Sanction may backfire in Russian rocket sales to U.S. space program

 

Sophisticated Russian rocket technology took down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine. It now has the potential to take down America’s Air Force and NASA rocket programs. (read more)

John Raoux/Associated Press file

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, carrying an X-37B experimental robotic space plane, lifts off in December 2012. If the Russians make good on their threat to withhold the RD-180 engine used in the rockets, it could have up to a $5 billion impact on the U.S. space program.

Exporting guns and gangs to Central America, and importing victims

The balance of trade in misery is hard to measure. The United States is importing inordinate suffering with the increasing numbers of victims fleeing Central American violence. More than 52,000 unaccompanied minors have recently entered the U.S. and sparked the latest immigration crisis.

People are rafted across the Suchiate River to the shore at Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico, from Tecun Uman, Guatemala, earlier this month.

On the export side, guns and gangs are mainly U.S. products that infect Central American societies and are to blame for much of the extreme violence and corruption down south. The exported means of violence, combined with hopeless economies, drive kids into the arms of dangerous mercenary escort “coyotes” and their promise to lead them north to safety and opportunity. (read more)

Russia is now clearly a state sponsor of terror

The collective gasp heard around the world after the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 is a recognition that what just happened is different. Civilian casualties in war zones are, unfortunately, all too common, sometimes outpacing the deaths of combatants. But this wanton act of shooting down a civilian airliner falls under a whole new category of terror.

What is it that has changed? Russia.

Dmitry Lovetsky/ The Associated Press

A pro-Russian fighter stands guard Friday at the site of a crashed Malaysia Airlines passenger jet near the village of Hrabove in eastern Ukraine.

The international community has a name for the type of state that Russia has become under Vladimir Putin’s reign: A state sponsor of terror. (read more)

Iraq, Syria Need National Saviors More Than U.S. Intervention

China and Russia are fighting a heated war with the United States. It is an intense battle of words and ideas fought between state-sponsored broadcasters, on the airwaves and online.

World War II hero Raoul Wallenberg in an this undated file photo

In 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said straightforwardly that the U.S. is “engaged in an information war.” She concluded her analysis to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations by saying that in the fight against emerging international broadcasters, “we are losing that war.” (read more)

Monarchs are ananchronisms but also have their place

The just-announced abdication of Juan Carlos of Spain is reigniting the question of the role of kings in that modern constitutional monarchy and around the world. (read more)

Andres Kudacki/The Associated Press

King Juan Carlos salutes during a ceremony in Spain last week. His prestige stopped a military coup in the 1980s. Now he’s stepping down and Prince Felipe will assume the throne.

The End of America’s ‘Big Stick’ Policy

My wife comes from a large family and her father would always make a point when the kids fought. He would give them each a stick from the ground and ask them to break it. Snapping the singular twig in half was never a problem. (read more)

President Barack Obama and Lt. Gen. Robert Caslen Jr., center, superintendent at the U.S. Military Academy, stand for the national anthem during last week’s graduation and commissioning ceremony in West Point, N.Y. Obama urged restraint before further military missions.

North Korean dreams, Japanese nightmares

Heads of state are sometimes treated to fireworks displays when visiting overseas. North Korea promised more than that during President Barack Obama’s recent swing through Asia. It threatened to detonate a nuclear device during his visit to South Korea.

Just 35 miles downwind from the North Korean border, Obama was being taunted by an aggrieved, impoverished and rogue nuclear power. It was a dark fantasy scenario reminiscent of a James Bond plot. Thankfully, the threat remained only that, with no accidental or intended explosions. (read more)

Popes and presidents can make a powerful team

St. Peter’s Square teemed last weekend with believers witnessing the extraordinary canonization of two contemporary popes, John XXIII and John Paul II.

Domenico Stinellis/ The Associated Press

Pope Francis is driven through a Vatican crowd Sunday after presiding over a ceremony canonizing two of his predecessors, John XXIII and John Paul II.

Americans who are critical of the church, its failings and even the sanctification process focus on recent scandals and exclusionary practices. Without minimizing these criticisms, there should also be a secular recognition of these two past popes’ international achievements, remembering that they both partnered with U.S. presidents to positively change the course of global events. (read more)

Warm water, cold reality, new frontier for exploiting resources

Big-screen “Noah,” the box office hit, presents the Biblical story of near apocalypse and indifference to God’s warnings. Small-screen NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, regularly warns of impending man-made environmental doom on its climate.gov website.

The submarine USS New Mexico surfaces through the ice during a Navy exercise in the Arctic Ocean last month. Scientists predict that Arctic ice could melt enough to allow for commercial shipping year round. The U.S. is one of many countries with claims in the Arctic.

Whether one is more susceptible to religious parables or scientific findings, the very real effects of contemporary climate change are happening at a stunning pace. (read more)

A question of Turkey and NATO

There is plenty to say about Turkey these days, although not on Twitter or YouTube. Both are frequently blacked out in Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey. Erdogan says he wants to “wipe out Twitter.” As a result, critically important voices regarding Turkey’s strategic importance and democratic evolution are harder to hear.

