Author: Srdja Trifkovic (Srdja Trifkovic)

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...

On August 24 the United States Mission to the United Nations published remarks by Samantha Power, the UN Ambassador, devoted to the mistreatment of homosexuals by the Islamic State. The key part of her statement reads as follows: “No religious beliefs justify throwing individuals off of buildings or stoning them to death because of who...

The Italian navy rescued 3,000 “migrants” aboard more than a dozen boats in the Mediterranean on Saturday. Like hundreds of thousands of others before them, they were taken to Europe for de facto permanent settlement. At the same time, any semblance of border control along the southeastern land route has collapsed. Thousands of migrants stormed...

American aid worker Kayla Mueller was regularly raped by the head of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in the months between her capture by ISIS in August 2013 and her death last February. The Western media have been quick to claim that the 26-year-old’s ordeal was due to a particularly perverted, un-Islamic ideology of...

Seventy years ago first Hiroshima, then Nagasaki, were obliterated. Three generations later the grand-strategic consequences of those events can be discerned with reasonable clarity. They are by no means uniformly bad. The claim that the destruction of two large cities and the killing of over two hundred thousand humans was justified in order to prevent...

The post-Maidan Ukrainian government is often criticized in Poland and Russia (a rare point of convergence) for indulging in historical revisionism over the controversial role of Stepan Bandera during the Second World War, and in particular for glossing over his followers’ slaughter of hundreds of thousands of eastern Poles, Jews, and other minorities in Galicia...

In his latest RT live interview (video; transcript) Srdja Trifkovic discusses the U.S. State Department’s decision to give its Human Rights Defenders Award to a Kyrgyz national, Azimzhan Askarov, who, as an ethnic Uzbek activist, in 2010 played an active role in Kyrgyz-Uzbek ethnic riots that shook the country. Askarov was arrested during the violence,...

“Truth and reason are eternal,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to Rev. Samuel Knox in 1810. “They have prevailed. And they will eternally prevail…” Jefferson was wrong. As the current media pack coverage of the 20th anniversary of the “Srebrenica massacre” indicates, his belief that “error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left to combat it” was...

The bohemian Left in Europe is as untrustworthy as the GOP “Right” in America when it comes to taking a tough, principled stand. As I have repeatedly predicted that it would do (here and here), the government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has caved in to EU creditors. The package he accepted after a marathon...

Last week I made a prediction that went against the media pack consensus, when I wrote on July 1 that the Greeks would vote “no” in last Sunday’s referendum. The banks had been closed for a week, cash withdrawals were limited to 60 euros ($66) a day, and they still did it. My assessment was...

Greece is now technically in default, having failed to pay its $1.8 bn monthly installment to the IMF which was due June 30. Contrary to the mainstream media treatment of the story, there will be no ripple effect and no major financial crisis. The Greeks are in dire straits, but their economy (the size of...

It’s taken over four years, tens of thousands of dollars, and a dozen trans-Atlantic trips… but my Kafkaesque ordeal north of the border is finally over. Having lost the initial case against me in September 2013, and the appeal on April 27 of this year, the government in Ottawa has missed the deadline for appeal...

There was only an en passant reference to Syria at the end of my analysis of Erdogan’s defeat three days ago. This subject deserves closer scrutiny. His controversial policy vis-à-vis Damascus now appears to have been a major factor in his defeat, and Turkey’s likely fine-tuning of her posture in the months ahead may have...

In a stunning blow to Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has lost its parliamentary majority for the first time in over 13 years. By curtailing Erdogan’s power, the results of the general election held last Sunday (June 7) are likely – at long last – to have some...

“Hasn’t US belligerence toward Russia – particularly on the Ukrainian situation – given rise to closer Sino-Russian cooperation to counter the US?,” Harry Colin asked in response to my latest article. My answer is a heavily qualified “yes.” Russia and China have upgraded their strategic partnership over the past year and a half, but they...

The South China Sea (SCS) is fast becoming one of the key geopolitical battlegrounds of our time. China’s systematic, rapid and large-scale island-building campaign has suddenly altered the strategic equation in “Asia’s Mediterranean.” It has also presented Washington with a long-term strategic dilemma in the Western Pacific. There are literally dozens of disputed islands, atolls,...

The Islamic State (IS, aka ISIS/ISIL) advances on a major Iraqi city, and Baghdad’s forces – while outnumbering and outgunning the attackers – flee in utter disarray. Last June it was Mosul. Exactly eleven months later, last Sunday, it was Ramadi. A year of sustained U.S. effort to make the Iraqi army a viable fighting...

The war in Europe ended 70 years ago today. It was the most destructive conflict in human history, but it was not the most important. In metahistorical terms it was but the second round of Europe’s extended suicide which started at the height of the Old Continent’s economic, scientific and civilizational achievement in July 1914....

The desert kingdom fundamentally depends on continued theocratic oppression at home – kept manageable by carefully crafted redistributive schemes – and on U.S. support abroad. Its survival is helped by the deep divide between different would-be heirs to the kleptocratic regime. To put it succinctly, there are some Islamists opposed to the royal thieves in...

The Saudi military intervention in Yemen was launched, according to Riyadh, to “restore the legitimate government” and protect the “Yemeni constitution and elections.” This sudden desire to fight for constitutions and elections sounds odd, coming from an absolute monarchy which is consistently combating efforts at democratization at home or in its neighborhood. As Ali Alahmed,...

