Author: Srdja Trifkovic (Srdja Trifkovic)

Those of us who grew up under communism remember well the ritual of the Leader’s Speech.  At a Party congress—invariably dubbed “historic” even before it began—or on the occasion of the opening of a new steel mill, the Dear Comrade would deliver a much-heralded oration.  It usually contained three main ingredients: “We” are making great...

A 31-gun salute boomed at daybreak on August 14 in Islamabad to mark Pakistan’s 60th anniversary of independence from British rule—or, to be precise, her birth as a Muslim state that resulted from the bloody partition of India in 1947.  That event was accompanied by the largest mass migration in history, as over ten million...

A prudent power will always seek to keep open as many options as possible in its foreign-policy making.  An increasingly rigid system of alliances, coupled with mobilization blueprints and railway timetables, reduced the European powers’ scope for maneuver in the summer of 1914 and contributed to the ensuing catastrophe.  The United States, by contrast, entered...

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s refusal to yield to Western pressure and accept Kosovo’s independence at the G-8 summit in Heiligendamm has prompted a new round of Russia-bashing at both ends of the political spectrum.  Editorial columns were filled with references to Putin’s “posturing,” “bluff,” “intimidation,” and “empty rhetoric.”  His “hard line” may “reignite ethnic violence,”...

On May 1, at a hearing on the future of Kosovo, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Democrat Tom Lantos of California, made a truly remarkable statement: Just a reminder to the predominantly Muslim-led governments in this world that here is yet another example that the United States leads the way for the...

In a sane world, Dinesh D’Souza would not merit a single inch of this column.  The greater Middle East, Islamic terrorism, Korea, the Balkans, the imperial mind-set, and many other problems and challenges America faces around the world would take precedence over the musings of a self-designated “conservative intellectual” with few original ideas and little...

Imagine yourself at a fashionable party, a century ago, in Belgravia, the Upper East Side, or the Ballplatz.  After-dinner brandy is served, Augustas are lit, and the talk turns to world affairs.  The host asks his guests what they deem to be the issue that threatens peace and stability more than any other. A senior...

The outcome of last November’s mid-term elections reminded us for the umpteenth time that democracy in America is a corrupt “democratic process” controlled by an elite class that conspires to make secondary issues important and to treat important issues as either irrelevant or illegitimate.  One party may be in; another, out; but the regime is...

The Democrats’ victory on November 7 and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s departure a day later marked the beginning of the end game in Iraq.  The moment is reminiscent of December 1970, when President Nixon decided to pull U.S. forces out of Vietnam by the end of the following year.  The major difference is that...

President George W. Bush’s highly anticipated prime-time speech to mark the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on America was supposed to be nonpartisan and conciliatory.  It offered him an opportunity to present mature thoughts on one of the most momentous events in this country’s history, to correct several manifest flaws in his conceptual approach...

If you did not know beforehand that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadine-jad was one of the most important men in the most neuralgic region of the world—and, by extension, in the world itself—you’d never have guessed it.  One of the few things he has in common with President George W. Bush is a forgettable face.  In...

Given the wars and rumors of war from North Korea to the Middle East, the last thing America needs is to reignite the proverbial powder keg in the Balkans, a region that has been fairly stable for the better part of this decade, especially when compared to the bloody 1990’s.  That precarious stability could be...

The looming amnesty of millions of illegal immigrants is deeply unpopular with millions of Americans, and for good reason: If the immigration bill the Senate passed in June gets through the House, this nation is finished.  The bill would not only legalize some ten million illegal aliens but bring in five times that many—legally—over the...

In Sartre’s grim play No Exit, a man and two women are in Hell, which, in this case, is a brightly lit drawing room furnished in the style of deuxième empire.  At one point, the man, Garcin, famously quips that “hell is other people” (“l’enfer, c’est les autres”).  One of the women, Inès, eventually responds...

Abdul Rahman, an Afghan who faced the death penalty in his native country for converting from Islam to Christianity, was granted political asylum in Italy and arrived in Rome on March 29.  His release came after several weeks of intense pressure by the United States and other Western governments on Kabul to spare his life...

For the past two-and-a-half millennia, our civilization has cultivated tragedy as an art form that articulates some of the key problems of our existence.  Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III—these works speak timeless truths in an ever-contemporary language. In the case of Serbia’s former president Slobodan Milosevic, reality has proved equal to inspired imagination.  His life, which...

The U.S. State Department has effectively sided with militant Islam by condemning the decision of newspapers in Denmark, Norway, and elsewhere in Europe to publish cartoon drawings depicting Muhammad, the founder of Islam. On February 3, State Department press officer Janelle Hironimus told reporters, “Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable....

Gary S. Becker, a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago and a 1992 Nobel Prize winner, cannot be accused of “racism.”  After all, he supports liberalizing immigration laws for educated professionals from around the world, especially India and China.  But his warning, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last December, that...

A year ago, the prospects for peace in Israel-Palestine appeared more promising than at any other time after Bill Clinton’s failed Camp David initiative in 2000.  Arafat’s death in November 2004 had removed a major cause of Palestinian corruption and incoherence, as well as the justification for Israel’s refusal to accept direct talks.  Mahmoud Abbas’...