Category: Web

Donald, listen, whatever you’ve done so far, whatever you’ve messed up, there’s one thing you could do that would make up for a lot. It would be huge! Terrific! It could change our world for the better in a big-league way! It could save us all from economic disaster! And it isn’t even hard to...

So: more police on the streets; better intelligence; better security arrangements; less nonsense when it comes to tolerance for the outrageous. The British are doing what they must and can to ward off future terrorist-related catastrophes. It may help. It will likely not do the job with anything close to the thoroughness that the situation...

On May 22, Salman Abedi, 22, waiting at the entrance of the Arianna Grande pop concert in Manchester, blew himself up, killing almost two dozen people, among them parents waiting to pick up their children. Saturday, three Islamic terrorists committed “suicide-by-cop,” using a van to run down pedestrians on London Bridge, and then slashing and...

From the October 1998 issue of Chronicles. When, after a stint in the British Army which left him crippled for life, Auberon Waugh went up to Oxford in 1959, by his own admission he knew nothing of the place apart from what he had read in his father’s novel, Brideshead Revisited, describing the Oxford of...

“We are there and we are committed” was the regular retort of Secretary of State Dean Rusk during the war in Vietnam. Whatever you may think of our decision to go in, Rusk was saying, if we walk away, the United States loses the first war in its history, with all that means for Southeast...

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...

From the July 2002 issue of Chronicles. I confess it: My television is always on.  I seldom watch the news, the talking heads, the public-spirited uplift, Masterpiece Theater, or the educational stuff.  No, I watch old movies.  Constantly. I watch them because they bring back the good old days.  I think, for instance, of a film...

Tolerant, kind, generous, forbearing—none of this you’d call our everyday Islamic mass murderer. One thing you may justly call him: discerning. He knows the stakes in the war on terror. He knows the degree to which the Christian, or semi-Christian, West makes impossible the realization of his ideals. Accordingly, he murders explicit Christians, as many...

By the time Air Force One started down the runaway at Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily, to bring President Trump home, the Atlantic had grown markedly wider than it was when he flew to Riyadh. In a Munich beer hall Sunday, Angela Merkel confirmed it. Europe must begin to look out for itself, she...

Last week saw two particularly grisly Islamic terror attacks of the type that have become all too common: 22 people, mostly children and teenagers, were killed after a bomb exploded at a pop concert in Manchester, England, and 28 Egyptian Copts, including young children, were massacred when ISIS ambushed their bus, which was taking them...

On Sept. 1, 1864, Union forces under Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, victorious at Jonesborough, burned Atlanta and began the March to the Sea where Sherman’s troops looted and pillaged farms and towns all along the 300-mile road to Savannah. Captured in the Confederate defeat at Jonesborough was William Martin Buchanan of Okolona, Mississippi, who was...

A remark one often hears from the current crop of film critics is that John Wayne might indeed merit the iconographic status conferred on him by tens of millions of ordinary cinemagoers around the world, were it not for the troubling matter of his alleged evasion of military service during World War II—an issue, it...

One of the sights that most amazed me as I approached the center of Moscow for the first time was a huge poster, stretched across the flat rooftop of a large building not far from the Kremlin, boldly advertising PHILIPS in large letters that needed no further explanation.  Not to be outdone by the famous...

Who is the real threat to the national security? Is it President Trump who shared with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov the intelligence that ISIS was developing laptop bombs to put aboard airliners? Or is it the Washington Post that ferreted out and published this code-word intelligence, and splashed the details on its front page, alerting...

Since Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, he has enjoyed only two brief periods of praise from a mainstream media that otherwise is working overtime to destroy him and his presidency. One of those periods commenced with his visit to Saudi Arabia, where he effectively reversed his campaign pledge to work with Russia to defeat...

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,...

“With the stroke of a pen, Rod Rosenstein redeemed his reputation,” writes Dana Milbank of the Washington Post. What had Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein done to be welcomed home by the Post like the prodigal son? Without consulting the White House, he sandbagged President Trump, naming a special counsel to take over the investigation of...

Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac On the heels of Donald Trump’s Oval Office visit with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other American and Russian officials, it finally seemed the fledgling US administration was turning the corner and making progress toward cooperation with Moscow against radical Islamic terrorism, particularly in Syria. Then the fake news came flying...

How U.S. Military Bases Back Dictators, Autocrats, and Military Regimes Much outrage has been expressed in recent weeks over President Donald Trump’s invitation for a White House visit to Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines, whose “war on drugs” has led to thousands of extrajudicial killings. Criticism of Trump was especially intense given his similarly...

Let us concede that President Donald Trump talks too much and—maybe especially—tweets too much. Let us concede the complexity of his explanation(s) for firing former FBI Director James Comey: Comey was doing a bad job; Trump always meant to; Trump relied on the deputy attorney general’s observations, etc., in whatever order you want to consider...

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, said Marx. On publication day of my memoir of Richard Nixon’s White House, President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. Instantly, the media cried “Nixonian,” comparing it to the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre. Yet, the differences are stark. The resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and...

From the June 1997 issue of Chronicles. I know it will strike many people as odd to call the current foreign policy of the United States a form of “empire building” or “imperialism,” and of course none of our leaders would ever call it that. They would prefer some such term as “peacekeeping” or “spreading democracy”...

For the World War II generation there was clarity. The attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec 7, 1941, united the nation as it had never been before—in the conviction that Japan must be smashed, no matter how long it took or how many lives it cost. After the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, however,...

Sing me back home with a song I used to hear Make all my memories come alive Take me away and turn back the years Sing me back home before I die Merle Haggard was a real American.  At its best, his music was folk art, Americana poetry, each song capturing a snapshot of his...

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...

The sullen self-righteousness of the progressive left (i.e., “We’re right, and the rest of you can go to the hot place!”) glows on college campuses everywhere but also in big cities—such as my beloved New Orleans, come to think of it: a locality embroiled in useless controversy over the removal of four Confederate-themed statues. City...

For two years, this writer has been consumed by two subjects. First, the presidency of Richard Nixon, in whose White House I served from its first day to its last, covered in my new book, Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. The second has been...

24 Key Issues That Neither the Washington Elite Nor the Media Consider Worth Their Bother Donald Trump’s election has elicited impassioned affirmations of a renewed commitment to unvarnished truth-telling from the prestige media. The common theme:  you know you can’t trust him, but trust us to keep dogging him on your behalf. The New York Times...

In December 1964, a Silver Age of American liberalism, to rival the Golden Age of FDR and the New Deal, seemed to be upon us. Barry Goldwater had been crushed in a 44-state landslide and the GOP reduced to half the size of the Democratic Party, with but 140 seats in the House and 32...

What is individualism? John Stuart Mill answered this question with a theory of rights. Mill looked for a “simple” theoretical principle that could distinguish the liberty of the individual from that of the state. Not only is there no such principle, but we miss the full character of individualism if we try to grasp it...

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...

The coming fight over tax reform highlights distinct and seemingly irreconcilable views of government. We might want to reflect on them, as the major players ready the armament: brass knuckles, baseball bats, Fox News and New York Times commentaries. The two warring views: 1. Government knows more than you do. 2. On many topics, you...

Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac Here’s an interesting hypothetical. Suppose the Trump Administration’s game of chicken with Pyongyang goes wrong. Suppose it results in the vaporization of a goodly portion of Seoul’s 10 million-plus population, not to mention almost all of the 28 thousand or so American troops in South Korea. It’s not an unrealistic scenario. Sure,...

Saturday’s White House Correspondents Association dinner exposed anew how far from Middle America our elite media reside. At the dinner, the electricity was gone, the glamor and glitz were gone. Neither the president nor his White House staff came. Even Press Secretary Sean Spicer begged off. The idea of a convivial evening together of our...

