Ben Friedman

[tapping earpiece] I'm just now getting a startling revelation about the shocking thing in common between those who work forces and those who burn crosses

Predictably people are saying this harms the credibility of ISW's map. But the ISW map enterprise lost credibility with me a couple years ago when they published analysis preposterously claiming that a drone attack on the Kremlin was actually a Russian false flag attack on itself.

Think tanker altered Ukraine war map before big Polymarket payout The Institute for the Study of War disavowed the edit, removed the employee, but is staying quiet, raising questions about the credibility of ISW and prediction gambling

It's pretty wild that someone at the Institute for the Study of War falsified their widely-cited war map to win a Polymarket bet. ISW fired the employee but didn't say why.
responsiblestatecraft.org/isw-polymark...

Trump Administration Says Europe Faces ‘Civilizational Erasure’

Trump national security strategy says US should stop "hectoring" repressive nations in the Middle East about human rights then goes on to hector democratically elected European nations about their domestic policies. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/w...

I partially disagree. Good writing is related to cleat thinking yes, but not necessarily deep expertise or insightfulness. I changed my mind on this due to various professional writers--reporters and magazine types--becoming abominable but compelling foreign policy pundits.

U.S., Ukraine move forward on peace deal, but Russian rejection is likely Putin has said the earlier U.S. plan, which Ukraine saw as too pro-Russian, should be the basis for talks and is unlikely to back down.

Being honest about what happened here, the Europeans and the US Secretary of State managed to insert poison pills into the peace deal Witkoff had put out, making it more unacceptable to Russia and thus ensuring the war continues.
www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/1...

It's one thing to argue Saudi Arabia is an important country, so we take meetings, put aside moral outrage, and do business. But the gratuitous ass-kissing, including a flyover, is needless. Why not just shrug and say we have a free press; we don't tell them what to ask? It's egregiously unamerican.

Even worse than this bit is how he went on to call the reporter embarrassing and "insubordinate" and threaten her employer's ABC's license. Just autocratically bullying the media to show off to MBS.

2 killed in U.S. strike on alleged drug boat in Eastern Pacific, Hegseth says Two people on board an alleged drug-smuggling vessel in the Eastern Pacific were killed by a U.S. military strike, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday

This is the 16th strike of its kind this year — and at least 66 people are dead because of the government’s rash actions.

These extrajudicial strikes are illegal under both international and domestic law.

If you're gonna build a coalition to change US Israel policy, especially on the right, you're gonna have an anti-semitism problem.

Vance responds that we often have different interests than Israel and had to pressure them to get the latest ceasefire, which is mildly good and what passes for boldly critical of Israel in DC, but he avoids telling the guy we don't have a state religion.

YouTube video by Forbes Breaking News JD Vance Responds To Man Who Says Israel's 'Religion... Openly Supports The Prosecution Of Ours'

See the promise and peril of the right's emerging anti-Israel politics here. This guy asks Vance why we support Israel, sensibly suggesting we shouldn't while flashing Christian Nationalism by saying they have a different religion than "us" and are hostile to ours. www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9Bn...

Pentagon readying thousands of Guard ‘reaction forces’ as U.S. mission widens The Defense Department’s newly established “quick reaction force” within the National Guard is being readied for civil unrest missions in U.S. cities.

If we can't stop this shit, let's at least all call them stormtroopers.
www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

What to make of Qatar's diet Article 5 protections Trump "may well have intended it one way, and the region could interpret it in another," said one expert.

A security guarantee by executive order is not much of a security guarantee. And even if it were a treaty, no US President can't he trusted to restrain Israel. Next president can and should ignore. www.axios.com/2025/10/08/t...

Trump ‘Determined’ the U.S. Is Now in a War With Drug Cartels, Congress Is Told

The war on drugs keeps getting more literal.
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/u...

This is extremely similar to what Duterte did in the Philippines. Killing of supposed drug dealers without due process. Dictator level stuff, scary.

Terror on The High Seas In the latest migration of a term with lethal consequences, "terrorism" is a pretext for murdering 11 people in international waters

I wrote in my book that "Trump had learned the foremost lesson of 9/11: the terrorists were whomever you said they were." Now "terrorism" is what he's using to apparently provoke a war with Venezuela.