Saudi Arabia has been dominating the Middle Eastern news recently. Its bombing of the Shia Houthis in Yemen, supported by Washington, and its ambivalent stand on ISIS, concealed in Washington, should raise questions about the nature and long-term ambitions of the desert kingdom. On those key issues there is an apparent conspiracy of silence in...

It is idle to pretend: Hillary R. Clinton will be the next president. A nation capable of electing, and then re-electing, Barack Hussein Obama is perfectly ready to make the most influential woman in the world the most powerful person on this planet. The math is on her side (and let us not imagine that...

On a recent trip to Germany I took a day off to visit Sigmaringen, on the upper Danube some 20 miles north of Lake Constance. This town of ten thousand with a massive castle towering over it – or, more precisely, this castle with a town attached – interested me as the site of a...

Eleven years ago I wrote a column for the print edition of Chronicles under this title. Tom Piatak’s grim reminder of the continued destructive presence of this cabal in what passes for the commentariat in today’s America has prompted me to dig into my old files and recap for our readers the historical and ideological...

American aircraft went into action against Islamic State positions in Tikrit on March 25 in direct support of a stalled Iraqi offensive. The following day General Lloyd Austin, top commander in the Middle East, told Congress that he would like his forces to protect the Syrian “moderate” rebels who are currently trained and armed by...

Following the horrendous terrorist attack in Tunis, it is inevitable that I am reminded of my week-long Chronicles assignment to Tunisia in September 2012. In view of the carnage that left 20 Western tourists dead on March 18, it is worth revisiting my notes posted in the immediate aftermath of that trip. “I covered some...

Even a seasoned cynic sometimes gasps in disbelief. “President Putin misinterprets much of what the U.S. is doing or trying to do,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told a press conference in Geneva on March 2. “We are not involved in ‘numerous color revolutions’ as he asserts. In the case of Ukraine, such assumptions...

In his speech to Congress on March 3 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented a straightforward, simple, and extreme position on Iran’s nuclear program: there is to be none, or else there should be war. He does not want that program kept limited to civilian purposes, or internationally supervised; he wants it eliminated totally, permanently,...

With the fall of Debaltsevo some interesting military-technical questions are starting to emerge. Is the Ukrainian general staff grossly incompetent, or outright treasonous?  “A colonel is a rank,” says my source, a former general officer of a NATO-affiliated army, “but a general is a clinical diagnosis.”  Ever since Hannibal’s masterful double-pincer maneuver at Cannae it...

There are two incompatible narratives on the meaning of last Saturday’s agreement in Minsk. There is also, as usual, the complex reality which the partisans of the warring sides refuse to recognize, and which escapes the attention of major Western media commentators. The Ukrainian nationalists accused Petro Poroshenko of surrendering to Putin. Kiev’s New Times...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande came to Moscow last Friday night to discuss the outline of what was heralded as their peace plan for Ukraine. They spent five hours talking to President Vladimir Putin, but left for the security conference in Munich early Saturday without making a breakthrough. Their effort will...

The intention of Charlie Hebdo’s surviving editors in publishing another provocative front-page cartoon a week after the attack, this time of a teary Muhammad holding a Je suis Charlie placard under the words Tout est pardonné (“All Is Forgiven”), is obscure and unimportant. One thing is clear, however: the historical Muhammad would never shed tears...

Lt. Col. Dr. Mark Obrtel is a 48 year old officer of the army of the Czech Republic who has served with distinction in his country’s missions under NATO command in the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. We would never know of him were it not for the fact that on December 30 he returned all...

This random collection requires a strong stomach. Let’s start with The New York Times (January 9): “M. Steven Fish, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, sought to quantify the correlation between Islam and violence . . . ‘Is Islam violent? I would say absolutely not,’ Mr. Fish said in an interview. ‘There...

“You can feel that this can’t continue,” Michel Houellebecq declared two weeks ago following the publication of his novel Soumission, imagining a Muslim-ruled France a decade from now. “Something has to change. I don’t know what, but something.” The carnage in Paris on January 7 has the potential, slim yet real, to trigger off that...

France is going to be transformed after today’s horror, or France will die. Having spent the holiday season in the South of France I can aver with some authority that the plutocrats are worried. They know that the chattering classes in the nation’s capital – led by the idiots of Bernard Henri Levy’s ilk –...

It is futile to make any but short-term predictions on world affairs: there are just too many variables in the equation, too many unknown-unknowns. The escalation of the Ukrainian crisis and the rise in U.S.-Russian tensions could have been forecast a year ago, in general terms at least, but the explosive rise of ISIS could...

“It is obvious that the elites of the West – U.S. government, the EU, NATO and the banking interests wish to overthrow Putin and his government and open Russia to ideological, economic and material exploitation,” a perceptive reader commented on my December 19 posting. “It is obvious that there are factions deep within the Russian...

In the latest issue of the Russian magazine Russkiy Mir (“Russian World,” December 10) our foreign affairs editor considers the implications of the crisis in Ukraine for Russia’s geostratigic position in the years to come. (Translated from Russian by the author) In Ukraine the United States presented Russia with its most serious challenge in the...

President Putin’s announcement in Turkey last week that Russia was cancelling the $45bn South Stream gas pipeline project has caused havoc in southeastern Europe. Political leaders in the countries most adversely affected by this decision, Serbia and Hungary, have tried to keep a brave face, expressing hope that it may be revived some time in...