The Trenchant Observer on Medium
Since 2009. over a thousand op-ed length articles have been published on my main blog, The Trenchant Observer: International Law, Politics, and Security (trenchantobserver.com).
Over the last four years, as addressing issues of international law became increasingly difficult with an administration which was not listening, aand in fact was directing its wrecking ball at international law and institutions, articles inevitably focused, increasingly, on President Donald J. Trump and what his administration was doing and saying. There were jewels of amazement along the way, as when he explained how Russia came to be in Afghanistan, and said they were right to be there because Islamic terrorists had been attacking the Soviet Union.
His statements were blissfully uninformed by knowledge of the fact that the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan in 1979 in violation of article 2 paragraph 4 of the United Nations Charter, that the U.S. and other countries had imposed sanctions on the USSR, and that the United States consequently had boycotted the Moscow Olympics in 1980.
He appeared totally unaware of the principle in Article 2(4) of the Charter prohibiting the use of force across international frontiers except in self-defense or pursuant to Security Council decisions Under Chapter VII.
Here, on Medium, I intend to bring to readers’ attention some of the more salient quotes and excerpts from The Trenchant Observer and other sources on issues of the day, in real time. I am fluent in French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish, and regularly cite or quote from journals such as Die Welt (Hamburg), Le Monde (Paris), El País (Madrid), and Veja (Brazil).
The purpose here is not so much to repeat what is in the headlines, as to connect the dots and to offer trenchant commentary on the most important foreign policy issues of the day, within the broader political and historical contexts in which they occur.
See, for example, “Evidence increasingly points to Wuhan Institute of Virology as source of nouvel coronavirus, The Trenchant Observer, March 9, 2021. Link:
The entire content of The Trenchant Observer can be accessed by using the search Box in the upper right hand corner, or by searching by month in the drop-down box in the center top part of the page.
There you will find articles on everything from torture to Afghanistan to Syria to the South China Sea, and in the last six months regular and at times almost daily dispatches on the latest developments in Trump’s attempted coup d’état, going as far back as June 2020, and indeed even further.
