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What is purpose of NATO in 2026?

One month into Operation Epic Fury against the Islamic Republic of Iran, a long-overdue conversation has finally broken into the open: What, exactly, is the enduring rationale for NATO? For decades, this question has been treated in Washington foreign policy circles as heretical. But it isn't. And to their credit, President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are now saying so plainly. As Trump recently put it, "They haven't been friends when we needed them. We've never asked them for much. ... It's a one-way street." At best, America's European "allies" have spent ...

Iran’s other enemies

It's not just Israel. One of the least convincing arguments of opponents of the Iran war is that it is a conflict initiated by the Jewish state for its own benefit — the U.S. is just along for the ride. This view not only discounts the U.S. interest in defanging Iran, but neglects that there are other countries in the region besides Israel and Iran and that they, too, have a stake in the outcome of this war. If there's anything that Iran has succeeded in doing over the first month of battle, it is further demonstrating the intolerable threat that it represents to the region. The ...

Bombeck’s legacy is humor, belonging

Last week's Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop in Dayton, Ohio, celebrated 25 years of the conference. The University of Dayton held the first workshop in 2000 as a one-time event to commemorate the Bombeck family's gift of Erma's papers to her alma mater. It turns out once just wasn't enough, and now there's no hint of stopping it. The conference sells out quickly and is known to have a long waiting list. I've wanted to attend the conference ever since I first began publishing essays and columns in the early 2000s. In 2012, I attended for the first time, and now I can't imagine not going. ...

Easter weekend time to pause, reflect, rediscover

There are moments in history when the noise of the world grows so loud that it drowns out the quiet truths we most need to hear. War dominates headlines. Moral confusion clouds judgment. Division becomes the language of public life. And in such moments, Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday arrive not as distant religious observances but as urgent invitations to pause, to reflect and to rediscover what it means to be whole. Good Friday is, at its core, a confrontation with suffering. It is not comfortable. It is not triumphant. It does not offer easy answers. It asks us ...

Foolish NATO was big loser in Iran war

NATO members are not legally required to join any member's military operations that are not formally sanctioned by the alliance or not aimed at protecting the homelands of the membership. But they often do just that. Some NATO members joined the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq on the theory that, in the post-9/11 environment, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein were dangers to all Western security. They followed the precedent set by America's 1999 intervention in the distant Balkans, leading a three-month NATO campaign to dismantle Slobodan Milosevi's often bloody ambitions of a Greater ...

Distance, perspective of America

There is something clarifying about being far from home. In Cape Town, South Africa, where the mountains meet the sea and the horizon feels endless, distance creates a kind of stillness that invites reflection. But even here, halfway across the world, America is never far away. It lives in the conversations, the questions and the quiet curiosity of strangers trying to understand what is happening and where it is all heading. What has struck me most is not just that people are paying attention but how intently they are watching. Taxi drivers, business leaders, students and ...