Year: 2017

Decades ago, a debate over what kind of nation America is roiled the conservative movement. Neocons claimed America was an “ideological nation” a “creedal nation,” dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” Expropriating the biblical mandate, “Go forth and teach all nations!” they divinized democracy and made the conversion of mankind to...

[Adapted and expanded from the introduction to Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.] In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington pursued its elusive enemies across the landscapes of Asia and Africa, thanks in part to a massive expansion of...

Was it for this That on that April day we stacked our arms Obedient to a soldier’s trust? To lie Ground by the heels of little men, Forever maimed, defeated, impugned? —Donald Davidson, “Lee in the Mountains” There are times when I feel as though I’ve awoken in a madhouse, a madhouse that cannot possibly...

“I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” said Winston Churchill to cheers at the Lord Mayor’s luncheon in London in November 1942. True to his word, the great man did not begin the liquidation. When his countrymen threw him out in July 1945,...

President Donald Trump’s address to the nation on Afghanistan was carefully crafted and well delivered. It did not provide a blueprint for winning the war, however, which remains his stated objective. Trump has settled for a compromise between all-out escalation, advocated by some of his generals, and the disengagement he had favored on the campaign...

The past week or so has been a sad one in American political life. The reason for this, of course, is Charlottesville, where a woman lost her life and people proudly carried flags no Americans ever should, the swastika of the Nazis and the hammer and sickle of the Communists. The emotions unleashed after Charlottesville...

“They had found a leader, Robert E. Lee—and what a leader! . . . No military leader since Napoleon has aroused such enthusiastic devotion among troops as did Lee when he reviewed them on his horse Traveller.” So wrote Samuel Eliot Morison in his magisterial The Oxford History of the American People in 1965. First...

Every living nation needs symbols. They tell us who we are as one people, in what we believe, and on what basis we organize our common life. This fact seems to be very clear to the current leadership in Russia, particularly to President Vladimir Putin, in restoring and reunifying a country rent by three generations...

From the August 2001 issue of Chronicles. All societies regulate personal behavior: That is part of what makes them societies, instead of mere aggregations of isolated individuals. Societies differ enormously, though, in just how they perform this regulation, how much they rely on law and the state, rather than informal or private means. If I...

When the Dodge Charger of 20-year-old Nazi sympathizer James Alex Fields Jr., plunged into that crowd of protesters Saturday, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer, Fields put Charlottesville on the map of modernity alongside Ferguson. Before Fields ran down the protesters, and then backed up, running down more, what was happening seemed but a bloody brawl between...

I have no idea what is the best way to deal with North Korea. But I do know this: North Korea is the worst governed place on the planet. The only thing preventing the North Koreans from enjoying the prosperity and freedom enjoyed by the South Koreans is the evil Communist dynasty that rules North...

For many scandal-plagued politicians there comes a turning point after which the downfall becomes inevitable. In Richard Nixon’s case this happened on March 1, 1974, when he was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in an indictment against seven former presidential aides. Two months later, impeachment hearings commenced before the House Judiciary Committee. Charles Haughey’s illustrious career as...

“When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight,” Samuel Johnson observed, “it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” And the prospect of a future where Kim Jong Un can put a nuclear weapon on a U.S. city is going to cause this nation to reassess the risks and rewards of the American Imperium....

Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac The Trump presidency eerily inhabits two diametrically opposed realities. On the one hand, we have the Beltway Reality. This is a world where Donald Trump is friendless and on the ropes, the Kevin McCallister of American politics. His legislative agenda, starting with repeal of Obamacare, is stalled if not moribund at the...

The Post-Cold-War Consensus Collapses Like it or not, the president of the United States embodies America itself. The individual inhabiting the White House has become the preeminent symbol of who we are and what we represent as a nation and a people. In a fundamental sense, he is us. It was not always so. Millard...

Considering the unprecedented obstacles President Trump is facing from various quarters in his attempts to devise a coherent foreign policy strategy (see my column in the September issue of Chronicles), the apparent success of his anti-ISIS approach thus far is both surprising and encouraging. It shows that realist pragmatism yields results. Over the past six...

Who weeps, who languishes, who darts anxious glances at the clock just about the time Congress goes on vacation? The media, of course. With Congress out of town, what’s to report on, what’s to wring the hands over? As we all acknowledge, Washington, D.C., is the center of the galaxy. When Congress is in session...

That the Trump presidency is bedeviled is undeniable. As President Donald Trump flew off for August at his Jersey club, there came word that Special Counsel Robert Mueller III had impaneled a grand jury and subpoenas were going out to Trump family and campaign associates. The jurors will be drawn from a pool of citizens...

From the August 1997 issue of Chronicles. “It is a sort of a disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything,” confessed George Soros to a British newspaper, “but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” Recalling youthful fantasies of omnipotence in his 1987...

In crafting the platform in Cleveland on which Donald Trump would run, America Firsters inflicted a major defeat on the War Party. The platform committee rejected a plank to pull us deeper into Ukraine, by successfully opposing new U.S. arms transfers to Kiev. Improved relations with Russia were what candidate Trump had promised, and what...

From the December 1996 issue of Chronicles. At some point in their development, civilizations cease believing in the sacred and plunge into a new set of absolutes. No community likes to speak of decadence and its usually harsh symptoms; no one may even grasp the meaning of such an upheaval. Yet new absolutes appear on...

What do we take away, then, from the earthquake on the Senate floor last week, with wisps of smoke still rising from the ruins of Republican efforts to do something—anything—likely to rationalize the health care mess? We take away, or should, the lesson that government can’t do everything, and when it tries to, you get...

Saturday, Kim Jong Un tested an ICBM of sufficient range to hit the U.S. mainland. He is now working on its accuracy, and a nuclear warhead small enough to fit atop that missile that can survive re-entry. Unless we believe Kim is a suicidal madman, his goal seems clear. He wants what every nuclear power...