The rules of engagement: Trump rejoins the world America never left

April 10, 2017

President Donald J. Trump’s decision to respond to the chemical weapons attack in Syria with a bombardment of 59 Tomahawk missiles was the most presidential thing he has done so far. He’s not the first president to use an air strike as a form of gesture politics and, sadly, he won’t be the last.

But it had to be done. It’s what a President Hillary Clinton would’ve done. It’s what President Barack Obama should’ve done. What does it accomplish? Maybe nothing. But you cannot let chemical weapons go unnoticed. This year marks the centennial of the United States’ entry into World War I, the Great War, in which millions were gassed. The response was “Never again.” And yet it has happened, again and again. ...

Trump’s truth: Stranger than fiction?

February 8, 2017

President Donald J. Trump’s “America first” campaign isn’t an original idea, as several historians have pointed out. There was the isolationist America First Committee that sought to keep the United States out of World War II and that featured aviation hero Charles A. Lindbergh as a member. Needless to say, the committee ended with the attack on Pearl Harbor, life having a way of forcing your hand.

But in “Water Music” (2014) – the first novel in my series, “The Games Men Play” – Sen. Morris Severance campaigns on the idea “Keep America Safe, First.” ...

‘America First’ – to serve others

January 22, 2017

I was a selfish child. Make that a self-centered child marked by a self-possession that I wore as a kind of armor against difficult parents and, later, other difficult authority figures. When I was 13, I had a teacher who told us students that selfishness was the root of all evil, the vice from which all others emanate. (She herself was a horror who should’ve practiced what she preached.)

But there is a fine line, I understood, between selfishness and self-possession in service of self-preservation. Recently, one of the columnists I edit wrote a piece in which he observed that there’s a reason that airlines ask you to put on your own oxygen mask first in case of an emergency: You cannot help others if you yourself are in harm’s way.

Which brings us to the new era – actually the cyclical era – of America First. ...