On any subject other than Russia, unanimity between the United States and her European “allies” has been impossible to achieve since Donald Trump was sworn in as President. The unsolved poisoning in the cathedral town of Salisbury, England, of a former Russian double agent—exchanged eight years ago in a spy-swap with the U.K.—and his daughter,...
Year: 2018
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With Nixon in ’68: The Year America Came Apart
On the night of Jan. 31, 1968, as tens of thousands of Viet Cong guerrillas attacked the major cities of South Vietnam, in violation of a Lunar New Year truce, Richard Nixon was flying secretly to Boston. At 29, and Nixon’s longest-serving aide, I was with him. Advance man Nick Ruwe met us at Logan...
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Macron: The Last Multilateralist
“Together,” President Macron instructed President Trump, “we can resist the rise of aggressive nationalisms that deny our history and divide the world.” Before Congress he denounced “extreme nationalism,” invoked the U.N., NATO, WTO, and Paris climate accord, and implored Trump’s America to come home to the New World Order. “The United States is the one...
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Confessions of an Autodidact
From the September 2005 issue of Chronicles. Is self-education a good idea? The greatest of my teachers, Walter Starkie, in his delightful autobiography Scholars and Gypsies, recalls a comment made in 1914 by his godfather, J.P Mahaffy, the legendary provost of Trinity College, Dublin, about W.B. Yeats: “Poor fellow! He is an autodidaktos—he never worked...
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America’s Unsustainable Empire
Before President Trump trashes the Iran nuclear deal, he might consider: If he could negotiate an identical deal with Kim Jong Un, it would astonish the world and win him the Nobel Peace Prize. For Iran has no nuclear bomb or ICBM and has never tested either. It has never enriched uranium to bomb grade....
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Macron in Washington
French President Emanuel Macron’s three-day visit to Washington started on an awkward note when he kissed an obviously uncomfortable President Donald Trump. The scene was a symbolic reminder that the two leaders do not enjoy an “intense, close relationship” invented by the media. In reality Macron is, both ideologically and temperamentally, the polar opposite of...
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The Sword in the Stone
“The call for free trade is as unavailing as the cry of a spoiled child for the moon. It never has existed; it never will exist.” —Henry Clay During the closing days of the 1993 congressional debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 300 of the nation’s leading economists, including two Nobel Laureates,...
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Why the Authoritarian Right Is Rising
A fortnight ago, Viktor Orban and his Fidesz Party won enough seats in the Hungarian parliament to rewrite his country’s constitution. To progressives across the West, this was disturbing news. For the bête noire of Orban’s campaign was uber-globalist George Soros. And Orban’s commitments were to halt any further surrenders of Hungarian sovereignty and independence...
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What Happens When a Few Volunteer and the Rest Just Watch
The American Military System Dissected The purpose of all wars, is peace. So observed St. Augustine early in the first millennium A.D. Far be it from me to disagree with the esteemed Bishop of Hippo, but his crisply formulated aphorism just might require a bit of updating. I’m not a saint or even a bishop,...
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Théâtre Syrien
There are several conflicting narratives on who is doing what to whom in Syria, and why. That a false-flag operation was followed by an act of aggression by the U.S. and its European satellites is clear. Everything else is murky. Three initial impressions deserve particular attention. 1. False flags work if they are supported by...
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Trump: Prisoner of the War Party?
“Ten days ago, President Trump was saying ‘the United States should withdraw from Syria.’ We convinced him it was necessary to stay.” Thus boasted French President Emmanuel Macron Saturday, adding, “We convinced him it was necessary to stay for the long term.” Is the U.S. indeed in the Syrian civil war “for the long term”?...
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Another Reason Why the Agrarians Lost
Andrew Lytle’s “The Hind Tit” is the best essay in I’ll Take My Stand (1930), not only because it focuses on the small, independent farmer, the class the Agrarians most admired, but also because Lytle nails the volume’s primary thesis to the church door, the dilemma his region and nation faced in 1930—the choice between...
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Is Trump Standing Down in Syria?
Wednesday morning, President Trump jolted the nation with a tweet that contained both threat and taunt: “Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart!’ You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and...
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Professor Burnham, Mafioso Costello, and Me
Not long after the conviction of Alger Hiss, Professor James Burnham, Karl Hess, and I met in my apartment on Riverside Drive to discuss a matter that had concerned us for some time. Jim Burnham was then working on his book The Web of Subversion. Karl, like me, was a Newsweek editor, and he had...
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Inescapable Horizons
Weighing in at more than 500 dense and provocative pages, Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self (Harvard, 1989) was clearly not intended for the general reader; at just over 100 pages. The Ethics of Authenticity is much more accessible. While not a fully “polished” work, this slim volume is so full of valuable insights I...
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Has the War Party Hooked Trump?
With his Sunday tweet that Bashar Assad, “Animal Assad,” ordered a gas attack on Syrian civilians, and Vladimir Putin was morally complicit in the atrocity, President Donald Trump just painted himself and us into a corner. “Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria,” tweeted Trump, “President Putin, Russia and Iran...
