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In the Human Interest – Mel Gurtov

In the Human Interest – Mel Gurtov

Critical appraisals of foreign affairs and politics from a global-citizen perspective

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20Jul 2026
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Post #517: Armed Conflict is Surging, Peacemaking is Flagging

A Record-Setting Pace Wars in Iran, Ukraine, and Israel have drawn attention away from a stark fact: armed conflict is…

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16Jul 202616 Jul 2026
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Post #516: The Retreat from Global Warming and Environmental Protection

Walking It Back We once took for granted that everyone concerned with global warming outside the Trump administration’s orbit accepted…

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12Jul 202616 Jul 2026
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Post #515: Putin’s Predicament

Three Policy Directions President Vladimir Putin’s increasingly problematic position in the war with Ukraine would seem to lead Russia in…

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Post #373: Nuclear Politics: The US-South Korea “Washington Declaration”

5 May 20235 May 2023
The US-Republic of Korea (ROK) alliance began in 1953, at the end of the Korean War. Now seventy years later, President Biden and Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol met to cement…
BLOG

Post #372: TikTok and US National Insecurity

22 Apr 2023
High-tech spying is in the news because of the one-sided, hypocritical debate in Congress on whether the popular app TikTok is actually a tool for Chinese government data collection on…
BLOG

Post #371: France’s Diplomatic Disaster in China

13 Apr 202312 Apr 2023
“Strategic Autonomy,” French Style French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen just visited China. You can bet Joe Biden and his national security team are…
BLOG

Post #370: A Political Lynching

7 Apr 20237 Apr 2023
            The Tennessee House of Representatives, dominated by a Republican supermajority, voted yesterday to expel two Black Democratic legislators who had participated in a peaceful public demonstration on behalf of…
BLOG

Post #369: The Climate Time Bomb

3 Apr 2023
The Bomb is Ticking             The odds are against us. That is the bottom line in the latest IPCC report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on global…
BLOG

Post #368: A Big Deal: China’s Middle East Diplomatic Coup

26 Mar 202325 Mar 2023
A Big Deal for Some By any stretch of the imagination, the March 10 announcement of China’s brokering of a Saudi Arabia-Iran agreement to resume diplomatic relations and exchange security…
BLOG

Post #367: Deepening Tensions on the Korean Peninsula Demand New Thinking in Washington

18 Mar 202318 Mar 2023
The Mounting Danger Tensions on the Korean peninsula have reached a new level of intensity. North Korea’s foreign ministry issued a statement Feb. 17 in anticipation of another round of…
BLOG

Post #366: No Exit: Two Ukraine Peace Proposals Going Nowhere

6 Mar 20235 Mar 2023
Two Very Different Paths to Peace Two proposals for bringing peace in Russia’s war on Ukraine were issued on nearly the same day last month: a UN General Assembly resolution…
BLOG

Post #365: The Coup in Israel

28 Feb 202328 Feb 2023
Israel has always been touted as America’s most reliable friend in the Middle East, a bastion of democracy in a region dominated by autocracies. Now that picture is fraying as…
BLOG

Post #364: China and Europe: Profits versus Principles

22 Feb 202320 Feb 2023
With all the attention on US-China relations, Beijing’s on-again, off-again relations with the European Union (EU) don’t receive the attention they deserve. In the short space of a few decades,…
BLOG

Post #363: More on the China Balloon Episode: Much Ado About Very Little

13 Feb 202322 Feb 2023
(The China Balloon Incident has three phases. We have just exited Phase 2. In Phase 1, “Discovery,” the Biden administration went into action mode on finding that a Chinese “spy”…
APB

APB: The Balloon is Up

3 Feb 20235 Feb 2023
            During World War I, British forces sent up hot-air balloons to spy on advancing enemy forces. Thus the expression, "the balloon is up." In recent times, a number of…

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  • Post #517: Armed Conflict is Surging, Peacemaking is Flagging
  • Post #516: The Retreat from Global Warming and Environmental Protection
  • Post #515: Putin’s Predicament
  • Post #514: Out of Control
  • Post #513: The Missing Art of the Deal with Iran

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Listen to my "Global Citizen" commentaries every Tuesday, 5:25 pm, on KBOO.fm (Portland area) and Wednesdays on KXCR.net (Florence, OR area). The Global Citizen International Digest of the week's news is on KBOO Thursdays at 5:30 pm and is also on SUBSTACK, free, via https://melgurtov.substack.com

  • A philanthropist makes a grand pledge for conservation
  • Making China a U.S. enemy is counterproductive
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