Opinion

In the days following Donald Trump's apparently impulsive decision to assassinate Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Iran's powerful military leader, there was a lot of speculation about why the president would do something so foolish and provocative. Some folks have clung to the idea that there is method to Trump's madness, but reporting since then has made it clear that he didn't spend time contemplating the likely national security consequences before — or after — making this decision. Instead, it seems that, because Trump is motivated strictly by self-interest and ego, his focus was less on the situation in Iran and more on his re-election prospects and creating a distraction from the ongoing impeachment drama.

A prestigious lecture before the Federalist Society’s annual convention was not an opportunity Attorney General William Barr would miss. But even conservative attorneys in attendance might have wondered why Barr chose the occasion to launch an attack on “the grammar school civics class version of [the American] Revolution,” that it was “a rebellion against monarchical tyranny.” The Declaration of Independence’s ringing proclamation that the “History of the present King of Great-Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States” seems to have fled Barr’s memory. Instead, Barr alleges that “the patriots well understood that their prime antagonist was an overweening Parliament.”

The decade ends with two major threats to humanity: global warming leading to a climate catastrophe and the threat of a nuclear war extinguishing our civilization. The U.S. has pulled out of the Paris Agreement and is wrecker-in-chief of the weak climate change agreement that all the countries had signed to limit the emission of greenhouse gases. It is also leading the charge for a nuclear armageddon, dismantling all nuclear arms control treaties. Expectedly, there has been a Russian response, but not by matching the U.S. efforts but by asymmetric measures designed to defeat the U.S. attempts of gaining nuclear dominance. Such an asymmetric response does not reduce the threat of a nuclear exchange but only ensures that there will be no winner in such a nuclear war.

The Iranians fired a dozen rockets last night into American compounds in Iraq. The strikes were retaliation for the president’s decision to assassinate that country’s top general. As the bombs fell, George Conway, a fierce conservative critic of Donald Trump, said something we should all bear in mind. It rings with a crystalline truth.

Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes on bases in Iraq housing U.S. troops, following the U.S. assassination of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, have dramatically raised tensions in the Middle East. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei called the missile strike a “slap in the face” of the Americans and called for U.S. troops to leave the Middle East. The Iranian missile strikes come just days after the Iraqi Parliament voted to expel all foreign military forces from Iraq. We speak with Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan.

Ever since President Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani last Friday night, everyone in the world has been holding their breath wondering what would come next. There were tweets and public statements about retaliation, with the president saying he would target Iranian cultural sites, while the Iranians were promising they would not engage in the asymmetric responses everyone assumed they were planning.

“Should I get a Huawei phone?”

In a recent op-ed, “I Was Once a Socialist. Then I Saw How It Worked,” conservative columnist David Brooks wrote, “We ran that social experiment [between capitalism and socialism] for 100 years and capitalism won.” But did capitalism really win? As I indicated in a chapter (“Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism”) in my An Age of Progress? Clashing Twentieth-Century Global Forces, history tells a more complicated story.

President Richard Nixon, like President Donald Trump, had his share of unwavering loyalists and supporters — and no matter how damning the Watergate scandal became in 1974, they refused to say a word against Nixon. Those Nixon loyalists, journalist Frank Rich stresses in an essay for New York Magazine, offer some valuable insights on what will ultimately befall Trump’s “toadies.”

As the 2020s kick off, there is much reason to despair. Donald Trump is doing what many of us feared he would, rushing the U.S. into possible war with Iran with an impulsive decision to assassinate Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Understandably, many of us are having flashbacks to 2002 and 2003, when the George W. Bush administration was rushing into a disastrous war with Iraq, based on false evidence.

IT’S BECOMING CLEARER by the hour. There was no legitimate reason for Donald Trump to order the military assassination of Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani.

We continue our discussion of data harvesting, targeted advertising and voter manipulation — practices used by firms like Cambridge Analytica. The secretive data firm collapsed in May 2018 after The Observer newspaper revealed the company had harvested some 87 million Facebook profiles without the users’ knowledge or consent to sway voters to support Trump during the 2016 campaign. A new trove of internal Cambridge Analytica documents and emails are being posted on Twitter detailing the company’s operations, including its work with President Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton. We speak with Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, co-directors of the Oscar-shortlisted documentary “The Great Hack”; Brittany Kaiser, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower featured in “The Great Hack” and author of “Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again”; and Emma Briant, a visiting research associate in human rights at Bard College. Her upcoming book is titled “Propaganda Machine: Inside Cambridge Analytica and the Digital Influence Industry.”