H.D.S. Greenway

H.D.S. Greenway is a former editorial page editor of the Boston Globe and author of Foreign Correspondent: A Memoir.
Articles by this author
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Views Tuesday, May 29, 2018 Trump’s Willful Ignorance Is Another Strain of American Exceptionalism If a meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong Un ever happens, it won’t be for a lack of amateurishness. After all, there was little advance preparation for the meeting originally scheduled for June 12, no hammering out positions between underlings and experts before the leaders were to meet... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, June 06, 2017 Seeds of Fascism Sprout Anew in Trump's America Watching Donald Trump on TV whipping up his base of supporters at a rally in Harrisburg, Pa., I had a sudden feeling I had seen this all before. I remembered a speech I had seen on YouTube. It was a speech Mussolini had given in Milan in 1932. I watched it again, and it was all there. The chin... Read more |
Views Tuesday, March 09, 2010 US Needs to Let Go in Iraq It will take many weeks of coalition building after Sunday's election before we know who rules Iraq, or whether the country will unite or splinter along sectarian fault lines, but for the United States it will mean success or failure. The outcome will shape Iraq's post-America future. Read more |
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Views Tuesday, April 07, 2009 A Different Europe Greets Obama When the last American president to step from the Senate into the White House was in the dawn of his presidency I was a student in Europe. Then as now, Europeans were thrilled by his youth, his cool eloquence, his glamorous wife, and their hopes ran high. Europeans would buy Americans a beer just because of the man we had elected - something I did not experience again until this January, almost half a century later. Then as now, you could make the case that the new American president was more popular among Europeans than any of their own leaders. Like Barack Obama, John F. Read more |
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Views Tuesday, December 23, 2008 At Last, Giving Bush The Boot The image of shoes being thrown at George W. Bush during his tarnished legacy tour of Iraq has already entered legend. That a Saudi offered to pay $10 million for just one of the shoes attests to the power of symbolism. The Turkish cobbler who made the shoes is being inundated with new orders from around the world. Read more |
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Views Tuesday, November 04, 2008 The Next President's Task in War on Terror AND SO it ends. The longest, most expensive, and riveting campaign in living memory is finally over. It has been an international cliff-hanger, with people in Europe, Africa, and Asia following every little twist and turn as avidly as anyone in the United States. For even though they may not have the vote, all the world knows the importance of America's choice. Read more |
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Views Tuesday, October 21, 2008 The Grand Illusion of American Power The other day I went to hear my favorite soldier-scholar, Andrew Bacevich, give a talk at Boston University, where he teaches. A retired colonel and Vietnam veteran, Bacevich's new book is called "The Limits of Power, The end of American Exceptionalism." Bacevich has migrated from a conservative outlook to what might be called a neo-Niebuhrean position - his thinking being influenced by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whom Bacevich calls "the most clear-eyed of American prophets." Read more |
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Views Tuesday, January 08, 2008 Dynastic Politics at Work There were lifted eyebrows in America when Pakistan's largest political party chose a 19-year-old Oxford student to be its leader. But then Bilawal Bhutto Zardari is only following in the footsteps of his murdered mother, Benazir Bhutto, who took over the party after its founder and her father,... Read more |
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Views Thursday, December 27, 2007 Hope in Times of War 'Peace on Earth, goodwill toward men" is the operative aphorism for this season, but the United States is at war on two fronts with no end in sight. The Iraq war is going better for the United States than it was at this time last year, and Afghanistan is worse. But the reality is that neither war... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, October 09, 2007 A Tortured Stance on Torture In half a century of reporting around the world, I have found that there was usually a feeling that the United States stood for standards of liberty, human rights, and the dignity of mankind. The Bush administration has taken us off that gold standard and drained away much of that reservoir of... Read more |