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Hawking told the audience that Earth's cataclysmic end may be hastened by humankind, which will continue to devour the planet’s resources at unsustainable rates

“Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years. By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.”

“I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” Hawking told the BBC in a 2014 interview that touched upon everything from online privacy to his affinity for his robotic-sounding voice.

The stance many foreign-policy hawks are taking is akin to granting that a reckless incompetent has temporarily taken over as on-duty surgeon and insisting that the hospital proceed with its brain operations anyway.

Syria hawks ought not to invoke the Kurds to call for an indefinite U.S. deployment without addressing (among other things) the unfitness of this commander in chief to preside over a volatile occupation, the risks of wider war, the danger to our troops, the lack of an authorization to use military force in Syria, the illegality of staying in Syria to fight with Iran, and the damage done when any faction helps sever the constitutional mechanisms that keep war subject to democratic accountability.

Syria hawks pressed for American boots on the ground anyway. And they got their way in part because they were willing to proceed in spite of a public that was largely ignorant of the intervention—a public likely to stay ignorant longer because foreign allies were minimizing U.S. troop needs and casualties. To urge an intervention despite those factors is to dramatically increase the likelihood of an unpopular deployment, a populist backlash to it, and withdrawal before hawks find it prudent. If anyone told Syrian Kurds that America would always have their backs, that person behaved irresponsibly and probably dishonestly

Mr. Obama’s clearly deliberate neglect of Washington’s favorite obsession was just the latest sign that the self-styled deficit hawks — better described as deficit scolds — are losing their hold over political discourse.

Why have the deficit scolds lost their grip? I’d suggest four interrelated reasons.

First, they have cried wolf too many times. They’ve spent three years warning of imminent crisi

“Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”

A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.

Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.

If Turchin's model is right, then the current polarization and inequality in American society will come to a head in 2020. "After the last eight years or so, notice how the discourse in our political class has become fragmented. It's really unprecedented for the last 100 years," he said. "So basically by all measures, there are social pressures for instability that are much worse than 50 years ago."

Why 50-year cycles? Turchin explained that a surge of violence begins in the same way as a forest fire: explosively. After a period of escalation followed by sustained violence, citizens begin to "yearn for the return of stability and an end to fighting," he wrote in his paper. The prevailing social mood swings toward stifling the violence at all costs, and those who directly experienced the civil violence maintain the peace for about a human generation — 20 or 30 years. But the stability doesn't last.

Eventually, "the conflict-scarred generation dies off or retires, and a new cohort arises, people who did not experience the horrors of civil war and are not immunized against it. If the long-term social forces that brought about the first outbreak of internal hostilities are still operating, then the society will slide into the second civil war," he wrote. "As a result, periods of intense conflict tend to recur with a period of roughly two generations (40–60 years)."

People are starting to question the value of pure wealth. Is knowledge or experience more important than money? Can possessions stand in the way of fulfilment? Can we truly own anything, or are we just transient custodians?

These questions are leading to a shift in behaviour which, in turn, is inspiring some groundbreaking new enterprises and ideas. These are termed “cathedral projects”, the modern equivalent of the grand church buildings, constructed as part of humanity’s attempt to bridge heaven and Earth. These ideas are started by one generation with the hope a future generation will take up these challenges.

I hope and believe that people will embrace more of this cathedral thinking for the future, as they have done in the past, because we are in perilous times. Our planet and the human race face multiple challenges. These challenges are global and serious – climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans. Such pressing issues will require us to collaborate, all of us, with a shared vision and cooperative endeavour to ensure that humanity can survive. We will need to adapt, rethink, refocus and change some of our fundamental assumptions about what we mean by wealth, by possessions, by mine and yours. Just like children, we will have to learn to share.

only luck and randomness can save “it won’t be Trump” punditry now.

So it’s time to start reckoning with what we got wrong.

The best place to start isn’t with the Republican Party’s leaders — the opportunists, the cowards, the sleepwalkers — but with its voters, and the once-reasonable assumptions about voter psychology that Trump seems to have disproved.

Clinton's remarks on Monday provide the latest evidence that she remains prone to military interventions of choice even when the likely outcome of intervening is unclear. 

it's hard to think of any instance where humility caused her to take a dovish position. As president, she would likely be a reflexive hawk.

What would I have her say instead? The Iraq War taught me my own limits, and the limits of all foreign-policy decision-makers, to accurately foresee the future. Even after studying decisions about war and peace from inside the White House during my husband's two terms, I didn't even come close to correctly forecasting the Iraq War. I underestimated the costs of the war in Iraq. I overestimated the benefits. I cannot promise that will be the last mistake that I'll make, but I've learned from it. I'll never make the same mistake. I've learned that a war of choice gone wrong does more damage to the United States than any other mistaken policy. So while the United States may well be forced to wage a war of necessity  in the future, whether to defend the nation after an attack or to prevent an imminent one, I'll never again favor a war if choice. If the consequences of foreign intervention are so unclear that experts are deeply divided, I will err on the side of nonintervention after that wise physicians' guidepost: "First do no harm." There are a lot of very smart people working at the highest levels of the U.S. government. So in a country like Syria, it's tempting to imagine that we can funnel weapons to the particular rebels that are most aligned with the values and interests of the United States. It's tempting to think that we can know the consequences and the possible unintended consequences of intervening in Syria. But Iraq taught me that of course we can't.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has ratcheted up tensions with the West for the better part of the last decade -- he annexed Crimea, meddled in US elections, poisoned an ex-spy on British soil, and more. Nearly every step of the way, former President Donald Trump parroted Kremlin talking points, excused Russian aggression and sometimes even embraced it outright.

