Author: Srdja Trifkovic (Srdja Trifkovic)

  Two years after the beginning of the Syrian insurgency, three facts are clear: The rebels are unable to bring down the government of President Bashar al-Assad, foreign political support and military supplies notwithstanding; Bashar’s forces are unable to defeat the rebels and reestablish control over the entire country; and continued third-party advocacy of either...

  Last week I testified, for the third time in a decade, before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague. I appeared as a defense witness in the trial of Radovan Karadzic. Just like on the occasion of my previous testimony, the prosecutor paid scant attention to the substance of my statements. He...

Eighty years ago today, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Germany’s Chancellor. The old Marshal, a Junker through and through, did so unwillingly. He disliked “that Austrian corporal”—he seldom uttered Hitler’s name—from the moment they first met, in October 1931. The antipathy was mutual, with Hitler often referring to Hindenburg—in private—as “that old fool.”...

  Last week’s attack on the Algerian gas facility at In Amenas was the most elaborate jihadist assault ever conducted on African soil. It was also the most spectacular action of its kind since November 2008, when Islamic terrorists carried out a series of coordinated shooting and bombing attacks in Bombay (aka “Mumbai”), India’s largest...

  On January 16 Islamic militants staged an audacious attack on a major natural gas complex in southeastern Algeria, 800 miles southeast from the capital. A jihadist group calling itself the Masked Brigade—led by Moktar Belmoktar, the fierce one-eyed veteran of the Afghan war and a senior commander of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)—claimed responsibility...

  I’ve just returned from Albania, almost 22 years after visiting that country for the first time. In July 1991 I went there on an assignment with U.S. News & World Report, only weeks after the country’s borders were finally opened to foreigners after 45 years of hermetic isolation. I have visited many countries over the years,...

  The most important foreign event in the final days of 2012 was the ramming through of Egypt’s new, Sharia-based constitution by President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood allies. The cultural, demographic and geographic center of the Arab world is now set to become an Islamic Republic. Egypt’s transformation, after 60 years of secularist...

  Srdja Trifkovic’s talks to Rev. Todd Wilken on Issues, Etc.  Transcript of live interview broadcast on December 12, 2012. Joining us to talk about the ongoing plight of Christians in Egypt is Dr. Srdja Trifkovic.  He is Foreign Affairs Editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture . . . Are we seeing a reenactment of what happened with...

  Speaking in Dublin last Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that a new effort was under way by “oppressive governments” to “re-Sovietize” Eastern Europe and Central Asia. She took a stab at Russia and her regional allies for their alleged crackdown on democracy and human rights, only hours ahead of meeting Russia’s foreign...

  RT: We are joined now live by Srdja Trifkovic, foreign-affairs editor for Chronicles magazine. A Washington spokesman has called the latest Israeli action “contrary to U.S. policy.” What about the state of relations between the two countries? ST: This Administration is widely perceived as the least pro-Israeli administration in history. The problem is that Netanyahu is...

  Democracy could “work” if it was a democracy of and for and by the right people, but that model is fit only for the Post-Raptorial Republic of Angels. In a non-Utopian world it cannot work because “We the People” is a corrupt mélange of mostly coarse individuals pretending to be Gods. Democracy has duly ruined the...

  The conventional wisdom is simple: when there is an uninspiring incumbent and a lackluster challenger, the people will opt for the incumbent. The formula is unsatisfactory in this case, however. Obama was not just any incumbent. He is the embodiment of an anti-America–culturally, spiritually and morally—that is hell-bent on destroying the surviving vestiges of...

  “Prominent conservative” Dinesh D’Souza resigned his post as president of a small Christian school in New York City on October 17. Two days earlier World, an evangelical Protestant publication, reported that while attending an evangelical conference in South Carolina last September D’Souza had checked into a motel room with a woman he introduced as his fiancée, despite...

  “Obama and Romney Bristle From Start Over Foreign Policy,” says The New York Times. The illusion that on Monday night a vigorous foreign-policy-centered debate took place in Boca Raton is being perpetuated by countless mainstream media outlets from coast to coast. We were treated to a choreographed, scripted conversation instead, with President Barack Obama and his...

  Yesterday and today (October 14-15) I’ve been taking part in an interesting conference at the Patriarchate of Pec, in the occupied Serbian province of Kosovo. Organized by Bishop Jovan (Culibrk), an old friend of Dr. Fleming’s and mine, The Balkans and the Middle East Mirroring Each Other marks the centenary of the First Balkan War and...

  A week-long visit to Tunisia, in the course of which I covered some 2,000 miles by rental car, bus, SUV, and a powered hang glider, has confirmed that of faraway places we often assume to know more than we do. The first country affected by a wave of popular discontent known as the Arab Spring was full...

