Author: Srdja Trifkovic (Srdja Trifkovic)

A week after President Donald J. Trump’s return from his 12-day tour of Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines, its fruits are uncertain. Trump called the trip “very epic.” On the other hand, the media and establishmentarian analysts have predictably declared that he has failed to achieve anything significant. Joshua Kurlantzick of the...

Exactly one hundred years ago—in the early hours of November 7, 1917—the Bolsheviks staged a successful coup d’etat in Petrograd. “The main operations began at 2am,” Leon Trotsky remembered five years later. “Bolshevik groups occupied the rail stations, the lighting station, military and food warehouses, the water systems, the Palace bridge, the telephone exchange, state...

In the aftermath of last week’s finale of the Communist Party of China’s (CCP) 19th congress, many commentators have opined that President Xi Jinping is now the country’s most powerful leader since Deng Xiaoping. This is incorrect. Xi is the most powerful leader since Mao Zedong at home, and arguably the most influential Chinese player...

Following President Trump’s maiden speech to the U.N. General Assembly on September 19, ideologically incompatible analysts have found similar reasons to cheer or condemn the 40-minute oration.  To Breitbart’s Adam Shaw it was a powerful, nationalist, full-throated defense of Trump’s “America First” agenda.  To the far more numerous Trumpophobic pundits—like the Chicago Tribune’s David Rothkopf—it...

On October 13, President Trump declared that the only way to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons was to abrogate the multilateral treaty which has been provenly effective in preventing Iran from developing such weapons. This is potentially the most serious mistake of his foreign policymaking thus far. According to Trump, “the longer we ignore...

Over the past nine days two important referendums on independence were held, in Iraqi Kurdistan (September 25) and in Catalonia (October 1). Both were met with overwhelming disapproval of the outside world. In both cases the local authorities—in Erbil and Barcelona respectively—had a short-term political agenda other than the stated grand objective. That is where...

A hundred years ago, in the early hours of November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks grabbed power in Petrograd.  Within weeks they took advantage of Russia’s collapsing political and social structure to impose control over the country’s heartland.  The result of the coup was a tragedy of world-historical proportions.  A vibrant, flourishing culture (see “Remembering the...

German general elections are usually rather boring affairs, with polite debates, disagreements over minor issues and predictable outcomes. The one last Sunday was an exception. It was interesting not because the incumbent, veteran “center-right” Chancellor Angela Merkel (a nominal Christian Democrat), and the “center-left” opposition leader Martin Schulz (a nominal Social Democrat) differ on any...

[Credit: By Roman Harak (North Korea – Kumsusan) [CC BY-SA 2.0]] As President Trump makes his UN General Assembly debut this week—the body he has rightly called weak, incompetent, bad for democracy, and no friend of the United States—North Korea still dominates the headlines. It presents a problem in need of sober management. While it is...

The aftermath of the Cold War has seen the emergence of what neocon gurus Robert Kagan and William Kristol have called “benevolent global hegemony” of the United States. Throughout this period, key figures of both major parties have asserted that America’s unchallengeable military might was essential to the maintenance of global order. This period was...

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...

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...

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...

Considering the toxic Russophobic atmosphere nurtured by the Beltway establishment, the first meeting between presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin last Friday went reasonably well. Contrary to the mainstream media pack’s predictions and predictable post mortems, there were no “winners” or “losers.” The encounter was not perceived by its principals in terms of zero-cum game....

The United States is in danger of descending into the Syrian quagmire. There are clear signs of mission creep devoid of logic or strategic rationale. It is not too late yet to step away from the brink. This would require swift action by President Donald Trump to rein in the war party before it takes...

Last Thursday the Conservative Party suffered a major blow in the general election in the United Kingdom, the third such race in as many years. It had not been due until May 2020, but Prime Minister Theresa May decided to call a snap election on April 19 and obtain a “stronger mandate.” At that time the governing party...

According to the media machine and pundits on both sides of the Atlantic, President Trump’s recent attendance at two summits—in Brussels (NATO) and Sicily (G7)—went very badly. He went through many tense encounters, made a number of statements his interlocutors did not like, notably on the uneven burden of defense costs, on his dislike of...

Here I am in Russia, for the third time in two months. This means the FBI should start an investigation, if it has not done so already. This time I was invited to a conference (“Exporting Democracy”) at the Russian State University for the Humanities on Thursday. As is often the case with Russian conferences,...

Emmanuel Macron’s predictable victory in the second round of the French presidential election on May 7 is bad news for France and detrimental to the prospects of Europe’s cultural and demographic survival. For details see my June column in Chronicles: he is a paradigmatic pastiche of Europe’s postmodern transnational elite, a former international banker and...

There seems to be no end to the deluge of inane and/or deranged commentary on “the North Korean nuclear threat.” On Wednesday Matt Pottinger, the Asia director on President Trump’s National Security Council, said that “they want to use these weapons as an instrument of blackmail to achieve other goals, even including perhaps the coercive reunification...

I like and respect Pat Buchanan, whose heart is always in the right place. I feel compelled to offer an addendum to his recent article on the suffering of Middle East Christians, not because I disagree with anything he says but because the whole story deserves closer scrutiny. Persecution and martyrdom are inseparable from Eastern...