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Syrian Showdown: Trump vs. the Generals
With ISIS on the run in Syria, President Trump this week declared that he intends to make good on his promise to bring the troops home. “I want to get out. I want to bring our troops back home,” said the president. We’ve gotten “nothing out of the $7 trillion (spent) in the Middle East...
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The Moscow Manifesto
Yesterday’s two panels on world affairs at this year’s Moscow Economic Forum raised issues that are well outside the permitted mainstream discourse in the West. As a German colleague remarked, “only here I meet people who are not focused on the disjointed, piecemeal fragments of reality, who have no doubt that the Chinese or Persian...
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The Joke’s On Us
I did mention Elvis once in a column, and in the ’90s I pointed to one Donald Trump as the TV star you’d least likely want sitting next to you at a dinner party. And yet the likelihood, back then, of ever mentioning Roseanne Barr—it just didn’t compute. But these days . . . I...
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Moscow Notes: The Curse of Liberalism
The first day of this year’s Moscow Economic Forum (MEF, April 3-4), the premium gathering of Russian and foreign business leaders, economic strategists and geopolitical analysts, started with a plenary session reminiscent of the opening of last year’s event. Speaker after speaker complained that President Putin has no coherent strategy for Russia’s comprehensive development, and...
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How Trump’s Presidency Will Be Judged
On many issues—naming Scalia-like judges and backing Reagan-like tax cuts—President Trump is a conventional Republican. Where he was exceptional in 2016, where he stood out starkly from his GOP rivals, where he won decisive states like Pennsylvania, was on his uniquely Trumpian agenda to put America and Americans first—from which the Bush Republicans recoiled. Trump...
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Must the U.S. Be a Merchant of Death?
It’s one of those stories of the century that somehow never gets treated that way. For an astounding 25 of the past 26 years, the United States has been the leading arms dealer on the planet, at some moments in near monopolistic fashion. Its major weapons-producers, including Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, regularly pour the...
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The Quest for Community
“A sense of the past is far more basic to the maintenance of freedom than hope for the future. The former is concrete and real; the latter is necessarily amorphous and more easily guided by those who can manipulate human actions and beliefs. —Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community The trouble with labels—whether adopted voluntarily...
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The Pursuit of Happiness
Mass shootings of the sort that happened recently in Florida and Nevada, whose only conceivable motive is the perpetrator’s compulsion to make his satanic and nihilistic hatred of other people and of existence itself a compelling item in the international news, have become almost monthly occurrences here, though they are rare in more mentally and...
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The Second Risorgimento
The national Italian elections so feared by Brussels, European liberals, and other would-be unifiers across the Continent have come and gone after having given the officials of the European Union “une mauvaise soirée,” as Marine Le Pen expressed it. The results are a dramatic victory for the right, for “populism,” and for antiestablishmentarianism generally. The...
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Books in Brief
America’s Political Inventors: The Lost Art of Legislation, by George W. Liebmann (New York: I.B. Tauris; 272 pp., £64.00). George Liebmann, an attorney and historian, argues that Friedrich Hayek’s definition of the rule of law (“uniform rules laid down in advance”) has not been observed recently by federal and state governments. Learned Hand said that...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Not a find, but an old friend, is Malcolm Muggeridge. I am reading a collection of his essays called Time and Eternity, and his golden spiritual autobiography, Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim, written after he and his wife, past their four-score years, had been received into the Catholic Church. I cannot read the latter without...
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America’s Death Wish
Parkland, Florida, came and went, bringing a new St. Valentine’s Day massacre, another unspeakable horror, and another opportunity for hashtags and political maneuvering over guns in America. It very quickly became obvious that liberal activists had prepared and somewhat organized a campaign against the National Rifle Association ahead of time, waiting for the next mass...
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Hour of Decision
Looking objectively at the legacy of Billy Graham in the wake of his passing is virtually impossible, especially for me personally. I know several people who answered the altar call at a Graham crusade, “just as I am without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me,” and mark that occasion as their...
Issue
April 2018
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Tariffs and Delusions
Lenin may or may not have said that the capitalists would sell him the rope by which he would hang them, but the proverb is assigned to him for good reason. Any revolutionary who dreams of destroying the free-enterprise system can count on a valuable ally within the system itself, in the form of the...
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Immigration and Citizenship: Ancient Lessons for the American People
Americans have been debating immigration since the Founding era. Congress passed the first Naturalization Law in 1790, which it amended and fine-tuned in 1795, 1798, and 1802. These acts experimented with different residency requirements before naturalization. From the start, children of U.S. citizens were citizens, even if born abroad. For the Founders, where citizenship was...
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Lies and Consequences
The Post Produced by Dreamworks Directed by Steven Spielberg Screenplay by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox The Phantom Thread Produced and distributed by Focus Features Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson The Post is Steven Spielberg’s account of the Washington Post’s 1971 decision to publish the Robert McNamara-ordered report...
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Mencken and After
If Noah Webster was the father of English-language spelling reform, H.L. Mencken was the strong son making good his inheritance. Mencken’s claim was to be the father of the American language. He named it. As with mountains and planets, the one who names is honored with immortality, and The American Language, first published in 1919,...