Macron says 26 countries pledge troops as a reassurance force for Ukraine after fighting ends French President Emmanuel Macron says that 26 of Ukraine’s allies have pledged to deploy troops as a “reassurance force” for the war-torn country once fighting ends in the conflict with Russia.

I can't speak for Ukraine, but the fact that Europeans feel compelled to call their proposed force for post-war Ukraine a "reassurance" force suggests it is not gonna be backed by a credible threat and won't be reassuring at all.

apnews.com/article/russ...

Along with Trump and Rubio, the bipartisan empowerment of presidents to blow up whoever they want by calling them terrorists is the big culprit here.

The purpose of attacking the ship seems to be to pretend are a we're at war with criminals and Venezuela, not to stop drugs or terrorism. In that sense it's a big escalation over the worst belligerence of the drone wars.

US military kills 11 people in strike on alleged drug boat from Venezuela, Trump says The U.S. military killed 11 people on Tuesday in a strike on a vessel from Venezuela allegedly carrying illegal narcotics, President Donald Trump said, in the first known operation since his administration's recent deployment of warships to the southern Caribbean.

Blowing up a boat and killing 11 people and in the name of stopping a drug shipment is a depraved act of needless violence. If it's a drug shipment, stop it with the Coast Guard.
www.reuters.com/world/americ...

Muslim Brotherhood terror designation ‘in the works,’ Rubio says “As long as Hamas exists, there will be no peace in Gaza,” the U.S. secretary of state told the radio host Sid Rosenberg.

This news is a throwback to the aughts, with Marco Rubio doing his best to resurrect the dumbest parts of the war on terror, conflating Islamism and terrorism.
www.jns.org/muslim-broth...

Law Firms That Settled With Trump Are Pressed to Help on Trade Deals

Despite everything autocratic thing that's happened this year, it's still shocking to me that these huge law firms are agreeing to be subordinated to Trump: working pro bono on an insane protectionist agenda. Corrupt, autocratic, and barely even a scandal.
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/u...

Even before Alaska summit, Putin is redrawing global order to his liking The Alaska summit between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin represents a return to great-power politics in which big countries call the shots.

This article asserts baselessly that Putin is already reordering the world in Russia's favor just by having a summit with Trump. The implication is Russia isn't a major power unless we treat it as one, an idea Ukraine war should have disabused people of.
www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...

Is starvation in Gaza really Israel's fault? The facts are clear Rising starvation in Gaza may have a number of factors. But Israel's wartime policies on humanitarian aid are inarguably among them.

For @forward.com, I wrote about how we know that Israel has been withholding food as a military tactic because Israeli officials have said versions of “we are withholding food as a military tactic” for the entirety of the war and pretending otherwise is willful ignorance forward.com/opinion/7586...

This suggests the opportunity for an off-ramp, which may be facilitated by Israel running low on a few key things, and thus willing to quit after they hit a few more militarily useless targets in a bank-shot attempt to destabilizie the Iranian government.

Live Updates: Iran Fires Missiles at U.S. Base in Qatar

Both the US strikes on Iran and their retaliation today seem partly theatrical. The US didn't do the sustained campaign likely in the can to really cripple Iranian nuclear weapons program, and the Iranians shot at well-defended bases with warning.
www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06...

Trump’s Iran Choice: Last-Chance Diplomacy or a Bunker-Busting Bomb

This binary view is wrong. The third choice is to live with Iran as a nascent nuclear weapons state, as we've been doing for a while, or fully nuclear one, and pressure Israel to not destabilize the situation by bombing.
www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/u...

Under no circumstances should we get sucked into Israel's preventive war on Iran, which will likely prove counterproductive. The question is how bad it gets.

US begins evacuating Mideast embassies, army bases as Iran nuclear talks come to a head CENTCOM chief shelves Senate testimony as nonessential embassy staff, troops' dependents depart region; Iranian defense minister threatens to strike US bases amid stalled talks

If Israel bombs Iran in an attempt to kibosh US negotiations and drag us into a war, can we stop underwriting their military? Or at least acknowledge we shouldn't pay them to screw us? www.timesofisrael.com/us-begins-ev...