Category: Web

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...

Donald Trump’s inaugural address was a powerful, straightforward articulation of American nationalism: “At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens. . . . From this day forward, a new vision will govern this land. From this moment on, it’s going to be America First. Every...

“Don’t Make Any Sudden Moves” is the advice offered to the new president by Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations, which has not traditionally been known as a beer hall of populist beliefs. Haass meant the president should bring his National Security Council together to anticipate the consequences before tearing up the Iran...

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...

With Donald Trump soon to be inaugurated President of the United States, I can put forward what I see as the central factor in his victory. It is masculinity. Trump is a condottiere, a soldier of fortune like Bartolomeo Colleoni whose statue by Verrocchio still stands in the Venetian square bearing his name. It is...

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...

Since World War II, the two men who have most terrified this city by winning the presidency are Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. And they have much in common. Both came out of the popular culture, Reagan out of Hollywood, Trump out of a successful reality TV show. Both possessed the gifts of showmen—extraordinarily valuable...

“Fake news!” roared Donald Trump, the work of “sick people.” The president-elect was referring to a 35-page dossier of lurid details of his alleged sexual misconduct in Russia, worked up by a former British spy. A two-page summary of the 35 pages had been added to Trump’s briefing by the CIA and FBI—and then leaked...

According to an article in Forbes (November 16, 2016), “Mexico aside, [Latin America] barely featured at all in the presidential campaign. This overall situation will largely remain the same under the Trump administration.” The first sentence is a truism (when has Latin America, as such, ever “featured” in a U.S. presidential election?), and the second...

Though every Republican in Congress voted against the Iran nuclear deal, “Tearing it up . . . is not going to happen,” says Sen. Bob Corker, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Hopefully, the chairman speaks for the president-elect. During the campaign, Donald Trump indicated as much, saying that, though the U.S. got jobbed in...

By Edward Lozansky and Jim Jatras Departing presidents tend to fade from public consciousness surprisingly quickly once they leave office. Most at least have the good grace to assume a low profile on their way out to give their successors room to launch. Not Barack Obama though. The closing weeks of his tenure have seen...

“As we begin 2017, the most urgent threat to liberal democracy is not autocracy,” writes William Galston of the Wall Street Journal, “it is illiberal democracy.” Galston’s diagnosis is not wrong, and his alarm is not misplaced. Yet why does America’s great export, liberal democracy, which appeared to be the future of the West if...

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...

In retaliation for the hacking of John Podesta and the DNC, Barack Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats and ordered closure of their country houses on Long Island and Maryland’s Eastern shore. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that 35 U.S. diplomats would be expelled. But Vladimir Putin stepped in, declined to retaliate at all, and invited...

Donald Trump has a new best friend. “President-elect Trump, thank you for your warm friendship and your clear-cut support of Israel,” gushed Bibi Netanyahu, after he berated John Kerry in a fashion that would once have resulted in a rupture of diplomatic relations. Netanyahu accused Kerry of “colluding” in and “orchestrating” an anti-Israel, stab-in-the-back resolution...

Did the community organizer from Harvard Law just deliver some personal payback to the IDF commando? So it would seem. By abstaining on that Security Council resolution declaring Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem illegal and invalid, raged Bibi Netanyahu, President Obama “failed to protect Israel in this gang-up at the UN,...

Are you sick of winning yet? I’m not! And one of the biggest winners is Chronicles Magazine. While one of the biggest losers is National Review, a shadow of its former self, the great magazine I grew up with in the 1960s to the 1980s. NR besmirched itself by attacking Trump all along, especially its February...

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...

The never-Trumpers are never going to surrender the myth that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the hacking of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee to defeat Clinton and elect Donald Trump. Their investment in the myth is just too huge. For Clinton and her campaign, it is the only way...

The Democrats’ hissy fit over the Trump election victory continues, with the usual suspects piling on with claims that the Kremlin hacked the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign’s e-mails in order to help Trump get elected. Obama’s deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes, upped the ante by claiming that Putin personally directed the...

