Louis René Beres
Why ‘Palestine’ Would Be a Dangerous Fiction
“The first general law, which is to be found in the very end of the society of Nations, is that each Nation should contribute as far as it can to the happiness and advancement...
“The Crowd Is Untruth”: Why American Political Life Is Increasingly Deformed
“The crowd is untruth”
Soren Kierkegaard, Point of View, “That Individual”
To understand the broadly dysfunctional nature of current American politics, we must first learn to look more capably behind the news. There, suitably distant from any adrenalized jumble...
Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un, and North Korean human rights
S President Donald Trump traveled to Singapore to negotiate urgent nuclear matters, and not to discuss North Korean violations of basic human rights. Nonetheless, any such willful US indifference to these violations in another...
Selective Nuclear Disclosure and Israel’s Strategic Deterrence
For Israel, a principal component of national strategic policy has always been to keep presumptive military nuclear assets (aka "the bomb") shrouded in the "basement." Arguably, at least until now, nuclear ambiguity (sometimes also called "opacity")...
Would Trump Use the Bomb?
After the Helsinki Summit between President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin, certain fearful matters of “high politics” in American diplomacy are discussed only in whispers, so as to seemingly reduce the likelihood of...
After Helsinki: US Abandons Legal Obligations in Syria
Among several noteworthy and interrelated Helsinki summit policy derelictions – most obviously, Vladimir Putin’s still unpunished aggressions in Crimea – US President Donald Trump chose to ignore America’s binding legal obligations regarding Russian war crimes in Syria....
Madness, Irrationality, and the Logic of Deterrence
Do you know what it means to find yourselves face to face with a madman? Madmen, lucky folk, construct without logic, or rather with a logic that flies like a feather. (Luigi Pirandello, Henry IV)
In...
How Sun Tzu Might Approach US Nuclear Strategy
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Although nuclear strategy must, by definition, be shaped without historical precedent, it should contain certain ancient core concepts. The strategic postulates first laid down by Sun Tzu could be referenced usefully by...
Mass Society, Presidential Emptiness And America’s “Soul”
“We are the hollow men,
We are the stuffed men”
T S Eliot, The Hollow Men (1925)
Once upon a time, long before T.S. Eliot’s oft-quoted poetic metaphor, Ralph Waldo Emerson called upon Americans to embrace “plain living...
The Trump Presidency At Its Core: Origins Of American Political Disfigurement
You ever notice they always call the other side `the elite.’ The elite! Why are they elite? I have a much better apartment than they do. I’m smarter than they are. I’m richer than...