Breaking News

Opinion

No more Mr. Nice Guy

Columnists

“No more Mr. Nice Guy,” Donald Trump declared while trying to persuade Iran to agree to peace terms favorable to the United States. But this style of public diplomacy adds to the confusion about the state of American-Iranian negotiations. One minute, Iran agrees to “open” the Strait of Hormuz; the next, the United States tries its hand at blockading the Strait. This is a test of whether the United States desires peace. Certainly, it mirrors the negotiating style during the Vietnam War. Lyndon Johnson would float the idea of “unconditional discussions” while pursuing ...

Kump Corner: 16th annual Kump Education Research Seminar

Columnists

The idea that on April 30th we will hold our 16th Annual Kump Education Research Seminars is a great delight to the old researcher in me. We started this seminar tradition when I was teaching in the Education Department at Davis & Elkins College, and we invited student teachers from Alderson-Broaddus and West Virginia Wesleyan College. I will never forget seeing the bus arrive from Wesleyan with 28 students who had written excellent teacher work samples, and one of them won our award for the best research project. It seemed as if we, education instructors, were almost as important as ...

Ceasefire arrangement

Columnists

The ceasefire in the Iran War was arranged partly through maneuvers rooted in past American diplomatic efforts. One involved Pakistan as a conduit to Tehran and Beijing. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner traveled a well-trod path, as Henry Kissinger did in 1971, using Pakistan as a lever to backchannel the People's Republic of China. For his part, Donald Trump essentially followed Richard Nixon's detente strategy. He also tended to use the "madman theory," which RN thought might convince the North Vietnamese to come to a settlement. Trump's methods were far louder than Nixon's, who ...

Artemis II mission offers inspiring unity for a deeply divided nation

Columnists

National confidence, unfortunately, is in short supply these days. In this season of springtime renewal, Americans would do well to look up — literally. Artemis II, NASA’s first meaningful manned space mission in over a half-century, has taken the nation by storm this month. In so doing, it has provided a timely reminder of what a great nation, acting with confidence and clarity of purpose, can still achieve. Public polling confirms that Americans are a largely pessimistic lot. Our politics are fractured, our institutions mistrusted, and our birth and marriage rates have plummeted. ...

Artemis mission was anxiously awaited

Columnists

If you’re reading this today, I am in George Town, the capital city of the Cayman Islands in the middle of my third Royal Caribbean cruise.  I’m writing this column before shipping off from Port Canaveral in Florida along the Space Coast, a short drive away from the launchpad where the Artemis 2 mission to orbit the moon took off.  It seems every time I leave for my annual vacation, which sometimes is a cruise but usually is a week’s stay at my mother-in-law’s timeshare in Kissimmee, I miss witnessing a rocket launch of some sort. These days, it’s usually a SpaceX launch. ...

39-Day War?

Columnists

Will the U.S.-Iran war turn out to have been the 39-day war, following the locution of the 12-day Israel-Iran war of June 2025? The markets, as this is written, seem to think so. Asian stock markets were up Wednesday morning after President Donald Trump’s ceasefire announcement and, hours later, so were European markets. U.S. markets had rebounded from initial losses on Tuesday. The political marketplace was less steady. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump posted on Truth Social at 8:06 a.m. EDT Tuesday. “I don’t want that to ...