The reaction of top U.S. Senators from both parties to the briefing by CIA director Gina Haspel on the killing of Jamal Khashoggi has been unprecedented. A close ally of President Trump, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), announced that he had “high confidence” Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was complicit in the murder, describing the Saudi...
Jair Bolsonaro won the presidential election in Brazil on October 28 with 55 percent of the vote. The former army captain triumphed over Fernando Haddad of the leftist Workers’ Party pledging to fight crime and corruption, to end affirmative action for “disadvantaged minorities,” and to shatter the straitjacketed discourse on race and sexuality. The leader...
“America First! The world is a very dangerous place!” President Donald J. Trump’s opening of his statement on “Standing with Saudi Arabia” (November 20) was eccentric; the ensuing 600-odd words—indubitably his own—appeared to give Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (“MbS”) an unqualified and outrageous carte blanche, seven weeks after Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. There may be...
After four years and three months of unprecedented carnage, the Great War—the most catastrophic event in all of history—ended one hundred years ago, on November 11, 1918. That war destroyed an effervescent civilization, unmatched in its fruits and vigor. A decent and on the whole well-ordered world was wrecked for ever, thrown into the abyss...
Angela Merkel announced on October 29 that she would make a two-stage exit from the political scene. She is first giving up her chairmanship of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which will select a new leader at its party congress on December 7-8. She is to step down as chancellor next, but not before the...
President Donald Trump’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly on September 25 was met with audible disrespect from some of the assembled globalist cognoscenti (representatives of many barbarous regimes included), and with blind hostility from the media and commentariat. This was unsurprising, because the opening segment of his half-hour address sounded like the summary of...
It is the duty of every Muslim to emulate the example of his prophet as recorded in the Hadith. By ordering the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Prince Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud has only acted in accordance with that orthodox, 14-century-old principle. It would have been eminently un-Islamic, in fact, for “MbS” to...
In the aftermath of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, the question has been raised whether the U.S.-Saudi alliance can or should be saved. It is based on false premises: there is no such alliance. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is neither a friend nor an ally of America. It...
Over the past few weeks we have witnessed a rapid and (for the past half-century) unprecedented worsening of relations between the United States and China. It is uncertain, for now, whether this is the result of a deliberate shift in strategy by Washington or the cumulative effect of a series of incremental moves and counter-moves...
Sen. John McCain’s death at 81 on August 25 was followed by effusive praise from everyone who is anyone in the Permanent State. His memorial service at Washington’s National Cathedral on September 1 confirmed that, inside the Beltway, even death is eminently political. It was the biggest gathering of the nation’s bipartisan establishment and its...
Greece is lovely most of the time and irresistible in the late summer, so I am back for a second stint in two months. Mercifully there are fewer tourists around now. There is no line to get into the palace of Knossos and even the ferry to Santorini is half-empty. The intense heat is gone,...
Now that a week has passed since Sen. John Sidney McCain III was given a truly presidential sendoff in Washington, it is not in poor form to try and amend the gushing record presented by the media and the bipartisan establishment. The plaudits and perorations are well known, including Meghan McCain’s amazing claim that America’s...
President Donald Trump’s meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and their joint press conference in Helsinki on July 16 have ignited an ongoing paroxysm of rage and hysteria in the U.S. media. Morbid Russophobia and Putin-hate are déjà-vu, but the outpouring of vitriol against Trump has been raised to an entirely new level. The...
President Donald Trump announced late on Wednesday that he had asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to study South African land and farm seizures and killing of farm owners, by implication of white race. The African National Congress (ANC)-controlled government in Pretoria accused the President of stoking racial divisions in the country, while his haters...
The United States has created “chaos” in its management of foreign affairs, Turkey’s foreign minister Mevlüt Çavusoglu said on August 13. “There is confusion in the U.S. administration, and no one knows who is doing what,” Çavusoglu said after meeting his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov in Ankara. “We are at a turning point in the...