The GOP is the party of the Russia hawks. For a half-century, one of their central organizing principles was opposing the Soviet threat," Graff said, adding that Trump upended that history and made some Republicans go soft on Putin. "But in this last month, a lot of Republicans who became wishy-washy on Russia have come back to their natural position as Russia hawks."

Trump's campaign chairman Paul Manafort -- who had spent a decade advising Yanukovych in Ukraine -- collaborated in 2016 with a Russian spy on a secret plan for Trump to help Russia control eastern Ukraine, according to special counsel Robert Mueller's report. The proposal envisioned that Yanukovych would return to lead a Russian puppet state in eastern Ukraine. This pro-Russian rhetoric didn't always translate into policy for the Trump White House. For instance, his administration said sanctions would continue until Russia returned Crimea. But the rhetoric gave Putin an unexpected cheerleader in DC and created tensions within NATO.

The problem here is that Romney wants tax cuts for the rich and he wants credit for being a deficit hawk. But as Jed Lewison notes, Romney simply can’t keep all his promises. What makes this even more untenable is the unshakable reality that cutting taxes deeply on the rich is very unpopular. Romney claims he would cut everyone’s taxes. But he can’t do that and also reduce the deficit, unless those tax cuts are offset by policy choices that would turn the middle class’s tax cut into an effective tax hike. And so his tax cuts for the rich would be even more unpopular if Romney leveled with voters on how they would have to be paid for

For more than three decades, the Republican Party brand has been deeply tied to a worldview in which the aggressive use of American power abroad is both a policy imperative and a political advantage.

Now, a new generation of Republicans like Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky is turning inward, questioning the approach that reached its fullest expression after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001

That holds the potential to threaten two wings of a Republican national security establishment that have been warring for decades: the internationalists who held sway under the elder President George Bush and the neoconservatives who led the country to long and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan under President George W. Bush.

Young Britons have turned strikingly liberal, in a classical sense

They are relaxed, almost to the point of ennui, about other people’s sexual preferences, drug habits and skin colour.

They worry about global warming, but still generally lean towards Mill’s minimal “nightwatchman state” when it comes to letting business get on with it:

The big secret of the Obama administration’s approach to national security, which neither party has had a strong incentive to admit, is that the president’s first-term policies have mostly been a continuation of policies put in place during George W. Bush’s second term, when the Cheneyite maximalism of the immediate post-9/11 era was tempered by a dose of pragmatism.

the president has mostly governed – sometimes by choice, sometimes out of necessity – as a steward of the powers Bush successfully claimed and the war-on-terror architecture that he established. What’s more, in his presidency’s biggest decisions about the use of force abroad – the Afghan surge, the Libya intervention, the escalated drone campaign (and the “kill list” that accompanies it), the green light on the raid to get Bin Laden – Obama has almost always erred on the side of hawkishness and expanded executive authority.

An acknowledgment of consensus is always better than a bogus disagreement, and Romney’s decision to play up his areas of concord with the president didn’t just serve the cause of reassuring swing voters worried by his sometimes hyper-hawkish rhetoric: It served the cause of truth as well.

Not every taboo or shibboleth has to be respected forever. Indeed, they should be inspected with some regularity

One of the nice things about being a great power is that you have a lot of choices

But in each of these choices the question is not really can we do it, or do we want to do it or do our values dictate we do it so much as 1) have we accurately thought through the potential costs and 2) are the costs sustainable in the face of the benefits we're trying to achieve?

The Donald Trump Cabinet Tracker

The Senate hasn’t formally rejected a Cabinet pick since it voted down President George H.W. Bush’s nomination of John Tower for defense secretary in 1989

Trump may have more luck with the Senate than his immediate predecessors, and he has Democrats to thank. When they held the majority in 2013, they changed the rules so that executive-branch nominations are no longer subject to the 60-vote threshold for filibusters. That means Trump could conceivably win Senate approval of his entire Cabinet without a single Democratic vote.

The president believes that Churchillian rhetoric and, more to the point, Churchillian habits of thought, helped bring his predecessor, George W. Bush, to ruinous war in Iraq.

Obama entered the White House bent on getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan; he was not seeking new dragons to slay. And he was particularly mindful of promising victory in conflicts he believed to be unwinnable. “If you were to say, for instance, that we’re going to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and build a prosperous democracy instead, the president is aware that someone, seven years later, is going to hold you to that promise,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, and his foreign-policy amanuensis, told me not long ago.

Power is a partisan of the doctrine known as “responsibility to protect,” which holds that sovereignty should not be considered inviolate when a country is slaughtering its own citizens. She lobbied him to endorse this doctrine in the speech he delivered when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, but he declined. Obama generally does not believe a president should place American soldiers at great risk in order to prevent humanitarian disasters, unless those disasters pose a direct security threat to the United States.

It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives.

If Olympic Games failed, he told aides, there would be no time for sanctions and diplomacy with Iran to work. Israel could carry out a conventional military attack, prompting a conflict that could spread throughout the region.

Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, took reporters on a tour of the plant and described grand ambitions to install upward of 50,000 centrifuges. For a country with only one nuclear power reactor — whose fuel comes from Russia — to say that it needed fuel for its civilian nuclear program seemed dubious to Bush administration officials.

In Moscow, especially in the not-so-good old days, the question almost always asked is kto vinovat: “Who is to blame?” The American capital now finds itself engaged in that very Russian exercise ever since President Vladimir V. Putin’s troops entered Ukraine.

As president, Mr. Obama naturally has absorbed most of the criticism, accused of being too soft not only in his dealings with Mr. Putin of Russia, but also with Syria, Iran and other rogue players on the world stage. The coincidental timing of his proposal to slash the Army to pre-World War II size only gave additional ammunition to the hawks. And some made sure to put former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in the cross hairs as well, recognizing her possible presidential campaign in 2016.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said on the Senate floor, “The president has eroded American credibility in the world.”