During the presidential campaign and in the immediate aftermath of his election victory, Donald Trump had made a number of conciliatory remarks about Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and the possibility of substantial improvement in relations between Washington and Moscow. On the campaign trail he also made the well-publicized statement that NATO was obsolete, and last...

This year’s Moscow Economic Forum (MEF) opened on Thursday at the Lomonosov State University under the slogan A New Strategy for Russia. The panelists—prominent academics, businessmen and senior managers—were brutally blunt in their diagnosis of the causes of Russia’s economic woes, and especially critical of the country’s Central Bank for continuing to follow a neoliberal...

St. Petersburg is coldly beautiful even on overcast late-winter days. There’s still ice on the Neva and the canals, with the wind-chill factor dropping to the lower 20’s in the evening—a reminder that Russia’s imperial capital is a mere 7° south of the Arctic Circle. Its façades look fresher than when I was here last...

On March 2, standing on board the USS Gerald R. Ford—the most expensive warship ever built—President Donald Trump touted his $54 billion military spending increase. A disproportionate part of that immense sum (more than the total defence budget of Russia at $45 billion, or India at $53 billion) would go to the Navy, eventually increasing...

At the security conference in Munich over the weekend and at the EU headquarters in Brussels on Monday, VP Mike Pence offered profuse assurances to the European elite class that the Trump administration supports unity and cohesion in the face of various threats allegedly facing the Western alliance. His remarks amounted to an explicit repudiation...

The Western world in general, and Europe in particular, are threatened not only by a numerically small, overtly jihadist cadre of “radicalized” individuals engaging in terrorism. The West is in mortal peril from a demographically explosive, ideologically highly developed, yet decentralized and structurally amorphous Islamic movement. To discuss the world-historical implications of this movement—which has...

After five days of MSM hysteria, President Trump remains justifiably unruffled by the establishment organs’ opprobrium. His January 27 executive order on immigration and refugees is reasonable and legal, and it enjoys strong popular support. In the medium-to-long term Trump has much bigger fish to fry than a temporary ban on citizens from seven failed,...

In his inaugural address President Trump made an important statement on foreign affairs which reflects his views on the nature of the international system and America’s role in it. His is a realist paradigm, explicitly based on interests rather than “values.” This is at odds with the bipartisan consensus which has guided the U.S. foreign...

It’s been almost seven months since Britons voted to leave the European Union. By now it seems likely that a genuine, hard Brexit—as opposed to some “associate-EU-membership” fudge—will actually happen. PM Theresa May has a strategy, it seems. It is not to the liking of the British liberal elite, but it is in line with...

In the course of this year President Donald Trump will improve America’s relations with Russia. He will also start purging the irredeemably politicized U.S. intelligence apparatus. The hysteria of recent weeks will be seen—a year from now—as a bizarre footnote to a failed presidency. The “dossier” concocted by a British dirty tricks purveyor hired to...

Over the years we have often lamented the absence of grand-strategic thinking within the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. For the past quarter-century, successive administrations have displayed a chronic inability to deploy America’s political, military, economic, and moral resources in a balanced and proportionate manner, in order to protect and enhance the country’s rationally defined security and...

Having written dozens of articles on the subject of Islamic terrorism and Europe’s ongoing suicide, following the latest jihadist carnage in Berlin I find myself lost for words—unable to think of anything useful that has not already appeared on this blog. Let me explain . . . In August of last year I wrote that...

On December 9, Geert Wilders was found guilty by a Dutch court of “incitement to anti-minority discrimination.” His crime was asking a crowd in The Hague in 2014, “Do you want more or fewer Moroccans in this city and in the Netherlands?” “Fewer, fewer!” came the reply, to which he responded: “I’ll take care of...

On November 29 Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan raised many eyebrows when he declared that Turkey’s military involvement in Syria, which started in the last week of August, had the objective “to end the rule of the tyrant al-Assad who terrorizes with state terror.” He even added that Turkey did not intervene there “for any...

In the early years of the second half of the 20th century, some time between Stalin’s death in March 1953 and the Hungarian uprising in October 1956, it had ceased to be fashionable for Western leftist intellectuals to be uncritically supportive of the late Soviet dictator and his bloody legacy. The search was on for...

Contrary to the MSM pack’s pitch of the week, there is no “disarray” inside Donald Trump’s transition team, no “Stalinesque” purges, and most certainly no successful insinuation of “adults” (Deep State operatives) into the list of early major appointees. They are all excellent. Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions as Trump’s attorney general, Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo...

Last night’s divine surprise is important more for the many bad things that will not happen than for the good ones that may happen. That Donald Trump won in spite of his many blunders, and in spite of the mainstream media machine acting as an integral part of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, indicates the magnitude of...

The FBI bombshell is not necessarily a gamechanging event. The Clinton campaign, and its mainstream media extension, have weathered with surprising ease the fainting episode on September 11. In the next two days they will focus on: the possibility (they will claim likelihood) that Anthony Wener’s/Huma Abedin’s server does not contain any emails not known...