On August 7 President Donald Trump issued a strong warning to countries trading with Iran, following his re-imposition of sanctions on the country. “Anyone doing business with Iran will NOT be doing business with the United States,” he tweeted. Some reimposed sanctions took effect overnight, while additional, more punitive ones—relating to oil exports and central...
A successful national leader (“good” or “bad”) is able to redefine the terms of what is politically possible in accordance with his values, and to produce durable desired outcomes. Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan come to mind at home, and Churchill, De Gaulle, and Deng Xiaoping abroad. Very few are able to effect a profound, long-lasting...
On July 26 Vice President Michael (“Mike”) Pence addressed the first “Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom” in Washington D.C. Pence opened his remarks by asserting that “religious freedom is a top priority of this administration,” that this “most fundamental of freedoms . . . is in the interest of the peace and security of the...
Five days after the Helsinki summit I am inclined to believe that President Donald Trump either knows exactly what he is doing—that there is uncanny finesse and foresight behind his bluster—or else that he is guided by an almost unfailing intuition, with similar results. Trump’s refusal to parrot the Intel-deepstaters’ “Russiagate” narrative at last Monday’s...
The hysterical media/establishment/Deep State reaction to President Trump’s comments in Helsinki is based on a lie. U.S. intelligence chiefs, current and former, fire back at Trump—a sample offering from the NPR—quotes Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats as saying the U.S. intelligence community has been “clear in our assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016...
In the spring and summer of 1968 a wave of student protests erupted on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Their immediate causes were different, but they had two significant common features: contagious denial of the legitimacy of authority and a distaste for established norms of behavior and thought. The process was spiritually comparable to...
For many years German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been regarded, with reason, as the most powerful woman in the world. Over the past few months Merkel’s authority has diminished precipitously, however, mainly due to her irrational immigration policy. That much became obvious at last weekend’s emergency EU summit on immigration. The meeting was hastily convened...
The conventional view among antiglobalist conservatives is that President Donald Trump’s nixing of the Iran nuclear deal, coupled with the much-heralded relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, is bad news. Their arguments are clear. America seems to be moving closer to another war of choice in the Middle East—potentially far more costly and devastating...
On June 20 Serbia’s foreign minister Ivica Dacic made an interesting remark in connection with the ongoing political and territorial dispute over the status of Kosovo. We are witnessing a new reflection of the desire to create the “green transverse” in the Balkans, which is a “dangerous fantasy” motivated by ambitious Islamic extremism. “This is...
At the end of their meeting in Singapore, President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Chairman Kim Jong Un signed a document in which Trump “committed to provide security guarantees to the DPRK,” while Kim “reaffirmed his firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” In principle this is a reasonable formula which...
In Italy’s general election on March 4, two parties routinely derided by the corporate media as “populist” won almost 70 percent of the votes cast. A coalition led by Matteo Salvini’s League (Lega, formerly known as Lega Nord, LN) won 37 percent of the vote and a plurality of seats both in the Chamber of...
The latest escalation of the Syrian crisis started with the false-flag poison gas attack in Douma on April 7. It was followed a week later by the bombing of three alleged chemical-weapons facilities by the United States, Britain, and France. The operation had two objectives. The first was the Permanent State interventionists’ intent to reassert...
Imagine you are a denizen of Melos enslaved by the Athenians during the brutal sack of that island in 416 BC. A year later you learn that your masters are preparing a massive expedition to Sicily as a starting point for the conquest of Italy and Carthage; and, furthermore, that they are hoping that the...
Tens of thousands of Armenians converged on the capital Yerevan on Wednesday morning, blocking roads and government buildings in protest over the ruling party’s reluctance to transfer power in the country to opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan. Protesters said they would stay on the streets for as long as it takes to oust the ruling Republican...
Until March 22, when the White House announced that John Bolton would replace H.R. McMaster as national security advisor, it was still possible to imagine that President Donald Trump’s many compromises with the globalist-hegemonist establishment had been made under duress. This may have been true once, but it is not true now. Bolton’s appointment indicates...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Last week saw one-hundredth anniversary of an event which greatly impacted the destinies of Europe and America for decades to come. It passed unnoticed by the media. On March 3, 1918, the Bolsheviks signed a peace treaty with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk. Far from sealing the Kaiserreich’s historic triumph in the East, its brutal...
