Free Republic

Here we go again. President Donald Trump says he wants to make a deal with Iran and avoid war. And he’s sending negotiators to Oman for talks with Iranian diplomats on Friday. Sound familiar? Ahead of scheduled U.S.–Iranian talks in Oman last June, Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran, instigating a war that Trump later briefly joined with a bombing raid on Tehran’s main nuclear facilities. Not quite eight months later, the world anxiously waits to see if recent history will repeat itself, this time with America leading the charge. Israel, of course, is worried that Trump won’t attack....

Donald Trump said in 2016 to the Republican National Convention, “We must abandon the failed policy of nation-building and regime change.” Earlier this month, after the current administration launched a war against Venezuela and ousted—one might say changed the regime of—President Nicolás Maduro, Trump said, “We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.” U.S.-led regime change in Venezuela seemed to fly in the face of Trump’s prior warnings against regime change wars. But the president’s defenders said this was a different kind of military operation, unlike the Iraq,...

In August 1961, during a period when tensions between Washington and Moscow were at a high point, Admiral Konstantin I. Derevyanko penned a letter to Premier Krushchev. His purpose was to alert Krushchev to what the Admiral called the “nuclear romanticism” of the Soviet General Staff. The Admiral’s words still carry the force of logic and common sense and are still worthy of our attention today: Which planet do these people [the Soviet General Staff] intend to live on in the future, and to which Earth do they plan to send their troops to conquer territories?... By this indiscriminately massive...