Translated excerpts from Srdja Trifkovic’s latest interview with the RTRS (the Bosnian-Serb Republic public media service). [Video] Q: There’s a whole host of generals among Trump’s appointees. Is he creating a junta? ST: First of all, we should differentiate between political generals and true soldiers. Men like Wesley Clark and Colin Powell, or even David Petraeus,...

In this world, it is often dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, said Henry Kissinger in 1968, but to be a friend is fatal. The South Vietnamese would come to appreciate the insight. So it is today with Aleppo, where savage reprisals against U.S.-backed rebels are taking place in that hellhole of...

When word leaked that Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, a holder of the Order of Friendship award in Putin’s Russia, was Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of state, John McCain had this thoughtful response: “Vladimir Putin is a thug, a bully, and a murderer and anybody else who describes him as anything else is lying.” Yet,...

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...

The wailing and keening over the choice of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the EPA appears to be a lead indicator of a coming revolution far beyond Reagan’s. “Trump Taps Climate Skeptic For Top Environmental Post,” said the Wall Street Journal. “Climate Change Denial,” bawled a disbelieving New York Times, which urged the...

On Sunday, I got to hear a wonderful Christmas concert by the Cleveland Orchestra. Particular highlights included the three carol medleys performed by the Orchestra: Robert Wendel’s “Christmas a la Valse,” Malcolm Arnold’s “Fantasy on Christmas Carols,” and Leroy Anderson’s “A Christmas Festival.” There was nothing incongruous about one of the world’s premier orchestras playing...

During the campaign for the presidency, the major media were relentless in their attacks on Donald Trump. Reading the Washington Post daily I couldn’t believe the news coverage. It was one anti-Trump story after another. The reporters didn’t even bother to disguise what clearly were opinion pieces, passing them off as news. “Racist,” “sexist,” “anti-Semite”—these...

Like a bolt of lightning, that call of congratulations from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen to President-elect Donald Trump illuminated the Asian landscape. We can see clearly now the profit and loss statement from more than three decades of accommodating and appeasing China, since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger made their historic journey in 1972. What...

Last week I attended a legal conference hosted by a well-positioned law firm with many significant corporate clients. What I heard there was surprising, and encouraging. An expert on tax policy declared that Trump had been substantially right about trade, and that Paul Ryan’s tax reform package contained provisions that could, and maybe even would,...

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...

As I wrote on the Day After the Election, it is incumbent upon America’s Deplorables not to sit idly by, content with a mere victory in a presidential contest, as if suddenly all of our problems are solved.  The rabid mainstream media, still licking its wounds, is working 24/7 to undermine any agenda item that...

Excerpts from Srdja Trifkovic’s latest Sputnik Radio interview, in which he comments on the findings of a new poll which indicates that an increasing number of Europeans want their countries to leave the European Union. More than half (53%) of the respondents in Italy said they would like their government to hold a referendum on...

“I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler’s government—by the planners of the New World Order,” FDR told the nation in his Navy Day radio address of Oct. 27, 1941. “It is a map of South America as Hitler proposes to reorganize it. The geographical experts of Berlin, however, have...

During the presidential campaign Donald Trump horrified the bipartisan foreign policy mandarinate by suggesting that NATO was “obsolete” and useless against the only real threat faced by Europe: the massive influx of violent Muslims applauded by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the “EuSSR” bureaucracy in Brussels, and the Obama Administration. Trump also indicated that America’s treaty...

Now that the British have voted to secede from the European Union and America has chosen a president who has never before held public office, the French appear to be following suit. In Sunday’s runoff to choose a candidate to face Marine Le Pen of the National Front in next spring’s presidential election, the center-right...

Another “lone wolf” Muslim has committed an act of terrorism on an American campus, ramming a crowd with a vehicle before slashing fellow-students with a butcher knife and receiving a fatal bullet for his reward.  Fittingly, the New York Times, in reporting this barbarous and outrageous crime at Ohio State University, devoted three paragraphs to...

What has become of poets and prose-stylists, essayists and novelists, composers and painters, philosophers and theologians, in this poststructuralist era, when everything (especially art) has been politicized and monetized? In this, our late-stage, moribund, materialist “sensate culture,” in which thought itself is a commodity? