Reuben F. Johnson

Hong Kong

Hong Kong

Kiev

Munich

The world continues to ask questions about who is responsible for the July 17 downing of Malaysia Airlines (MH) flight 017 as it was crossing the airspace over the border between Russia and the eastern region of Ukraine near the city of Donetsk. The aircraft, a U.S.-made Boeing 777, was by all…

Kiev

Kiev

Kiev

Andrew Marshall, the longtime director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, has had a number of titles conferred on him over the years. A 1999 profile in Washingtonian magazine dubbed him “the most influential policy maker you have never heard of.” Others of us who have known him over the…

Singapore

Kiev

Rio de Janeiro 

Kiev 

Kiev – A close friend from the Republic of China (otherwise known as Taiwan) lived for several years in Foshan, in the southern province of Guangdong in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). One day, when feeling rather hopeless about Chinese society, she remarked, “what I hate about this place is…

Taipei, Republic of China —Aircraft carriers are the cause of apprehension here in Taiwan. The concern is that, in the event of any future hostile action taken by China against Taiwan, U.S. carriers would be taken out by China’s increasingly capable arsenal of anti-ship missiles—and that the…

In March 2010, I wrote a piece for THE WEEKLY STANDARD about some incidents in which the Moscow police had shown that ordinary citizens’ lives did not count for much in Putin’s Russia.

Speculation over the medical condition of former Chinese Communist leader Jiang Zemin continues unabated since a Hong Kong television station, ATV, broadcast an unattributed news story of his death on July 6. Jiang’s health has been thought to be in decline for some months, but when he did not make…

As Henry Kissinger used to say, at times it is more dangerous to be America’s friend than its enemy. Further confirmation of this sage observation came on June 24 when the Obama State Department blocked another request by Taiwan to purchase 66 Lockheed Martin F-16C/D fighter aircraft. These are…

Kiev – At around 10 a.m. Moscow time on March 23, the world saw another example of just how dangerous it is to be an investigative reporter in Russia. Sergei Topol, a 55-year-old political journalist, was beaten by two men outside of his apartment building at 1 Kotelnicheskaya Naberezhnaya—one of…

Beijing

Kiev

Linköping, Sweden

Kiev 

Beijing

Farnborough Airport

Farnborough Airport

Beijing  

This past weekend’s fatal crash of Poland’s presidential aircraft, a Russian-made Tupolev Tu-154M, has had cataclysmic affects on the country’s national leadership. Among the 97 victims were the Polish president, Lech Kaczyński, and virtually the entire Polish armed forces’ leadership – the senior…

Russian president Dmitri Medvedev's state visit to France on March 1-3 was built up to be an historic event. It was supposed to be a moment for Nicolas Sarkozy to cement his position as the man who has good relations both with Moscow and Washington. Which, in turn, would position himself in a place…

In the president's proposed budget, the Obama administration zeroed out funding for NASA’s Constellation launch vehicle program. I think this decision is both irresponsible and short-sighted. “We certainly don't need to go back to the moon,” one administration official is quoted in the Orlando…

Kiev

Washington loves liberal power couples. Remember Tina Brown and Harold Evans swooning over the Clintons? And the campaign Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson waged against the Bush White House?  Book deals and good favor are up for grabs to those who best play professional victim.

Rio de Janeiro

Beijing

Rio de Janeiro

Krakow, Poland

After a long and tortuous path of allegations of illegal subsidies and analysis of financial records, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ruled last week that the European Airbus consortium has been receiving illegal assistance from the relevant governments. The target of the ruling, which runs over…

Zhukovskiy, Russia

The failing Russian defense industry. Kiev

Personality cults are a traditional fixture of totalitarian communist dictatorships. Generally they become less banal and intrusive on the lives of everyday people as those nations modernize and traverse the onramp to Al Gore's famous Information Superhighway. As it happened in the former USSR and…

Washington, D.C.--It is both painful and amusing to watch the crowing over this week's vote by the Senate to delete $1.75 billion in funding for the continued production of the Lockheed-Martin F-22A Raptor. There are numerous parties in the Obama camp calling this a spectacular victory, but so far…

Pretend that Iran has a late night variety-comedy show hosted by a Johnny Carson-like personality. One whose off-color jokes send the network's legal department scrambling to affect some manner of damage control and negotiating out-of-court settlements.

Kiev

This week I had been chatting online with a friend of mine in Beijing about the uprising in Urumqi, the capitol of Xinjiang province. Although the "Great Firewall of China" that has been created by the security services does a marvellous job of filtering many websites that the state does not want…

Kiev

Le Bourget

Rio de Janeiro

A prototype of the Sukhoi Su-35 Super Flanker exploded during take-off at the Komsomolosk-na-Amure Aviation Production Association's (KNAAPO) Dzemgi flight test aerodrome on 26 April. Spokesmen for KNAAPO told Russia's Novosti news service that the fighter caught on fire and burst into flames…

Throughout history the initial signs of collapse of despotic regimes can usually be traced back to some apocryphal moment in which the armed forces, secret police or others charged with maintaining "public order" demonstrate that they no longer unquestioningly follow the orders of the dictator.…

Kiev

Paris

Kiev

Kiev

Vienna

Kiev

Kiev

In 1976, when Soviet fighter pilot Viktor Belenko defected to the West in his MiG-25, his U.S. debriefers discovered (along with a trove of Soviet secrets) a military man with a life's accumulation of grievances against the Soviet system. Even at the height of Moscow's power, Belenko told them, the…

Kiev

Chengdu, Sichuan Province

Today is the magical number of 8 days before the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, to be held at 8 p.m. on the 8th day of August, the 8th month of the year. The number 8 has all sorts of magical attraction for the Chinese. Eight, in Mandarin, also means "prosperity" and…

Farnborough, UK

Dujiangyan City, Sichuan Province

Julia Latynina's acid commentary on the reign of President (and now prime minister) Vladimir Putin has been one of the glories of the Russian press in recent years. She finally got a piece in the Washington Post on Sunday and it is a blistering indictment of how Russia has become a criminal state.…

Kiev

Novosibirsk, Russia

THE DEVESTATION AND DEATH toll from last week's earthquake centered in China's Sichuan province continues to rise. The quake registered a 7.9 on the Richter Scale (and has been reported as an 8.0 magnitude on some Chinese television networks--roughly equivalent to a 600 megaton explosion) and is…

J-11B_+_J-8F_2x (2).jpg The J-11B fighter seen in the foreground is Chinese industry

Following the Kentucky, West Virginia, and Puerto Rico primaries, which Hillary seems poised to win, and the Oregon, South Dakota and Montana primaries, which will likely go heavily for Obama, it is expected that Hillary will suspend campaigning at a minimum, or perhaps even withdraw from the race…

Linköping, Sweden

The election of a new Russian president should not be mistaken for a democratic transition. Vladimir Putin's hand-picked successor, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, ran almost unopposed, and there was little doubt as to the outcome. But Medvedev will now be the beneficiary of the most…

INDIA IS ONE OF THE MOST important customers for two of the world's major arms producers: France and Russia. Both nations have recently had fairly good success in this market and are competing there along with four other U.S. and European suppliers for a large export contract for fighter aircraft.

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kittyhawk-flightops0629.jpg The USS Kitty Hawk is expected to be decommissioned in 2008.

ACCORDING TO BOTH Reuters and AFP, Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz resigned Tuesday as president and commander in chief of Cuba. His message was published in the online version of the official daily Cuban news outlet Granma.

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Kiev

UNLESS YOU'VE BEEN hiding in a cave somewhere or posted to a UN humanitarian assistance project site in North Korea, you know that the latest contest in the U.S. election is over who can come up with the sexiest stimulus package for the economy. Both Obama and Clinton have put forth their own plans…

The website link here details the imminent and uncontrolled return to Earth of a 20,000 lb spy satellite that has lost power and can no longer be controlled. Fears are now that radioactive and other hazardous materials that are part of the satellite's configuration could cause serious problems…

Kiev

EXCLUDING THE LITTLE more than symbolic access to the political process granted to a few small opposition groups, the pro-Kremlin United Russia party has assumed a monopoly on the Russian political sphere much like that enjoyed by the old Communist party of the Soviet Union. It is widely expected…

MSPO 2007-008.JPG WZU Nr 2-modified SA-8.

Anyone familiar with the inner workings of THE WEEKLY STANDARD would know that it is--with few exceptions--an all-Macintosh organization. And here we are, vindicated by Cracked.com: "No producer of goods in the history of man has sold so much while caring so little. The combined love and…

"They are fecklessly pouring gasoline on a roaring fire," was how a western intelligence official in Islamabad described the actions of the Pakistan government in its handling of the inquest into last Thursday's assassination of former prime minister and political candidate Benazir Bhutto. This…

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MONDAY SAW THE endorsement of a presidential candidate that has ended months of handicapping the chances for various rivals, maneuverings, and back-room politicking. It is a choice that is likely to have far-reaching consequences for most of the world, and its implications may have the current…

Monday saw the endorsement of a presidential candidate that has ended months of handicapping the chances for various rivals, maneuverings, and back-room politicking. It is a choice that is likely to have far-reaching consequences for most of the world, and its implications may have the current…

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Moscow

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In the old westerns, it was not uncommon to see a final showdown in which the white hats confront the black hats with an accusation of perfidy: "So it's you that's been sellin' rifles to those Injuns." Something like these recriminations is taking place on an international scale now, although there…

Some years ago at the beginning of the Putin era, the consensus among several foreign policy experts was that Russia was about to re-assert itself in a manner that it had practiced so well during the Cold War. That is, attacking the United States by proxy. The proxy for the United States was to be…

f22_j.jpg Looking les and less likely.

200px-James_L._Jones.jpg Our next VP?