My voice, too, is often discounted. My Greek name usually prevents me from writing about Turkey because it is dismissed as biased.

Though I was born and reared in California, my ethnic origin labels me hostile to Turkey. The reason? Greece and Turkey have ongoing disputes regarding territorial waters, airspace, islands, the future exploitation of continental shelf hydrocarbons and the matter of Turkish troop-occupied Cyprus.

But here’s the reality: I know and love Turkey. I have traveled the country multiple times, learned a bit of the language and even got married there.

Looking at the geopolitics of that nation-state, all I see is a Western-aligned country unjustly denied European Union association years ago, back when Erdogan was still interested in Europe. What is never stated in the official EU affiliation postponements and negotiations, however, is what is heard in the German and French streets – Turkey will never be a European Union nation because Turkey is not a European nation; because it is Muslim. (read more)

Punish Putin by opening door to Russia's best and brightest

Immigration policy was the first weapon used to punish Vladimir Putin and his cronies following their Crimean consumption.

Eric Risberg/The Associated Press

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who emigrated from Russia, gestures after riding in a driverless car with Gov. Jerry Brown, left, in September 2012 in Mountain View. One way to punish Russia is to attract more like Brin

A dominant line considers a Putin who is nostalgic for the Soviet empire and with a deep-seated desire to reconstruct a modern, greater Russia.

While he may have broader irredentist goals and be willing to throw the dice on Ukraine to this end, his calculation of the costs of invading Crimea needs also to be understood as a move for his personal political survival.

When looking to history, the Russian military moves in Ukraine may resemble Hitler’s “Anschluss” – the German annexation of Austria leading up to WWII – but the real effect is for this to be Putin’s “Tiananmen Square.” (read more)

Putin’s push into Ukraine could be his Tiananmen Square

Most analysts of the Ukraine crisis ask why Russian President Vladimir Putin would risk international condemnation – and potential military confrontation – with his aggressive military moves in Crimea.

A dominant line considers a Putin who is nostalgic for the Soviet empire and with a deep-seated desire to reconstruct a modern, greater Russia.

While he may have broader irredentist goals and be willing to throw the dice on Ukraine to this end, his calculation of the costs of invading Crimea needs also to be understood as a move for his personal political survival.

When looking to history, the Russian military moves in Ukraine may resemble Hitler’s “Anschluss” – the German annexation of Austria leading up to WWII – but the real effect is for this to be Putin’s “Tiananmen Square.” (read more)

Open Cuba; close Guantanamo

Bang! That’s how the Cuban Revolution began. Fidel Castro’s “permanent revolution” is now on the verge of going out with a whimper.

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Uncredited/ The Associated Press

President Barack Obama shakes hands with Cuban President Raul Castro in December during a memorial service for former South African President Nelson Mandela in Soweto, South Africa.

As importantly, America’s historic lapse on Cuban soil is also about to disappear.

American polls show new support for normalizing relations with Cuba. Leading U.S. politicians such as Florida’s Charlie Crist and major media now advocate for change in the adversarial half-century policy that pits the United States against the tiny island nation. President Barack Obama’s recent handshake with Cuban President Raul Castro became a thawing gesture felt round the world.

The inevitability of normalized relations is just a question of timing. Will it come prior to the 2016 presidential elections? Or will it just take the passing of 87-year-old Fidel Castro, now more reclusive in his twilight? (read more)

Good Ship USA – a remembrance of Ambassador Shirley Temple Black

I’m a Shirley Temple fan. Not a big fan of her movies; they seemed more suited for my sister. I’m a fan of her diplomacy in Czechoslovakia. I was a Newsweek reporter living in Prague between the 1989 “Velvet Revolution” and 1991 when I saw up close how Ambassador Shirley Temple Black worked it. That’s how I became a fan. (Disclosure: I like ambassadors, my wife was U.S. ambassador to Hungary 2010-13.)

America has had many notable diplomats dealing with Czechoslovakia, or the more modern Czech Republic, a country split from Slovakia in 1993 following a “Velvet Divorce.”

But Shirley Temple Black’s watch came at a seminal moment in modern Czechoslovak history and she was, perhaps unexpectedly, the right person at the right time. (read more)

Hoffman, heroin and the war in Afghanistan

In the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War,” Philip Seymour Hoffman played a CIA officer determined to help Afghans win back their country from occupying Soviets in the 1980s. The helicopter-killing missiles that Hoffman’s character promoted for mujahedeen fighters – and procured with Charlie Wilson’s congressional support – were decisive in turning the tide against the Soviet Red Army.

Francois Duhamel/

Philip Seymour Hoffman played a CIA agent in “Charlie Wilson’s War,” about covert operations in Afghanistan, where most of the world’s heroin is produced.

But there is a cruel twist of ironic fate in the drug-addicted Hoffman’s recent heroin overdose death. Most of the world’s heroin – about 80 percent – is currently produced in the country where the United States has fought its longest war: Afghanistan. (read more)