A week ago, after meeting Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the two sides had made progress on the matter of coordination and intelligence sharing in the air war against al-Nusra (now re-dubbed Fatah al-Sham) and ISIL in Syria.

Meanwhile President Obama (at least since last December) has backed off on his insistence---urgent in 2011, when he was advised by Hillary Clinton as secretary of state---that Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad surrender power. This demand has weakened over time as Assad has stubbornly clung to power, as the (largely Sunni) national army has performed unexpectedly well against U.S.-backed armed rebels, and as Russia has belatedly intervened on behalf of the regime (or, as Moscow sees it, the modern, secular Syrian state itself). More

The enduring cliche of the 2016 election is a comment by Trump that provokes outrage, rebukes, and the declaration, “He’s gone too far.” This happened the moment Trump declared his presidential bid by denigrating Mexicans, then when he attacked veterans, women, the disabled, Muslims, and the judiciary among others, and most recently with his vendetta More

Political discourse in America still takes place within the New Deal/Great Society (ND/GS) framework that dominated the political arena from the end of the Second World War up to the mid-seventies. The terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ were central within this settlement. Orthodox politicos who inform themselves through NPR and other mainstream venues occupy a static world. They do not think historically nor do they conceptualize major institutions, like capitalism, in developmental or evolutionary terms. Hence, most of your liberal friends have no idea what the term ‘neoliberalism’ means. More