, time to get on the bus. So many are rushing forward...
View ArticleGrand Strategy in Three Words or Less
The only time I seriously contemplate suicide is circa 2 o’clock on the first day of a two-day, government-sponsored conference. Whatever enthusiasm might have existed has long since been crushed by...
View ArticleAssuming the Position
Pumphrett, newly reinstated at Defense after the unpleasantness concerning the Third Offset, had asked me to come alone to a curtained booth at the back of La Brasserie on Capitol Hill. As I entered my...
View ArticlePumphrett Ops In
I happened upon Pumphrett in Lafayette Park, where I had come to witness the straggling few Never Trump protestors. There they were—all crinkled khakis and Lululemon—half of them shouting slogans, the...
View ArticlePumphrett Plights His Troth
“I have to say, I really admire him,” enthused Pumphrett, my old Choate classmate and newly appointed White House counselor. We were sitting in the mezzanine restaurant of Trump Tower observing the...
View ArticlePumphrett and the Fourth Estate
“I think he wears lifts,” remarked my old Choate classmate Pumphrett as we churned across the Tidal Basin in a rented paddleboat.“What are you gibbering about, Pumphrett?”“You know, lifts. Elevators....
View ArticleMy Pivotal Role in Iran Contra
To understand why Paul Manafort, formerly a peripheral chairman of the Trump campaign, has volunteered to testify in closed session before the House Intelligence Committee, it’s instructive to recall...
View ArticlePumphrett and the Tangled Web
My friend and former Choate classmate Pumphrett has always embraced ignorance. He argues that ignorance is empowering because it vastly expands one’s options. “Why, if you’re ignorant enough,” he has...
View ArticlePumphrett and the Promulgation of Piffle
“I’ve cooled on Steve,” confided Pumphrett, my old friend and fellow Choate “Wild Boar” as we sipped our lattes on the bottom step of the Lincoln Memorial. I had been glad when he suggested meeting on...
View ArticlePumphrett in Trump’s Labyrinth
The anonymous instructions on a folded piece of pink paper pushed beneath my condo door specified a one a.m. rendezvous at a parking garage on K Street. If I agreed, I was to move a pot of geraniums...
View ArticleThe Back Channel Delusion
In 1991, when I was Ambassador to Jordan, King Hussein became convinced that the deterioration in his relations with the United States was the fault of an unsympathetic Department of State. It was...
View ArticleComey’s Brain: An Insider’s Perspective
I don’t know either James Comey or Donald Trump. Each says the other is lying, but only one is compulsively dishonest, so Comey’s version is likely closer to the truth. But is it the whole truth?To...
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