Have you ever had to take away an aging parent’s car keys? I have.

I remember how hard it was when my family, seeing that my dad’s declining mental and physical abilities made him a danger on the road to himself and others, took away his car keys. It wasn’t pretty— the family had underestimated how important driving a car was to Dad’s sense of self as vigorous and competent.

Now the Democratic Party needs to take away Joe Biden’s...

By now you’ve read opinions and analyses of Joe Biden’s debate performance. I add my views from the perspective of being almost exactly Biden’s age and having been a competent platform speaker for half a century.

Of this there’s no doubt: Biden tanked. He looked and sounded frail and uncertain. Where he should have countered Trump’s blasts of lies and invective with a clever mix of humor, anger and facts, he mumbled statistics. There...

I’m exactly Joe Biden’s age so I can see myself in his shoes better than most. Actually, I almost went into politics myself when some pols here in Washington State suggested I run for Congress decades ago. That ship has long sailed but I’ve done demanding work in the US Foreign Service and continue to put in challenging work days in the nonprofit world and as a global peace-builder.

Now, like Biden, what I may have lost in stamina I’ve...

Let’s face it, I told the Explorers Club in a speech November 11 in Seattle, there’s not a lot of unexplored real estate left on this planet. Other planets beckon, but perhaps not for everyone in this room.

And that’s OK, because after a lifetime of adventures and risk, I’m convinced that the most meaningful explorations any of us can take are not in pushing the limits of the map but pushing the limits of ourselves—challenging not just...

There’s no doubt that Henry Kissinger was a complicated man, as shown by the torrent of fierce opinions published since his death.

I worked for the man and Vietnam was where I first began to hate him. A young US diplomat, I was a civilian adviser to the Mayor of Hué, one of the most dangerous places in the country during the last years of the war, at a time when any American there still in control of his senses knew we’d lost the war....

As you may know, Gordon Lightfoot recently died. You may have memories of the Canadian singer/songwriter’s work. My memory is that he changed my life.

In 1971-72, as a US Foreign Service Officer, I was Advisor to the city of Hué, South Vietnam. I’d volunteered for Vietnam because being in a shooting war was one adventure I’d not yet had.

I was an adrenaline addict, drawn to war zones and high, dangerous mountains. I’d asked the...

The Iran Hostage Crisis Re-visited

In November of 1979 the staff of the US Embassy in Teheran was taken prisoner by mobs controlled by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Two months of diplomatic pressures and direct threats hadn’t freed them.

But in early 1980, I came close.

I thought I knew then why I’d failed, but I didn’t know the half of it. Decades of investigative reports have now revealed the truth. Any efforts to free...

The recent security breach by a young idiot video-gamer out to impress his friends was worse than you think. It could end up being one of the worst security breaches in the history of US intelligence operations.

It should never have happened. It’s crazy that anybody in the US government would consider giving a top-secret clearance to a naïve, unqualified kid in the National Guard. The real damage has yet to be fully known, but it’s...

Yes, I’m writing here about peace. But let’s be clear: The recent atrocities committed by retreating Russians north of Kiev—added to their relentless bombing and shelling of civilian targets all over Ukraine—have made any peace-building initiatives much more difficult. Still, this evil madness will end someday, and those with the will and skill to build a peace must be ready. .As an experienced international negotiator, I have some...

Will a nuclear war start in Ukraine? Is that even possible? Maybe we’re just watching a Netflix re-run of Dr. Strangelove.

No. It’s possible. As someone who once planned nuclear war for NATO, I can tell you that events in Ukraine have moved us closer to Armageddon than anything since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Putin said two weeks ago that he’d placed Russian nuclear forces in “a high state of readiness,” but NATO intelligence has...

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”–Vladimir Lenin

I was wrong. A month ago I predicted that Putin’s massing of Russian troops on the border of Ukraine was a bluff—that he was too smart to launch a full-scale invasion because the costs would far outweigh the benefits.

But I was not as wrong as Putin, who grossly underestimated the strength of Ukrainian and global resistance as well...

Hell, yes, it’s scary.

125,000 Russian troops are poised on the border with Ukraine. The US has put 8,500 soldiers on “high alert.” NATO is sending jets and ships to the region as well as shipments of arms to Ukrainian forces.

After years as a NATO war planner, I know that one miscalculation by either side could mean a face-off between nuclear-armed opponents.

But this is no Cuban missile crisis—at least not yet. Putin is...

