ArcaMax

Fail to study the past (history), from energizing grand aspirations to how-it's-done tactics, and you will fail the present.

Failure to study the basics definitely occurred when the Biden administration clan committed its disastrous 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal. The relevant history Biden administration bigwigs failed to study was how to safely ...Read more

In late December, the Voice of America reported that Hong Kong's Dec. 19, 2021, election had "almost completely eliminated pro-democracy voices from the former British colony's Legislative Council" -- colloquially called the Legco.

VOA's evidence: pro-Beijing candidates and their local allies took 89 of the council's 90 seats.

I prefer the ...Read more

As 2022 begins, four strategic challenges to the post-World War II international order generate the psychological ambiguity -- meaning plain old human fear -- that fosters ethnic and sectarian slaughter and seeds the kind of bloody "proxy" wars that escalate into major regional wars.

Warning to everyone who cares about Planet Earth: When major ...Read more

Seventeen years ago, I reprised a Christmas column I'd written in the 1990s for a Texas newspaper.

The original column and the 2004 interpretation celebrated a holiday prayer conceived by my favorite grand-aunt, Aunt Lillian, a before-the-big-meal "grace" of gratitude and humble spirit composed with a mother's grasp of Thanksgiving and ...Read more

Aggravated bees attack unfortunate honey seekers from all directions. The mad birds in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" mastered the tactic, attacking en masse residents of a small Northern California town in coordinated swarms.

Ticked off bees are a fact, malign Hitchcockian birds a fiction, but both demonstrate aerial swarm attacks can be ...Read more

As 2021 ends, Russia threatens to invade Ukraine (eastern Europe) and China threatens to invade Taiwan (east Asian littoral).

Russia's early December troop movements along its Ukraine border and China's fall 2021 aerial and naval penetrations of Taiwanese territory are well-publicized displays of massed conventional armed forces poised to enter...Read more

December 7, 1941. "A date which will live in infamy," President Franklin D. Roosevelt called it. The attack's 80th anniversary is this month.

Infamy. Webster's Dictionary defines infamy as: "evil reputation brought about by something grossly criminal, shocking, or brutal."

From the U.S. perspective, the Japanese 1941 sneak attack on Pearl ...Read more

Calling the Aug. 29 mistaken counterterror attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, a wartime error -- or an "endless war" withdrawal blunder -- understates the inhumane effects and geostrategic significance of the tragedy.

On the other hand, labeling the incident a war crime absurdly overstates the case. Prior to the strike, an Islamic State group-...Read more

In early August Economic Information Daily, a communist Chinese government mouthpiece, accused the multibillion-dollar online video game industry of peddling "spiritual opium" to Chinese teenagers.

Comparing video game playing to opium addiction has explicit historical and national security connections. Opium addiction, spurred by Great Britain...Read more

In July Japan's Vice Defense Minister Yasuhide Nakayama told the Hudson Institute that China and Russia could launch a surprise "Pearl Harbor-style attack" in the Pacific. The Washington Examiner and Reuters quoted Nakayama as insisting the U.S. and Japan must demonstrate the will to deter both China and Russia because "they are doing their (...Read more

In July The National Interest published an essay entitled "Can America Lose to China?" written by Kishore Mahbubani, a fellow at the National University of Singapore's Asia Research Institute and a former Singapore UN Ambassador.

The essay focuses on the China-U.S. political, economic and social competition. Mahbubani begins with an observation...Read more