Section: Ron Paul Institute (USA)
Jared Kushner’s Diplomacy for Hire
Many observers of the highly dysfunctional President Donald J Trump administration have noted how a major contributing factor for the foreign policy disasters might well derive from the appointment of two real estate billionaires personally linked to the president as its top negotiators. That Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner had no...
How the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic Became a Country
The former Soviet administrative unit that emerged as independent Ukraine in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union was bounded by the exact borders of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). That is, it comprised a wholly unnatural polity whose borders and population had been assembled by successive Soviet leaders for the administrative...
The Ground on Which Europe Stands is Shaking
Configuring the European-wide hostility towards Russia has been the long-standing project for Europe since at least the 1990s. The US security cadre long embraced the eastward expansion of Europe as a key post-war objective — firstly to combat communism in post-war Europe; and secondly, the expansion of NATO and then the EU served to lock EU...
The Crisis In Poland
I was First Secretary at the British Embassy in Warsaw 1994-98. While that was a long time ago, I knew personally many of the people at the heart of the current crisis, such as Donald Tusk and Radek Sikorski. 1) The first thing to say about Poland is that the current crisis is unlikely to turn violent, certainly not in a sustained way. There will...
Republicans Deserve to Lose, but Democrats Do Not Deserve to Win.
Anyone wondering why the Republicans are facing historic losses in this week’s midterm elections should consider these two numbers: 3.7 percent and 0.6 precent. The first is the latest one year increase in prices from the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The second is how much wages and salaries for private industry workers are reported to have...
Please Mr. President: Be A Peace President Like Eisenhower
n October of 2002, the night before the U.S. House voted to go to war in Iraq, my sister Beverly called to tell me a Knoxville television station had conducted a poll and found that 74 percent in its viewing area were in favor of the war, 9 percent were opposed, and 17 percent were undecided. The next day, when I voted against going to war, I...
America’s Deadly Addiction to War
America has a deadly addiction to war. Since 1950, presidents of both political parties have sent American troops into conflicts across the globe, killed countless people, sacrificed the lives and limbs of American servicemen and women, and wasted trillions of dollars. Yet these wars have consistently failed to achieve the objectives proclaimed...
Lies, Damn Lies, and Ukraine News
It’s been said that truth is the first casualty of war. What about the Ukraine war? I’ve followed the news closely, and have found ample evidence in headlines and storylines that the old adage holds true today. Too often the Ukraine news stories we see are misleading instead of informative. For instance, in March 2014 CNN reported...
Who is Making Billions from the Iran War?
At a campaign rally over the weekend, President Trump dismissed Americans’ concerns over high oil and gas prices, claiming that it’s a small price to pay for the hundreds of billions of dollars “we” are making from these higher prices. “We’re making a fortune,” he said. “Hundreds of billions of dollars. Trillions of dollars.”...
A Western Civ Speech Only A Neocon Could Love
When one of my acquaintances expressed his enthusiasm for Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s October 7 speech from the Acropolis in Athens, Greece—seeing it as the de facto launching of a presidential campaign—I thought to watch the talk in its entirety. It was worth the viewing, if only for the craftsmanship involved. It was set in the...
