David P. Goldman

The Obama administration’s hopes for a diplomatic settlement in which Iran would give up nuclear weapons in return for a greater regional role, including a sphere of influence of sorts in Iraq and a presence in Afghanistan, seem to be flaking apart. A New York Times op-ed this morning by . . . . Continue Reading »

Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic’s national correspondent, tries hard to summon up enough liberal outrage to challenge the conclusion of Israeli historian Benny Morris that a two-state solution is as unrealistic as the overtly utopian one-state solution to the Palestinian problem. Reviewing . . . . Continue Reading »

The more faith, the more doubt: Dan Brown’s imbecilic scenarios exist precisely because the Catholic Church has become the dominant Christian denomination in the United States, displacing the mainline Protestants. Think of it as religious pornography. Anyone who believes in supernatural . . . . Continue Reading »

Wo es sich christelt, da judelt es sich auch, quipped Heinrich Heine. It translates roughly: where Christians do something, so do the Jews, but with onomatopoeiac allusions to tinkling bells and doodling bagpipes. Events this week proved Heine’s dictum twice over. The clever, worldly and . . . . Continue Reading »

That, I suppose, is the converse of “magnificently right,” J. M. Keynes famous headline about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Fox News reports:President Obama won’t put an “artificial deadline” on Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program but said Monday that the Islamic . . . . Continue Reading »

Asia Times Online, the home of my “Spengler” essays since 1989, is a virtual expat bar, a venue where riffraff mingle with respectable folk and a good time is had by all (usually). Its small and hard-pressed editorial team are old friends, and I’m happy to give them the odd article . . . . Continue Reading »

Three generations of economists immersed themselves in study of the Great Depression, determined to prevent a recurrence of the awful events of the 1930s. And as our current financial crisis began to unfold in 2008, policymakers did everything that those economists prescribed. Following John . . . . Continue Reading »

Well, almost personal. I never tortured anyone except some unfortunate members of a concert audience who had to hear me play the piano on an off-night. But my family did. Apropos of my First Things essay this morning on torture, it seems worth mentioning a not-so-hypothetical case.Two of my . . . . Continue Reading »

Radical evil sets the threshold of victory so high that we risk contamination by confronting it on its own terms. Terrorists tempt us to torture them, by striking against innocent noncombatants out of the shadows. The present debate over torture is a black cloud as big as a man’s hand . . . . Continue Reading »

Over at Asia Times I have been maintaing a financial blog called Inner Workings. Most of the material is technical, but I posted a Jeremiad today about the end of the rule of law in American business that is generally relevant.Don’t zombies come from places where they grow bananas?Over a year . . . . Continue Reading »