For a president who won his office by denouncing the Middle East wars into which George W. Bush and Barack Obama plunged the nation, Donald Trump has assembled the most unabashedly hawkish conclave of foreign policy advisers in memory. And he himself seems to concede the point. If foreign policy were decided by my security...
From the October 1986 issue of Chronicles. “The obscurest epoch is today.” —Robert Louis Stevenson Taken together, these three books serve nicely as a kind of group portrait of Clio and her several faces. In reverse order we have the historian as diarist and memoirist, as documentarian, and as reflective sage. As one of the...
What is it about special counsel Robert Mueller that he cannot say clearly and concisely what he means? His nine-minute summary of the findings of his office, after two years of investigation, was a mess. It guarantees that the internecine warfare that has poisoned our politics continues into 2020. If it was the intention of...
From the June 1988 issue of Chronicles. The Present Age begins with the First World War, the Great War as it is deservedly still known. No war ever began more jubilantly, among all classes and generations, the last including the young generation that had to fight it. It is said that when Viscount Grey, British...
The trouble with last week’s elections for the European Parliament is that its results offer grounds for widely different interpretations of their meaning. Too many glasses are half-full or half-empty. One thing is certain: the upsurge of Euroskeptic, sovereignist-identitarian parties – feared by some, hoped for by others – has not materialized. The EU is...
“Thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting.” The verdict on Theresa May is the same as that on Belshazzar. The Book of Daniel records other similarities: Belshazzar’s Feast uncannily foreshadows the Buckingham Palace banquet in which President Trump will be entertained, along with the still-in-office Prime Minister who steps down as Leader...
After a stroke felled Woodrow Wilson during his national tour to save his League of Nations, an old rival, Sen. Albert Fall, went to the White House to tell the president, “I have been praying for you, Sir.” To which Wilson is said to have replied, “Which way, Senator?” Historians are in dispute as to...
“Pass me the can, lad; there’s an end of May.” A.E. Housman, in a different key, has the right words for a nation celebrating the exit of Theresa May. The impossible dream has come to pass, and the worst Prime Minister in living memory—the competition is stiff, including Edward Heath and John Major—has at last...
“Regardless of their doom, / The little victims play.” All eyes are on the impending fall of Theresa May, whose tragedy is hyperbolically termed “Shakespearean” by scribes who are yet to acquaint themselves with more than his titles. We are not looking at a Lear, or Othello, or Coriolanus. The failure of May is on...
The hour of Boris is at hand. He has been in backbench exile since last July, when he resigned as Foreign Secretary. He could not take Theresa May’s preposterous Chequers Agreement, and gave up the glories of Chevening. (How many of us could bear to part with a fine country house, said to be designed...
A week from today, Europeans may be able to gauge how high the tide of populism and nationalism has risen within their countries and on their continent. For all the returns will be in from three days of elections in the 28 nations represented in the European Parliament. Expectation: Nationalists and populists will turn in...
Donald Trump won in November 2016 in part because he had promised to turn a new leaf in America’s global engagements. Three years ago he spoke against his opponent’s imperial delusions, voiced doubt about the utility of NATO, expressed certainty that he’d find a common language with Putin (declaring Crimea none of our business), promised...
From the August 1989 issue of Chronicles. A nation lives by its myths and heroes. Many societies have survived defeat and invasion, even political and economic collapse. None has survived the corruption of the picture it has of itself. High art and popular art are not in competition here. Both may and do help citizens...
Speaking on state TV of the prospect of a war in the Gulf, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei seemed to dismiss the idea. “There won’t be any war. . . . We don’t seek a war, and (the Americans) don’t either. They know it’s not in their interests.” The ayatollah’s analysis—a war is in neither...
From the December 1992 issue of Chronicles. To study any vital religion is to address, as a matter of hypothesis, a striking example of how people explain to themselves who they are as a social entity. Religion as a powerful force in human culture is realized in society, not only or even mainly in theology....
As his limo carried him to work at the White House Monday, Larry Kudlow could not have been pleased with the headline in the Washington Post: “Kudlow Contradicts Trump on Tariffs.” The story began: “National Economic Council Director Lawrence Kudlow acknowledged Sunday that American consumers end up paying for the administration’s tariffs on Chinese imports,...
When long-time Chronicles contributor John Lukacs died on May 6, the country lost one of its finest adopted sons, who was also one of its finest writers and historians. The scope and extent of his work defies summary—he published over three dozen books between 1953 and 2017 on a wide-ranging list of subjects, including: the...
