Prior to the disruptions of the current Iran War, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) had spent more than a half-century as the world's leading oil exporter. That crucial economic role and the vast gusher of wealth thus generated had established KSA as one of the most important countries in the world. The Middle East...

Late last week sudden, unexpected developments in the Middle East forced me to refocus my attention to the ongoing conflict in that region. The Houthi forces of Yemen---the widely used name for Ansar Allah--launched a sweeping ground offensive against the Saudi proxies deployed against them, quickly putting the latter to flight, as they abandoned their...

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks will arrive this Friday but I'm not sure how much attention that date will receive. Those landmark events of a quarter-century ago were certainly among the most important in modern times, constituting the largest and most dramatic terrorist attacks in the history of the world. Indeed, they were...

Decades ago when I was in college and grad school I had a strong side-interest in the Soviet Union and its history. During those years I may have read as many as one hundred books on those subjects. At that point, my views on most historical matters were almost entirely mainstream and conventional, closely conforming...

On Friday morning the New York Times reported that America had launched waves of attacks on Iranian targets, one of the most intense rounds of strikes since the war had begun more than four months earlier. A day or two before, President Donald Trump had declared that the ceasefire with Iran was "over." Strikes and...

Over the last few weeks I'd been paying less and less attention to our continuing Iran War mostly because less and less seemed to be happening. Every few days President Donald Trump would loudly announce that a peace agreement was about to be signed that would fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz to oil tanker...