  It is the nature of men to create monsters, says virtual counter-hero Harlan Wade of F.E.A.R., and it is the nature of monsters to destroy their makers. Mary Shelley and the Golem come to mind, but what happened in Benghazi on Tuesday is more reminiscent of Bram Stoker. U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens did not create it, but he was...

Fourteen centuries of Islam have fatally undermined Christianity in the land of its birth. The decline of the Christian remnant in the Middle East has been accelerated in recent decades, and accompanied by the indifference of the post-Christian West to its impending demise. Once-thriving Christian communities are now tiny minorities, and in most countries of...

  Marine General John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, says one possible explanation for a spike in killings of American troops by their Afghan partners is the strain of fasting during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which ended on August 18. He said that while the reasons for the killings are not fully understood,...

  Ah, Italian politics . . . This scene reminds me of my native Serbia: corruption, sleaze, scandals, cushy jobs for the boys, and dramatis personæ that changes but little from one decade to another. There’s also the same resentment at various dictates coming from the German-dominated European Union—of which Italy (unlike Serbia) is a member, but...

  Almost a year has passed since we last took note of Turkey’s increasing clout in three key areas of neo-Ottoman expansion: the Balkans, the Arab world, and the predominantly Muslim regions of the former Soviet Union. Each has played a significant part in reshaping the geopolitics of the Greater Middle East over the past decade. This...

  The Syrian scenario, as concocted in Washington with some help from London and Paris, is proceeding with almost comical predictability. Amnesty International has just issued a report accusing government forces of “crimes against humanity” and calling on the UN Security Council to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court. The report, “All-Out Repression: Purging Dissent in...

  The Obama Administration’s Middle Eastern policy is irrational and detrimental to American interests in the region. The decision to support the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Egypt is the strategic equivalent of Emperor Nicholas I Romanov’s support for the Habsburgs in suppressing the Hungarian revolution in 1849. The cost of that geopolitical blunder was...

  Having traveled all over Bosnia and Herzegovina recently, including Sarajevo, Banja Luka, Tuzla, Doboj, Zvornik and Visegrad, I can testify that—almost 17 years after the end of the war—this former Yugoslav republic is not a “country” but a deeply divided international protectorate. As the Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik said on July 20, it...

  Anyone claiming that international bankers, multinational company executives, members of the Bilderberg Group, elite academics, senior judges, United Nations officials and European Union strategists are working together to undermine the remnants of sovereignty and identity of old Christian nations through mass Third World immigration would be dismissed by our bien pensants as a conspiracy theorist. A...

  Over the past two decades the decisionmakers in Washington have acquired and internalized a bias in Balkan affairs that falls outside the parameters of rational debate. As Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute has noted, such policy is not as inconsistent as it seems: “Time after time the U.S. policy makers would ask what...

  Once some powerful people in Washington decide that they want a war, they do not give up until they get it. The proponents of an American-led NATO intervention in Syria were on the defensive in April, when government forces were winning on the ground and the political balance inside the Beltway seemed to be favoring...

  Last Thursday’s decision by the Supreme Constitutional Court in Cairo that Egypt’s parliament was elected unconstitutionally and should be disbanded is a direct challenge to the Islamists who dominate the legislature. The scene is set for a new political crisis in the Arab world’s most populous nation. It is obvious that the Supreme Council...

  Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning, quipped Churchill in November 1942, following Montgomery’s modest success at El Alamein. The same applies to Tomislav Nikolic’s victory in the second round of Serbia’s presidential election last Sunday. The...

  In May 2011 this column covered the Kafkaesque tribulations of an American citizen, Zack Shahin, who was arrested in Dubai in 2008, held in isolation for months on end and denied bail. As we noted then, “Shahin still remains in jail on what appear to be spurious charges, with no trial date in sight. All this is...

  The latest spectacle of disgusting posthuman monsters in expensive suits squandering other people’s billions—while displaying nothing but studied contempt for hoi polloi whose blood is their sustenance—is sickening and infuriating. Déjà vu all over again. Never mind the regulators and government officials with whom they are in existential cahoots; the bastards will continue doing their thing...

  Friday, May 4, 2012, 16:08 Moscow Time Wiping out local minorities after an extensive NATO airstrike is the only combat tactic the KLA had mastered and the only thing the Syrian opposition can really learn from them, foreign-affairs editor for the U.S.-based Chronicles magazine, Srdja Trifkovic, told RT. RT: Just what might the Syrian opposition learn at...

  In the latest issue of The Jewish Chronicle (UK) a polemicist by the name of Oliver Kamm takes The Jerusalem Post to task for publishing an article last February “by one Srdja Trifkovic claiming that US recognition of Kosovo was an advance for jihadism.” In a fact-free diatribe Kamm complains that the JP “did not mention that Trifkovic has described Srebrenica as...