“Peace in the Middle East” is like the unicorn: we can envisage the beast, paint it in detail even, but we can’t groom a living specimen. The problem transcends geopolitics and ideology, it is also metaphysical. The people inhabiting the region are vying for limited resources, such as land and water. In addition, many also...
The most interesting part of President Vladimir Putin’s two hours long state of nation address on March 1 was his announcement—accompanied by a video presentation—that Russia has developed a hypersonic state-of-the-art missile 20 times faster than the speed of sound, as well as a nuclear-powered cruise missile, both supposedly safe from interception. Putin claimed that...
The Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy, which Defense Secretary James Mattis presented on January 19, envisages aggressive measures to counter Russia and China and instructs the military to refocus on Cold War-style competition with them, away from terrorist threats and “rogue nations.” This is in stark contrast to Barack Obama’s 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, which called...
“For thousands of years, the land that carried the mountains of Lebanon and hugged the Mediterranean Sea was restless,” says painter Antoine G. Faddoul of his Phoenix as a metaphor for his native land. “Those who inhabited the very first civilized cities suffered numerous invasions destroying their cities time and again [but] the survivors always...
Since there are no pressing global issues that cannot wait until next week, I’ll devote my column to a book I’ve just finished reading. Its title, Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans (Penguin, 2017), and the reputation of its author—retired admiral James George Stavridis, who ended his career as NATO Supreme...
Devising a great power’s national-security strategy is serious business. When external challenges are properly evaluated, tasks prioritized, and resources allocated, the results can be impressive. The Roman Empire from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius (a.d. 96-180) provides one example; Britain from Napoleon to the Great War another. The rise of Prussia and unification of Germany during...
On this month’s form, 2018 will be an interesting year. So far it has brought rich rewards to us world affairs aficionados. The overall global tempo is accelerating, affrettando, like de Falla’s Danza Ritual del Fuego. What would have been considered bizarre if not outright insane but a few years ago is now commonplace. Take...
You can read Letter from Germany, Part I here. This past week has been unseasonably lovely in southern Germany, with crystal blue skies and the temperature in the fifties. I was enjoying the view of the Alps from the southern wing of Neuschwannstein, the famous fairytale castle built by Wagner’s mad friend King Ludwig, when...
The North German Plain is not an exciting place. It lacks the charm of the Palatinate, the fairytale quality of the Middle Rhineland, or the drama of the Bavarian Alps. It is peopled by staid burghers who are hard-working, practical, and (in contrast to the Oberpfälzers, say) rather quiet. It rains a lot, and now...
A key source of volatility in today’s international system is the propensity of the U.S. government to reject any conventionally ordered hierarchy of American global interests. Washington’s deterritorialized policy of full-spectrum dominance is based on ideological suppositions that are unreceptive to rational debate. America’s “global engagement” constantly creates results—notably in Iraq and Libya—that run counter...
On December 20 the European Commission (EC) took the unprecedented step of activating Article 7.1 of the Lisbon Treaty against Poland. The EC accuses the Law and Justice (PiS) government in Warsaw of “putting fundamental democratic rights at risk” by enacting 13 laws to reform the country’s judiciary which make it easier to replace the...
President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to the Holy City has been criticized on many grounds, most of them ostensibly sensible, in America and abroad. In the Western media, over the past two days, we have encountered six chief objections:...
Exactly ninety-nine years ago—on December 1, 1918—the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes came into being. A decade later its name was changed to Yugoslavia. A generation ago the country disintegrated in blood and acrimony. The unification of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes came several decades too late. Had it happened during the era of Germany’s...
That Europe is in mortal danger from the ongoing, overwhelmingly Muslim immigrant deluge and from its ruling elites’ spiritual degeneracy is beyond dispute. This phenomenon of world-historical significance has several causes, but the most important one is in the divorce of reason from faith. As a result, post-Christian Europe is rapidly sinking into self-destruction. The...