American Diplomacy Links--February 2016.

• Author: Clack, George

"Trump's America"

Trumpism will not fade away if Donald Trump fails to win the Republican nomination. It is an expression of the legitimate anger that many Americans feel about the course that the country has taken, the end game of a process that has been going on for a half-century: America's divestment of its historic national identity.

By Charles Murray, AEI Publications and the Wall Street Journal. Murray is a political scientist, author, and libertarian. Among his books are Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 and The Bell Curve: intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.

http://www.aei.org/publication/trumps-america/

"Work with the Russians on Syria"

It's important to remember that this is not the Cold War, and not every conflict is zero-sum. Some Russian objectives in Syria conflict with U.S. objectives, but others are neutral and some are congruent with American interests.

By Paul R. Pillar, the National Interest. Pillar is a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University and a nonresident senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. He is a contributing editor to the National Interest.

http://www.nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/work-the-russians-syria-15184

"Putin Is No Ally Against ISIS"

The leaders of the United States and the European Union are making a grievous error in thinking of Russia as a potential ally in the fight against the Islamic State. Putin's primary aim currently is to foster the EU's disintegration, and the best way to do so is to flood the EU with Syrian refugees.

By George Soros, Project Syndicate. Soros, a pioneer of the hedge-fund industry, is chairman of Soros Fund Management and chairman of the Open Society Foundations.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/putin-no-ally-against-isis-by-george-soros-2016-02

"How Wars End"

This review of Pierre Razoux's book The Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s has lessons for the current conflict in Syria. How can a war end if the participants don't want to stop fighting? One answer: there won't be any diplomatic progress until the proxy war throughout the region between Iran and Saudi Arabia is dealt with.

By JoostHiltermann, the London Review of Books. Hiltermann is Middle East and North Africa programme director at the International Crisis Group and the author of A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq and the Gassing of Halabja.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n03/joost-hiltermann/chemical-wonders

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