Sunday Comics

Adam Zyglis
Adam Zyglis
Demonstrations have been taking place across Kazakhstan. The government has been becoming more repressive; President Nursultan Nazarbaev has been in office since before the Soviet Union collapsed. The society is closed enough that it’s hard to know exactly what is going on. From Eurasianet and RFE/RL. Photo from BBC, where there is more discussion. Read More
The genre “what President Obama should say in Hiroshima” grows every day. Each op-ed lists what the author believes is important about nuclear weapons. Their sameness is depressing. End nuclear weapons. A very good idea, but hard, perhaps impossible, to execute. Read More
Russia complains that the United States broke a promise not to expand NATO to the east, made when the reunification of Germany was negotiated in 1990. Recent scholarship agrees that the United States promised at that time not to expand NATO, although the promise was not formalized. (Shorter podcast version here.) Read More
Rob Rogers
Jeffrey Lewis of the Monterey Institute for International Studies (MIIS), also known as Arms Control Wonk, has written a nice primer on open-source intelligence. If you want to know more about that subject, I highly recommend it. Read More
I might not be able to post for a while, so here are some things to keep you busy.
You may have read or read about David Samuels’s profile of Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes. Here is my Twitter take; I may write more if I have the time. Read More
Adam Zyglis