Unless you’re Donald Trump or Ebeneezer Scrooge you gotta be happy that President Biden got his bipartisan infrastructure bill passed and that America will finally fix a decades-long backlog of repairs and upgrades.

But that infrastructure bill, in today’s super-polarized world, was the exception. Even though its benefits are hugely popular in red states and blue, there were still weeks of petty foot-dragging...

Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, has leaked thousands of pages of internal company documents showing that Facebook, in order to increase its profits, has continually operated against the public interest. It has spread disinformation on crucial subjects like Covid and election integrity, undermined the self-images of vulnerable teens, further polarized the American electorate and supported violent extremists like the ones who...

In the summer of 1964, on a year-long global journey by bus and hitchhiking, I found myself in the middle of one of the worst famines in history. I was on the Ethiopian plateau, 10,000 feet above sea level, and it would be the most godforsaken place I would ever see. Hidden from the world in this barely accessible place,peasants wrapped in rags or even old newspapers huddled in the bone-numbing rain and cold. At everystop, crowds of them...

A few days ago, my daughter and I carried out her wild idea of re-creating the Last Dinner on the Titanic. It was a daft way of celebrating our own rescue from another sinking passenger ship exactly 41 years ago.

She made cocktails, an elaborate appetizer, and an extravagant dessert. I did salad and meat, both of us following the recipes used on the Titanic. We had to assemble truffles,...

It was inevitable that rightwing loonies would cry “fraud” in the California election that kept Governor Gavin Newsom in office. Never mind that Newsom won by two and a half million votes, or roughly 2/3 of those cast. Even before the polls opened on election day, Newsom’s opponent, Trump wanna-be Larry Elder, contended, without a shred of proof, that there were already “millions” of...

Richard Spencer is the most infamous summer resident in Whitefish, Montana, a mostly liberal, affluent resort town, nestled in Trump Country in the Rocky Mountains.

Spencer was the main instigator of the 2017 neo-Nazi riot in Charlottesville that killed Heather Heyer and injured at least 19 others and he played a major role in the attack on the Capitol last January.

But his Whitefish story—detailed in the New York Times...

I’m going to say something about Afghanistan that doesn’t jibe with what you’re hearing in the media, something that may even sound callous. Here goes—When the snap judgments and finger-pointing die down, I think history’s judgement will be that the long-term damage to American interests was less than we now think it is.

As a former US diplomat, one who witnessed the awful endgame in Vietnam, I don’t underestimate the loss of lives and...

Why Not Knowing, or Refusing to Know, Can Kill You

The pandemic is resurging. The US is now averaging more than 100,000 new Covid-19 cases a day, the highest in nearly six months. The resurgence is driven in part by a deadly new strain of the disease, the Delta variant.

I want to focus on the other reason for the resurgence—the reluctance of tens of millions of Americans to get vaccinated, even though contracting the...

Two new books suggest that on January 6 we came far closer to losing democracy than we thought.

Landslide, by Michael Wolff, describes Donald Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior after his election loss. In I Alone Can Fix It, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker detail how the top US military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley, was so shaken that then-President Donald Trump...

The pandemic is easing in much of the United States. In the larger world, vaccines are finally beginning to flow from “have” countries to “have nots.”

As it ends in this country, I think it’s crucial not to rush onwards, without looking at these last, devastating months. There are huge lessons to be learned from what we’ve been through—about inequality, about race, about work, about ourselves—and we’d be monumentally stupid not to learn...

A few days ago I was interviewed on Russian state television on a news show that draws over a million viewers inside Russia. The subject was President Biden’s trip to Europe and in particular his upcoming meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

This is perhaps my 30th appearance on Russian media and I remain mystified why they keep asking me on, since I offer balanced views of issues the United States and Russia don’t agree on....

Memorial Day 2021

President Biden’s withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan will be completed before the deadline he set—September 11, exactly 20 years after the attacks on the US that were our reason for starting that long, unwinnable war.

As you know, the United States went into Afghanistan in December of 2001 to find and destroy the Taliban (the ultraconservative political and religious faction that ruled Afghanistan...

Let’s talk about courage. For the last 35 years I’ve helped lead a global movement that inspires people to stick their necks out to solve tough public problems. So I’ve got some standing on the matter of what’s courageous in public life.

Let’s look at a woman many people in the last few weeks have cited for her courage.

Of course I’m talking about Liz Cheney, the far-right congresswoman from Wyoming, the daughter of Dick Cheney,...