America’s War-Fighting Footprint in Africa Secret U.S. Military Documents Reveal a Constellation of American Military Bases Across That Continent General Thomas Waldhauser sounded a little uneasy. “I would just say, they are on the ground. They are trying to influence the action,” commented the chief of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) at a Pentagon press briefing in...

Has President Donald Trump outsourced foreign policy to the generals? So it would seem. Candidate Trump held out his hand to Vladimir Putin. He rejected further U.S. intervention in Syria other than to smash ISIS. He spoke of getting out and staying out of the misbegotten Middle East wars into which Presidents Bush II and...

Samuel Francis’s newest book, composed of 30 essays originally published in Chronicles between 1989 and 1996, is much more than a collection of articles about matters of passing concern. Rather it attests to Francis’s singular efforts in constructing a strategy by which Americans might recapture their nation from the decadent establishment now in power. He...

The multiple thousands who marched throughout America and the world last weekend hoped to whip up support for “Science.” Well. I’m sold. And what next? Do more than a handful of people doubt the indispensability of science to the enrichment of the human condition? Science’s God-given nature may, in these secularizing times, meet with less...

For the French establishment, Sunday’s presidential election came close to a near-death experience. As the Duke of Wellington said of Waterloo, it was a “damn near-run thing.” Neither candidate of the two major parties that have ruled France since Charles De Gaulle even made it into the runoff, an astonishing repudiation of France’s national elite....

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...

What follows is an attempt to portray not the typical statesman, as he repeatedly appeared in the course of Western history up to yesterday, but the average professional politician of our times, the man (or woman) whose chosen trade is to govern his (or her) fellow citizens. Any ruler must somehow be subordinate to the...

“You all start with the premise that democracy is some good. I don’t think it’s worth a damn. Churchill is right. The only thing to be said for democracy is that there is nothing else that’s any better. . . . “People say, ‘If the Congress were more representative of the people it would be...

What you end up with when the moral barriers topple is, not least, the end of due process at American colleges and universities. It’s a dreadful prospect you likely wouldn’t imagine without having scanned some of the stories on the rape crisis said to be spreading across American campuses. Supposedly, college women are at immense...

Independent Institute Research Fellow Allan C. Carlson is probably America’s top intellectually-serious social conservative thinker, as he has demonstrated over the years as former President of the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society and author of books such as The Family in America and The New Agrarian Mind. Dr. Carlson’s first essay in the...

“Why would I call China a currency manipulator when they are working with us on the North Korean problem?” tweeted President Donald Trump on Easter Sunday. Earlier, after discovering “great chemistry” with Chinese President Xi Jinping over “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake” at Mar-a-Lago, Trump had confided, “I explained . . . that...

A Rebel in Defense of Tradition is the title of Michael Wreszin’s 1994 biography of Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982). It is a very good title, by which I mean something more than a “handle”; it is a precise phrase, a summary properly affixed to the memory of an extraordinary man. The emphasis of Wreszin’s biography is...

“Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?)” Those are among Jesus’ last words on the Cross that first Good Friday. It was a cry of agony, but not despair. The dying Christ, to rise again in three days, was repeating the first words of the 22nd Psalm. And today,...

They call it Cascadia—a land of plunging waterfalls and snowcapped mountains, a mythical kingdom of towering trees and raging rivers. Here in Seattle, capital of this Arcadia, the sleekly modernistic Space Needle rises up against the backdrop of Mount Rainier, which dominates the horizon—a distinctly Cascadian juxtaposition of mountain and cityscape, forest and skyscraper, greenery...

The Editors are sorry to announce the departure of our longtime colleague and friend Scott P. Richert as executive editor of Chronicles.  Mr. Richert, who holds an M.A. in political theory from the Catholic University of America, came to us in 1996 from Piety Hill, the home of Scott’s late mentor Russell Kirk, in Mecosta,...

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...