A new round in the U.S.-China trade dispute has started in earnest. Last Sunday (May 5) President Donald Trump tweeted that he would raise the current 10 percent tariff on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports to 25 percent. The President doubled down on his trade war threats with China early today (May 10), just hours after last...
In 2003, George W. Bush took us to war to liberate Iraq from the despotism of Saddam Hussein and convert that nation into a beacon of freedom and prosperity in the Middle East. Tuesday, Mike Pompeo flew clandestinely into Baghdad, met with the prime minister and flew out in four hours. The visit was kept...
From the September 1986 issue of Chronicles. “I am rich in letters. . . . “ —Horace Walpole Alexis de Tocqueville was an immensely prolific writer. His friend Gustave de Beaumont wrote that “for one volume he published he wrote ten; and the notes he cast aside as intended only for himself would have served...
Last week, it was Venezuela in America’s gun sights. “While a peaceful solution is desirable, military action is possible,” thundered Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. “If that’s what is required, that’s what the United States will do.” John Bolton tutored Vladimir Putin on the meaning of the Monroe Doctrine: “This is our hemisphere. It’s not...
Over the first three issues of this year Chronicles presented an illuminating series of essays by executive editor Aaron Wolf. Titled “Ignoble Savages,” this three-part work took as its starting point the venomous, even celebratory reaction of much of the secular West to the slaughter of a Christian missionary who had sailed to North Sentinel...
“Who would be free themselves must strike the blow… “By their right arms the conquest must be wrought.” So wrote Lord Byron of Greece’s war of independence against the Turks, though the famed British poet would ignore his own counsel and die just days after arriving in Greece to join the struggle. Yet Byron’s advice...
The crisis in Venezuela, instigated and stage-managed by the mighty interventionist clique within the Trump Administration, presents in a distilled form the neoconservative global repertoire. Its key traits are mendacity, arrogance, contempt for all legal and moral norms, bloodlust, avarice, and disregard for any rationally based understanding of the American interest. On Tuesday morning Venezuelan...
President Donald Trump has decided to cease cooperating with what he sees, not incorrectly, as a Beltway conspiracy that is out to destroy him. “We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” Trump said Wednesday. “These aren’t, like, impartial people. The Democrats are out to win in 2020.” Thus the Treasury Department just breezed by a deadline from...
Chronicles has suffered a tragic loss: on Easter Sunday, executive editor Aaron Wolf died of a sudden heart attack. He was a man of abounding goodness as father, husband, and Christian. Readers of Chronicles know that he was also a tenacious defender of our civilization and the lives of the unborn and most vulnerable. He...
The headlines were familiar, The New York Times setting the tone: “In Attacking Ilhan Omar, Trump Revives His Familiar Refrain Against Muslims.” According to the media pack the President is seeking to rally his base by reviving allegedly “Islamophobic” themes of his 2016 campaign. His detractors notably ignore the question what exactly is the message...
The release of the Mueller report has left Democrats in a dilemma. For consider what Robert Mueller concluded after two years of investigation. Candidate Donald Trump did not conspire or collude with the Russians to hack the emails of the DNC or John Podesta. Trump did not distribute the fruits of those crimes. Nor did...
“The Liberal Mind” might seem a large subject. In practice, it is not. It is defined through the words and actions of its believers, who operate within a tight compass, not quite hermetically sealed but near enough. We can re-construct a corpus of the Liberal belief-system from a few skeleton remains. Here are some bones...
When a gunman murdered 50 Muslims at prayer in New Zealand, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton forthrightly expressed their solidarity with “the Muslim community.” New Zealand’s Prime Minister went even further, donning a hijab and leading her countrymen in paroxysms of guilt over their supposed “Islamophobia,” even though the shooter was not a New...
From the December 1986 issue of Chronicles. The most widely known of Merseyside philosophers was never a full-time academic. But he gave classes for the Workers Educational Association from 1912, extra-mural lectures on philosophy from the 20’s, gained his Ph.D. in Liverpool in 1925 (in philosophical psychology), and was an active and famous philosopher till...
The emotional outpouring prompted by news of the fire at Notre Dame de Paris has been extraordinary. It has been marked by both depth and breadth, prompting myriad expressions of concern for the fate of Paris’ venerable cathedral and affecting Catholics and non-Catholics, those who live in France and those who don’t, those who have...