LAST MONTH IT was reported that a 54-year-old veteran FBI official, Carl L. Spicocchi, had been jailed in Arlington County several weeks earlier for abducting, holding and physically assaulting his girlfriend. Specifically he is accused of dragging her around by the hair inside of her apartment,…

Kiev

saegheh3.jpg The new Iranian-designed and produced fighter aircraft, the Sa'eqeh.

saegheh3.jpg The new Iranian-designed and produced fighter aircraft, the Sa'eqeh.

Russia's new prime minister, Viktor Zubkov.

In a season five episode of The Simpsons titled "Deep Space Homer," the head of America's most famous cartoon family is selected to fly on the space shuttle as part of a NASA plan to increase public interest in launches that have become "boring." In this episode, coverage of shuttle launches has…

The hidden world of arms trafficking was in the spotlight last weekend with an Associated Press report uncovering a $40 million weapons deal that would have sent more than 100,000 automatic weapons of Russian design to Iraq. But, before the contract could be completed and shipments put into motion,…

Americans might be pardoned for thinking that the presidential race is an out-of-control, ever-lengthening marathon. But defects in our presidential selection process are trivial in comparison with the sinister pantomime that is the March 2008 Russian presidential election.

A Russian defense analyst with close ties to the country's state-run arms export agency has denounced recent reports of a large upcoming sale of Russian weaponry to Iran, describing them as part of a U.S.-U.K.-Israeli conspiracy to disrupt Russia's attempts to sell arms to other Middle Eastern…

The ability of Iranian agents to walk out the front door of U.S. Government boneyards and used equipment depots with spare parts for the F-14 in hand has created a spate of negative publicity for the DoD's Defense Logistics Agency (DLA). A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released…

Most of us remember the joke from the famous Robin Williams film Good Morning, Vietnam. "Here's Airman Adrian Cronauer with a little riddle for you. What's the difference between the army and the cub scouts? Ahhhnnn. Cub scouts don't have heavy artillery." Nashi1.jpg Su-27s fly in formation above…

MOST OF US REMEMBER the joke from the famous Robin Williams film Good Morning, Vietnam.

John Walker Jr. of the infamous Walker family spy ring was once asked how he had been able to pass some of the nation's most heavily guarded communications codes to the KGB for so long without being detected--almost 18 years, until he was caught in 1985. Walker's answer was both revealing and…

Le Bourget The 47th running of the biennial Paris Air Show closed as it always does. Huge crowds on the public days of the last weekend, an air display of fighter and commercial aircraft, and dozens of vendors hawking baseball caps, t-shirts, jackets, refrigerator magnets, and plush toys with the…

With the traditional Boeing-Airbus foodfight dominating the news coverage of the biennial Paris Air Show, one of the stand-out companies that receives less attention than it deserves is Brazil's Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica S.A., or Embraer, as it is more commonly known. Embraer jet and…

Truth is stranger than fiction--or so the saying goes. Nothing illustrates this more than the intersection of arms salesmen, government spokesmen, press reporting and a series of mysterious events leading up to the Paris Air Show at Le Bourget. In the first week of March, Ivan Safranov, a retired…

During the Cold War, defense procurement was a fairly straightforward proposition. The Soviet Union would produce a new weapon, and the United States would respond with something bigger and better. The Russians would then respond with some weapon that challenged the American military. And so it…

DAY ONE OF Le Bourget is like being at the biggest Macy's store you can imagine on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Only it is around 90 degrees, you are fighting a crowd all day long and running to get from one place to the next--all the while perspiring through your coat and tie. At the end of the…

DAY ONE OF Le Bourget is like being at the biggest Macy's store you can imagine on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Only it is around 90 degrees, you are fighting a crowd all day long and running to get from one place to the next--all the while perspiring through your coat and tie. At the end of the…

Paris, France

Paris, France

I WILL NEVER FORGET the first time I saw Boris Yeltsin in person. It was in Dallas in September 1989--slightly less than two years after he was fired from his job as Moscow's chief Communist Party boss and lost his seat on the old Soviet-era Politburo. His political revival had begun earlier that…

Kiev

"TRANSNISTRIA'S integration into Russia will proceed in several phases, and it may take 5 to 7 years," said the breakaway Moldovan region's foreign minister, Valery Litskai, to Russia's Interfax news agency earlier this month. "Russian society is now ready to expand beyond the . . . borders it has…

"I AM JUST GOING CRAZY about how she's doing it so quickly," Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez reportedly said, as he beamed at a young Russian woman in the provincial city of Izhevsk last week. Chávez, who was on a three-day trip to Russia, did not make this statement while carousing at a local…

Rio de Janeiro

ACCORDING TO yesterday's news, the controversial deal that would have had a United Arab Emirates firm, Dubai Ports World, take over the management of six major U.S. ports is now dead. The Dubai-based firm has decided, in the face of congressional opposition and an almost endless campaign of…

Kiev

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[img caption="Yushchenko supporters form a march several miles long running through the center of Kiev and down the main thoroughfares of Khreshchatyk and Red Army Street. (11/23/04)" float="right" width="240" height="360" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]8853[/img]Kiev

The Main Enemy

Kish Island, Iran