Author: Srdja Trifkovic (Srdja Trifkovic)

The debate was not a hands-down victory for Hillary Clinton, as the media pack predictably claims, but on Monday night Donald Trump missed a great opportunity to damage her credibility and question her record. For that reason she has grounds to feel pleased with the outcome. Clinton was the first to mention Wall Street, but...

According to Hillary Clinton’s campaign talking points, she wanted to “power through” her pneumonia; but after that “overheating episode” on September 11 it “seemed like the smart thing to do” to take some downtime. According to Politico.com, which obtained the document, “those phrases, projecting strength, prudence, and vigor, were among the six bullet-pointed talking points...

On Wednesday night Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump spoke at the same prime-time television event for the first time. The “forum” was not a debate; the candidates appeared back-to-back, answering Matt Lauer’s questions about their qualities and qualifications to be commander-in-chief. He let Clinton—who appeared first—speak without disruption, but repeatedly interrupted Trump. On the other...

Hillary Clinton’s speech at the American Legion National Convention on August 31 was an exultant restatement of the two-decades-old doctrine of “benevolent global hegemony” justified by the dogma of American exceptionalism. She provided the blueprint for never-ending wars and crises wholly unrelated to any rational understanding of this country’s national interest. “The United States is...

A month ago the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) took control of the Castillo Highway in northern Aleppo, the rebels’ last supply route into their eastern redoubt. By July 27 it looked like the complete reconquest of Syria’s largest city by government forces was only a matter of time. In the first week of August, however,...

It is not Europe’s darkest hour yet—not quite on par with the peak of the Black Death 1346-53, or the impasse of the Western Front 1915-18, but on current form it is approaching fast. What is likely to happen in the next two to three decades is the darkest nightmare imaginable: a massive barbarian (overwhelmingly...

Two weeks after the failed coup and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s subsequent mass purge, three facts seem clear. Turkey has ceased to be a democracy in any conventional sense. The army’s reputation and cohesiveness have suffered a massive blow, with uncertain consequences for its operational effectiveness. Most importantly, Turkey’s foreign policy and regional security strategy...

Last Saturday, during lunch with Scott Richert and Aaron Wolf at Rockford’s Prairie Street Brewhouse, I expressed suspicion that the coup in Turkey—just over 24 hours old at that time, and in the final stages of collapse—was Erdogan’s Reichstag fire: a stage-managed event, carried out by clueless stooges, meant to enhance the power of the...

The outcome of the United Kingdom’s EU referendum on June 23 stunned the London-based elite class. It laid bare the deep chasm between Britain’s political and media machine and the alienated, angry and disillusioned majority of “left-behind” citizens. Thanks to David Cameron’s miscalculation, hoi polloi used the opportunity to express their abiding dislike not only...

In the final weeks of spring the Islamic State finally seemed to be in serious trouble. Its capital of Raqqa came under simultaneous pressure from forces supported by the Syrian government advancing from Palmyra in the southwest, and from the U.S.-supported (mainly Kurdish) Syrian Democratic Forces to the north. The scene was set for a...

President Barack Obama’s tirade on June 14 was filled with angry passion. His rhetoric was not directed against the perpetrator of the Orlando attack and his ilk, however, but against the (unnamed) GOP nominee and others who do not subscribe to Obama’s fundamental views on the nature of Islam and his “strategy” of confronting the...

India’s prime minister Narendra Modi paid his second visit to the White House in two years on June 8. President Barak Obama was greatly pleased by Modi’s stated willingness to proceed with ratification of the Paris agreement to limit greenhouse gases, and this was the theme duly emphasized in the Western media coverage of their meeting....

At a press conference at the G-7 summit in Japan on May 26, President Barack Obama declared that world leaders are “rattled” by Donald Trump, “and for good reason. Because a lot of the proposals that he’s made display either ignorance of world affairs or a cavalier attitude or an interest in getting tweets and...

Ahmet Davutoglu has served Recep Tayyip Erdogan loyally for over a decade, first as his chief advisor (2003-2009), then as foreign minister (2009-2014), and finally as prime minister until his forced resignation on May 5. Loyalty is no longer enough: Erdogan now demands unquestioning obedience from his team, and Davutoglu’s willingness to provide it has...

Donald Trump’s foreign policy speech last Wednesday deserves at least a solid B+ and you can read my take on it in the June issue of Chronicles. It offered an eloquent argument for offensive realism, based on the fact that the international system—composed of sovereign nation-states pursuing their interests—is still essentially competitive and Hobbesian. Trump...

In an interview with FOX News aired on Sunday, April 10, President Barack Obama said that failing to prepare for the aftermath of the ousting of Libyan leader Col. Muammar Qaddafi was the worst mistake of his presidency. He added that intervening in Libya nevertheless had been “the right thing to do.” The second part...

Faced with a fresh barrage of threatening rhetoric by North Korea, its fourth nuclear test (January 6), and its subsequent successful launch of a ballistic missile capable of reaching the mainland United States, on March 31 President Barack Obama advocated closer security ties among America’s chief allies in the Far East. More significantly, he also...

In the millennia-long “tragedy of great power politics” we encounter a recurring phenomenon.  An ambitious leader comes to power, successfully pursues an expansionist policy for a few years, succumbs to hubris, starts making risky decisions, and finally pays the price of not balancing his state’s strategic ends and means.  Classic examples are provided by Cleon...

Until about three decades ago the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day was not just another tackily “festive” occasion marked by shamrock face paintings and Guinness-soaked pub crawls. It had the markings of a Christian feast and it reflected a sense of collective awareness among the Irish that they had a lot to be proud of....

Not for the first time the government of Germany is acting as if it owned Europe. On two occasions in the 20th century it sought to occupy most of Europe; this time, with almost equal arrogance, it is trying to bully the rest of Europe into not resisting the ongoing Muslim occupation. The consequences of...