“(T)here is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” said Hamlet, who thereby raised some crucial questions: Is moral truth subjective? Does it change with changing times and changing attitudes? Or is there a higher law, a permanent law, God’s law, immutable and eternal, to which man’s law should conform? Are, for...
“We shall not go to Canossa!” declared more than one eminent German statesman. Theresa May loves Canossa, and cannot stay away from the place. For her the Castle of Canossa is the Europa Building in Brussels, whence she has just returned from another fruitless quest for mercy from the European Union. I see in my...
Julian Assange’s arrest inside the embassy of Ecuador in London would not have been possible had that country’s government not authorized the British police to enter its theoretically sovereign territory. The lesson is clear: if you plan to seek asylum in a foreign embassy, you should be careful to choose the diplomatic premises of a...
On Monday, President Donald Trump designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, the first time the United States has designated part of another nation’s government as such a threat. Iran’s Supreme National Security Council responded by declaring U.S. Central Command a terrorist group. With 5,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and 2,000 in Syria,...
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac On March 31 the first round of Ukraine’s presidential election was held. In line with all polls, the top spot (with about 30 percent of the vote) was taken by Volodymyr Zelensky, a comic actor who played President of Ukraine in a popular TV series, making him the leading candidate for the...
From the July 1987 issue of Chronicles. “I once voted at a presidential election. There being no real issue at stake, I cast my vote for Jefferson Davis of Mississippi. I knew Jeff was dead, but I voted on Artemus Ward’s principle that if we can’t have a live man who amounts to anything, by...
During an Iowa town hall last week, “Beto” O’Rourke, who had pledged to raise the level of national discourse, depicted President Donald Trump’s rhetoric as right out of Nazi Germany. Trump “describes immigrants as ‘rapists’ and ‘criminals'” and as “‘animals’ and ‘an infestation,'” said Beto. “Now, I might expect someone to describe another human being...
In the new Democratic Party, where women and people of color are to lead, and the white men are to stand back, the presidential field has begun to sort itself out somewhat problematically. According to a Real Clear Politics average of five polls between mid-March and April 1, four white men—Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, “Beto”...
Our southern border is being overwhelmed by waves of “migrants” and interior immigration enforcement has collapsed, as the president continues to threaten closing the border. Trump has made plenty of threats before, threats about halting the “caravans,” making Mexico pay for a border wall, forcing “migrants” to wait in Mexico, and refusing to sign any...
Twenty years ago the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, led by the United States, waged a relentless 78-day bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, consisting of Serbia and Montenegro (March 24-June 10, 1999). This act of naked illegal aggression marked a significant turning point, not only for America and NATO but also for everyone...
From the September 1991 issue of Chronicles. Eleanor Roosevelt and I go way back. My father taught me to read from a stack of her “My Day” columns in 1940. We happened to have a plentiful supply of “My Day” in the house because the doctor had refused to be responsible for my reactionary grandmother’s...
When Donald Trump meets with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg today, the president should give him a direct message: The roster of NATO membership is closed. For good. The United States will not hand out any more war guarantees to fight Russia to secure borders deep in Eastern Europe, when our own southern border is...
Last night’s quip went round the country: “Theresa May fell on her sword—but missed.” She is indeed, like Charles II, an unconscionable time dying. That monarch however went on—though not for long—to say that he hoped they would excuse it. No such hope for May: she is already arraigned at the bar of public opinion...
As the Democratic Party quarrels over reparations for slavery, a new and related issue has arisen, raised by the president of Mexico. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has written Pope Francis I and King Felipe VI to demand their apologies for the Spanish conquest of Mexico that began 500 years ago with the “invasion” of Hernando...
From the October 2001 issue of Chronicles. A fish starts rotting from the head, it is said. That a society starts rotting from its head needs to be much better understood. Blaming the decline of Western society on a “revolt of the masses” absolves elites, who must bear the brunt of the blame. Catering to...
Now that the Russian Collusion Myth has been revealed to be a mendacious conspiracy by the Deep State, the Democratic Party and the media, President Donald Trump needs to move on with his election promise to improve relations with Moscow. That is a geopolitical and civilizational necessity. It is essential to note that the same...
“The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia . . . to influence the 2016 US presidential campaign.” So stated Attorney General William Barr in his Sunday letter to Congress summarizing the principal findings of the Mueller report. On the charge of...
From the July 1989 issue of Chronicles. I never exchanged a word with Richard Weaver. I knew him because he was a figure at the University of Chicago. I heard that he was a teacher who expected his students to meet a high standard of intellectual probity and rigor; I think that he expected the...