author - oman observer

“Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.” That’s what President Donald Trump said about the Covid-19 outbreak on February 10, 2020,...

A festival of artificial intelligence policy incoherence has exploded in recent weeks. It’s a response to AI agents’ going rogue on their developers, rogue actors’ beginning to use AI systems to...

I confess that I never expected to see an American election where the choice of candidates in more than a few districts will be a democratic socialist versus a Republican monarchist — but live long...

Surely something about this preliminary agreement between the United States and Iran must have felt familiar to America’s real-estate mogul president. After all, it reads like a real-estate...

With each passing month of his presidency, Donald Trump behaves more like America’s commander in thief than its commander in chief. How so? Let me count the ways. We are a nation at war today, with...

Only two questions remain regarding the US war with Iran. One, how big a plate of crow will President Donald Trump have to eat to end this conflict with at least some achievements? And two, will he...

As President Donald Trump and his administration head toward the midterm elections, it’s now clear that the Republican Party has split into three factions: the 'Never Trump' Republicans,...

The summit between President Trump and President Xi Jinping in Beijing next week could be the most significant encounter between American and Chinese leaders since Richard Nixon met Mao Zedong in...

If you are looking for two pictures that summarise where Israel’s geopolitical strategy under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has taken the country, you could not do better than a couple of...

If it wasn’t clear before, it is undeniable now. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel started a war with Iran assuming that they would trigger quick and easy regime...

In September 1996, I visited Tehran, Iran, for the first time. I stayed at the Homa Hotel, formerly a Sheraton. I wrote at the time that fixed above the door in the lobby was a sign that read, in...

Let’s stop beating around the bush: Israel’s far-right government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is spitting in America’s face and telling us it’s raining. It’s not raining. Bibi...

One of the biggest political lessons I learned covering the Middle East for four-plus decades is that there is only one good thing about extremists: They don’t know when to stop. As a result, they...

Every day now, I sit at my computer and ask myself: What is there left to say about the two news stories I care about most? One is unfolding in my hometown, on the banks of the Mississippi River; the...

President Trump said on Tuesday that Venezuela would begin handing over oil worth up to $3 billion that Trump would dole out “to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States.” On what...

Every few years, I am reminded of one of my cardinal rules of journalism: Whenever you see elephants flying, don’t laugh, take notes. Because if you see elephants flying, something very different is...

I am sure President Donald Trump and his envoys to Russia, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, sincerely want to stop the killing in Ukraine, but they are failing and will continue to fail as long as...

Listening to President Donald Trump telling Israelis and Arabs on Monday that they were at “the historic dawn of a new Middle East” was like watching Trump selling his bankers on a plan to build...

Sometimes you have to get outside America, and go to a place like Ukraine, to see the full impact of Donald Trump’s policies on both our country and the world. What I saw so clearly from Kyiv...

I will leave it to historians to debate whether Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip. But what is absolutely clear to me right now is that this Israeli government is committing suicide,...