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“Only Connect!”
Niall Ferguson is a distinguished historian of Scottish origin who specializes in big arguments, and contrarian claims. His books are always provocative, frequently infuriating, and often (if not always) correct in their analyses. Unlike most academic historians, he genuinely understands issues of business and finance, both in the contemporary world and in the historic past,...
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Fiddling on the Brink
A standard theme in the literature on the Great War is that hardly anyone expected it at the time. Europe’s last summer, balmy and idyllic, suddenly brought the guns of August. This view is not historically accurate—Germany willed the war, and her leaders engineered the July crisis—but for most other actors the catastrophe did come...
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Blame Poland
OK, all you readers: You are weak, easily manipulated, led by the nose to the gutter, susceptible to the devils of your diabolical urges, and you are crazy. In fact you are the unspeakables, the deplorables who voted for Trump, and a bald, ugly man by the name of Roger Cohen says so. Needless to...
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The Great Clarifier
Not even President Trump’s most ardent admirers would claim that he is a “Great Communicator,” the title bestowed on the last resident of the White House who could plausibly be seen as governing, at least in some respects, as a conservative. But Donald Trump might just be a great clarifier: His words and actions cause...
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A Billion Sordid Images
Disconnected is not an amusing book. The subtitle’s “digitally distracted” doesn’t hint at its grim findings. This short text—a long one might be too dispiriting—is nevertheless lengthy enough to expose the digital revolution as an outright calamity, though the author generally eschews the apocalyptic tone. Of course, there is the familiar boast that children now...
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Hang ’Em High
I was recently watching Westward Ho, one of the many dozens of B Westerns I have in my collection, and it struck me that until the 1940’s vigilantes were most often portrayed in the movies as the good guys. Following the credits at the beginning of Westward Ho we read, “This picture is dedicated to...
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Venting Is Not Enough: Nassar and Injustice
Imagine a justice system that functioned as follows. While awaiting sentencing after conviction, the vilest criminals would be put in the public dock, surrounded by angry spectators. At the behest of the presiding judge, victims, along with their friends and relatives, would then unleash all of their verbal anger on the perpetrator. The victims could...
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Large Is Ugly: Why America Is Not a Democracy
Of course it is ludicrous for anyone to consider the government in Washington, D.C., a democracy, no matter how often it is declared to be one. The reason is perfectly obvious: With a population of nearly 330 million people, no nation could have a government with anything resembling a true democracy. Let us consider. With...
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Lost Near the Beltway
Whatever happened to the libertarian movement? Since the age of 14 I have been a self-conscious libertarian. That’s when I started reading libertarian tracts (Rand, Mises, Hayek). I say reading, but at least in the case of Mises, reading was not the same as understanding at such an early age. I was no child prodigy. ...
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The Lowdown on Music Appreciation
Music Appreciation is a revealing phrase: It doesn’t mean what it says. It doesn’t mean that music is getting more expensive, though it is true that music is appreciating. It doesn’t mean even a proper regard, as in “I appreciate your efforts.” What it does mean is a matter more of pedantry than of anything...
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A Ruthless Charm
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was bred in the bone for his role on the stage of 20th-century American history. His father, the historian Arthur Meier Schlesinger, was already a rising academic star when Arthur Jr. was born in 1917 in Iowa City, while, on his mother’s side, the prominent 19th-century historian, George Bancroft, was said to...
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Muslim Migrants and the Religious Left
Why are so many Western Christians either silent about, or actually complicit in, the Muslim hegira to the West? One would think Christians would be at the forefront of opposition. Some are, but most are not, and these latter include Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, mainline “Protestants,” and evangelicals in America. These churches have made four...
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Does the Pope Believe in Hell?
“Pope Declares No Hell?” So ran the riveting headline on the Drudge Report of Holy Thursday. Drudge quoted this exchange, published in La Repubblica, between Pope Francis and his atheist friend, journalist Eugenio Scalfari. Scalfari: “What about bad souls? Where are they punished?” Bad souls “are not punished,” Pope Francis is quoted, “those who do...
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Latin, The Language of the West
For generations Latin was the backbone of Christian civilization, and served as the basis for political, intellectual, and religious discourse during the most creative periods of European history. And, as a number of scholars have pointed out, the relatively recent abandonment of Latin by educators coincides rather strikingly with American culture’s collapse into vapid superficiality....
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Degradation of European Diplomacy
In his latest Sputnik International interview, Srdja Trifkovic discusses the decision by a number of European countries, as well as the United States and Canada, to expel dozens of Russian diplomats over the Skripal case. Dr. Trifkovic was first asked for his overall assessment of the significance of this move. Audio (here). Article (here) ST: The...
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Is Trump Assembling a War Cabinet?
The last man standing between the U.S. and war with Iran may be a four-star general affectionately known to his Marines as “Mad Dog.” Gen. James Mattis, the secretary of defense, appears to be the last man in the Situation Room who believes the Iran nuclear deal may be worth preserving and that war with...