This Week’s Foreign Policy Must Reads

Almost seven years after the deployment, suicide is spreading through the old unit like a virus…The Marine Corps does not track suicides of former service members. Feeling abandoned, members of the battalion have turned to a survival strategy they learned at war: depending on one another. Doing what the government has not, they have used free software and social media to create a quick-response system that allows them to track, monitor and intervene with some of their most troubled comrades.

For a brief moment in late 2013, it looked as if a small group of Syrian expatriates in the United Arab Emirates had outfoxed Bashar al-Assad. By day, they were businessmen and bureaucrats, working as middle managers, professors, and salesmen. In every moment they could spare — nights, weekends, lunches, and cigarette breaks — they and dozens more like them in the capital of Abu Dhabi devoted themselves to supporting an uprising in a homeland they left long ago.

Americans are often tempted to read Francis as a “progressive” pope who has tossed out the conservative playbook of Church leaders past… [But] it’s essentially meaningless to try and place him on the spectrum from “left” to “right” in the United States, contorting the poor pope to fit the mishmash of statism and individualism that plagues U.S. politics.

Arguably the most important reason for the French loss of intellectual dynamism is the growing sense that there has been a major retreat of French power on the global stage, both in its material, “hard” terms and in its cultural “soft” dimensions. In a world dominated politically by the United States, culturally by the dastardly ‘Anglo-Saxons,” and in Europe by the economic might of Germany, the French are struggling to reinvent themselves.

When Ken Dornstein learned that Pan Am Flight 103 had exploded, he did not realize that his older brother, David, was on the plane… His colleagues knew nothing of his brother, but he privately took solace from accumulating investigative skills. “I was interested in the tradecraft of how you find people,” he recalled. He wondered about the shadowy culprits behind the Lockerbie bombing. “I wasn’t a worldly person, I hadn’t travelled…but I kept thinking, These guys are out there.”