Source: Reason
by Katherine Mangu-Ward

“Here’s a good rule of thumb, both for understanding foreign policy and also for life in general: When someone offers a bunch of rapid-fire and mutually irreconcilable justifications for a controversial decision, they’re not telling you the whole story. William Shakespeare might have invoked letting slip the dogs of war to describe the unleashing of violence, but these days we just ‘wag the dog.’ Popularized by Our American Cousin — the play being performed at Ford’s Theatre when President Abraham Lincoln was shot — the phrase took on an explicitly political meaning after the ripped-from-the-headlines 1997 film Wag the Dog. In that otherwise pretty awful movie, a fabricated military conflict was used to distract voters from a presidential sex scandal. Since then, the term has become shorthand for the idea that leaders sometimes use military action to divert attention from problems at home.” (03/26/26)

https://reason.com/2026/03/26/a-tail-wagging-a-dog-forever/

Source: The American Conservative
by Doug Bandow

“American officials and commentators are outraged that Moscow would stoop so low, helping another country to — cue manifold expressions of fury and outrage — kill U.S. military personnel. (Some have also claimed that Russia provided intelligence to the Yemeni Houthis targeting Western merchantmen and American warships in the Red Sea, and, less credibly, paid the Taliban to kill Americans in Afghanistan.) Such critics of Moscow are like Captain Renault, who famously discovered gambling occurring at Rick’s Café Américain in the movie Casablanca. Shocking! Shut the establishment! Those demanding action offer few helpful suggestions, preferring, for instance, to call on the administration to ‘respond with clarity and resolve.’ Meaning what, precisely? Perhaps provide financial and military support to Moscow’s adversary, even planning the latter’s battlefield operations. Oh, wait! That is what Washington has been doing for years.” (03/26/26)

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/in-iran-russia-pays-america-back-for-aiding-ukraine/

Source: Libertarian Institute
by Brad Pearce

“The Israeli-American attack on Iran has been defined more than anything by the nonsensical nature of the messaging, with statements listing any number of potential goals. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump, always eccentric and erratic, has been ranting about an endless variety of topics, with each day bringing about new unhinged statements. It is as if we have watched the White House become a Greek tragedy before our very eyes, with Donald Trump in the role of a mad king. This represents an incredible fall for a man who defeated all of his opponents and orchestrated the greatest comeback in American political history. However, his advanced age and hubris seem to have got the best of him. Trump must on some level know that his attack on Iran was a strategic disaster, hence his spiraling behavior.” (03/26/26)

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/trumps-american-tragedy

Source: Foreign Policy
by Aliona Hlivco & Dalibor Rohac

“The Trump administration has been roundly criticized for a lack of clarity in its war aims and strategy. What is perhaps even more striking is the lack of imagination, by both the civilian and the military leadership, in grappling with the prospect of countering asymmetric drone warfare. The economics of the drone war are currently lopsided by several orders of magnitude. Shooting down $20,000 drones with a limited stock of multimillion-dollar interceptors is unsustainable when the United States faces a comparatively puny adversary, such as Iran; it becomes completely unthinkable in a situation in which the U.S. military would have to fight off a larger adversary with a massive drone supply, such as China or Russia.” (03/26/26)

https://archive.is/tUhjH

Source: Christian Science Monitor
by staff

“This month, three democracy-tracking organizations released analyses of the state of political, press, and personal freedoms around the world. The title of one report, ‘The Growing Shadow of Autocracy,’ sums up a shared view about backsliding on all these fronts. Yet the data and perspectives also reveal progress – especially in the enduring and widespread appeal of democratic ideals and values. Looking back at 2025, the Sweden-based Variety of Democracies Institute, known as V-Dem, counts 44 countries worldwide that it says are ‘autocratizing,’ including the United States. In particular for the U.S., V-Dem cites recent ‘attacks on the press, academia, civil liberties, and dissenting voices.’ On the other hand, the Dartmouth College-based Bright Line Watch finds that declining views of American democracy from earlier in 2025 have ‘largely stabilized’, and public opinion now shows ‘mild optimism.'” (03/25/26)

https://www.csmonitor.com/Editorials/the-monitors-view/2026/0325/Defending-and-demanding-democracy