The reports of China’s pending economic collapse have been greatly exaggerated.  There are signs that the world’s second-largest economy is entering a period of long-term restructuring marked by a slowdown, but the process is neither unexpected nor chaotic.  A sober look at China’s economic transition will allow us to assess its impact on the country’s...

“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Pope Francis declared on his flight back to Rome last week.The political implications of his statement have been considered in some detail in recent days, but his assertion also needs to be examined in the light...

In the days and weeks ahead President Obama will face an important decision: whether to allow the conflict in Syria to escalate by approving Turkey’s and Saudi Arabia’s direct intervention, or to come to terms with the continued survival and expanding area of control of the government of Bashar al-Assad. Informed commentators note that this...

President Barack Obama’s Wednesday speech at the Islamic Society mosque in Baltimore, a venue tainted by a long history of preacing radicalism, summarizes his thinking about Islam and national security. That address has troubling implications and deserves detailed scrutiny. OBAMA: “[I]f we’re serious about freedom of religion—and I’m speaking now to my fellow Christians who...

The massive, overwhelmingly Muslim migrant onslaught on Europe is the most important event of 2015.  Its proportions are staggering.  The Babylonian captivity affected at most 75,000 Jews, and the Völkerwanderung of the late-Roman era numbered in the hundreds of thousands.  It is greater, in numbers within the time frame, than the Moorish, Mongol, or Turkish...

This year my winter retreat in Gran Canaria coincides with an unprecedented political crisis in Spain which may herald some trouble for the Brussels-based superstate. More than a month has passed since the inconclusive general election on December 20. It has marked the end of the decades-long duopoly enjoyed by the center-right People’s Party (Partido...

On New Year’s Eve 121 German women were subjected to sexual attacks, robbery and violence by “concentric rings” of a thousand Middle Eastern and African migrants in and around the central railway station in Cologne. Women and girls were surrounded, poked and jeered at as “whores” and even worse insults; their blouses were ripped and...

Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian Su-24 bomber over northwestern Syria on November 24 may be a game changer in that strategically positioned Middle Eastern country.  Various parties have been forced to declare their true agendas.  Strategic clarity is finally emerging, which is the precondition for an eventual solution—even though no solution is yet in...

“In some areas of the Middle East where church bells have rung for centuries on Christmas Day, this year they will be silent,” President Barack Obama said in a statement on December 23. “This silence bears tragic witness to the brutal atrocities committed against these communities by ISIL.” This is a misleading and hypocritical statement...

The “General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina” was negotiated at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995. It ended the Bosnian war and provided for a decentralized state comprised of two entities of roughly equal size: the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Serb Republic (Republika Srpska, RS). The General Framework Agreement, including...

With mathematically predictable precision, President Barack Hussein Obama declared that last Wednesday’s slaughter of 17 American attendees of a Christmas party by two Muslims in a community center in California, and the wounding of two-dozen others, was a mystery (“We don’t know the motives)—and that the U.S. needed stricter gun laws. It was a jihadist...

This year’s mid-fall was not pretty in Moscow, where I write this column.  Wind, drizzle, and early frost herald a long winter. It won’t be the winter of Russian discontent, however.  Western sanctions and low oil prices have harmed the economy—it contracted by 4.3 percent in the third quarter—but Putin’s approval rating is consistently well...

There is no single explanation for Turkey’s decision to shoot down a Russian SU-24 bomber over Syria on November 24. That it was shot over Syria (and did not merely fall inside Syria) is by now a matter of record, confirmed almost immediately by U.S. military sources: The United States believes that the Russian jet...

Over 8,000 migrants entered Serbia on November 11 on their way from the Middle East to Western Europe. The item went unreported by the major media because it was not newsworthy. Daily totals may vary, not much, as the Great Invasion of 2015 continues unabated. Millions are on the move, with unknown further multitudes tempted...

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took a gamble after his Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost its parliamentary majority last June 7: he would call another election, rather than let Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu look for a coalition partner in good faith. Contrary to most preditions, last Sunday the AKP regained its majority with 49%...

Last Tuesday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu caused a stir when he told the World Zionist Congress that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, inspired Hitler to proceed with the mass murder of European Jews during the Second World War. “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel...

Reports by various commissions of inquiry – national as well as international – into politically significant tragic events tend to be distorted by politics. The Dutch-led inquiry report into last year’s downing of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, released on October 13, is no exception. The British Lusitania Inquiry, chaired by Lord...

The Russian military intervention in Syria, and the creation of a new regional alliance which includes Iran and Iraq, removes one undesirable outcome from the complex equation. The collapse of the government in Damascus, and its replacement by some form of jihadist-dominated Sharia regime which would spell the end of the non-Sunni minorities (including Christians),...

For what was widely expected to be the grand finale of the Greek snap election campaign—the country’s seventh since 2012—I drove to Thessaloniki, 400 miles south of Belgrade. Greece’s marvellous second city of half a million prides itself on being the country’s cultural and artistic capital, and its diversified economy offers a broader cross-section of...

Even in his advanced age Henry Kissinger remains hugely influential, and the remnant of the realist school in Washington’s foreign policy establishment looks upon him as its part-guru, part-patriarch. His recent pronouncements are somewhat disappointing, however, and they reflect the confused state of the realist camp after many years of the neoconservative-neoliberal duopoly’s dominance. As...

Stratfor’s George Friedman published an interesting article on September 1, “Pondering Hitler’s Legacy,” to mark the 76th anniversary of the beginning of World War II. The first outcome of Hitler’s war, he says, was that it destroyed Europe’s hegemony over much of the world and its influence over the rest: Within 15 years of the...