Phil Butler

Everyone knows the Engish nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty”, but few realize the famous single quatrain melody is really about the breakage of great men and great nations. Though we often refer to world leaders in terms of their “broken egg” fates, we seldom take to heart what happens when things get so broken, that we can’t glue them back together. This brings…

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was in meetings recently with the Executive Secretary of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGADDahJTkfw Workneh Gebeyehu. In a followup to the Russia-Africa summit held back in October 2019 in Sochi, the two discussed the decisions of the first Russia-Africa summit, with an added focus on expanded…

At a recent US-India meetup US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo led an American effort to take advantage of recent India-China friction. In a move to do exactly what the United States blames Russia, China, and other nations of doing, the Trump administration foreign policy chief put forward again a possible US-India Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership, thinly…

The world community is being transformed. The current pandemic is only another phase of a metamorphosis set in motion decades ago. The intersection of our physical and digital lives is the battleground, where the last hopes of freedom are being bludgeoned to death. Few can see this because most people are…

September 2nd, 2019, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan lays claim to roughly half of the Aegean Sea in what has been dubbed “Turkey’s Blue Homeland.” In November the Turkish president went a step further in an appeal to the United Nations for Exclusive Economic Zones in the Eastern Mediterranean. He ended that month…

Focus on Beirut for a moment. What did we just witness happening at the port there? The massive explosion that rocked the whole city felt like an attack. And I use the term “felt” for a purpose here. For in a world where media or even governments can no longer be trusted, we are left with our gut and intuition to protect us. Yes, everything about the Lebanon incident feels like an attack…

When I read this week that Princess Ivanka Trump telling American workers they need to eat cake, I’ll admit still being surprised by the Trump White House. According to the reports, Ivanka told the country’s laid-off workers to consider alternative career paths because their old jobs won’t be coming back. For those of you in disbelief like…

US President Donald Trump’s gyrating foreign policy has just set the stage for another catastrophe in the eastern Mediterranean region. America’s waning influence on the world stage comes at the most inopportune time. When regional powers flex their muscles like Turkey is trying to, no good will come for a world of people already stressed to the limit over pandemics and civil strife. Just when…

A great many analysts and journalists are dancing around the issue of Donald Trump’s visions of fascist grandeur these days. Americans put in office a greedy and self immersed billionaire to save the nation from a woman of even scarier character. And now the American people are about to come under military rule. The federal crackdown…

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is the perfect instrument of President Donald Trump. Not only is he as arrogant and self-righteous as the beleaguered American leader, but he is also a impolite, nasty Trump clone who possesses zero social grace. Pompeo, like Trump, feels like his role is to insult and beat down the rest of the world to “win” a ridiculous…

A hundred years from now a scraggly little kid in a crumbling old library building in Melbourne will stumble across an interesting book on a dilapidated leather top table. The cover will show a collage of profiles of men and women at podiums. The title will read simply “2020”. The author’s name will be obscured by time and Australia’s tepid climate. Reading or watching…

If you live in the United States the mention of a country like Kyrgyzstan or Uzbekistan probably only registers on a subconscious “movie memory” level. Or, you assume all those countries with “stan” at the end are the same – foreign, off this world, and too far distant to matter. Unless, of course, you work in the intelligence community…