Early on, David Mamet established himself as a gifted playwright and screenwriter. Genuine artists are not herd animals, esthetically, intellectually or politically. For example, Mamet’s screenplay for the 1997 film, “Wag the Dog,” finessed — by in large — the politically correct cliches, which, since the Vietnam War, have turned Hollywood into an ideologically petrified […]

Last week’s naval confrontation between Vietnam and China involved an old and unresolved territorial dispute in the South China Sea. For decades, the Communist neighbors have sparred over the islets. However, Hanoi’s high-risk response led to the most dangerous clash since the bloody 1979 China-Vietnam border war. The Vietnam-China Paracel Islands dispute — Chinese calls […]

Partisan political advantage, gained at the real or potential life-threatening expense of American personnel undertaking high-risk assignments, was the deep moral issue driving prosecutors in the 2005 Valerie Plame name exposure scandal. An even more disturbing and exploitative example of high-level Washington political operatives exposing low-level American field personnel to greater physical risk is the […]

Russia’s “Crimean Precedent” — the brazen military invasion and imperial political annexation of sovereign territory — has shredded several key post-Cold War diplomatic agreements and treaties. To the chagrin of China, this 21st-century object lesson in authoritarian depredation and brute military force now provides Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe with the decisive political opportunity to […]

For the past month, the Russian government, with Vladimir Putin its spotlight propagandist, has repeatedly declared that brutal anti-Russian ethnic violence as a prelude to ethnic-based civil war is imminent in Eastern Ukraine. That’s a lie. What Eastern Ukraine really faces is a Russian military invasion — and more on that in a moment. Kremlin […]

Vladimir Putin’s creeping assault on Ukraine continues. With a quick strike invasion, Russian conventional and special operations forces bit off Crimea, annexed it, and then waited. This week, ethnic Russian agitators in eastern Ukraine marched on camera, building barricades and demanding political unification with Mother Russia. One group in Donetsk demanded the Kremlin send “temporary” […]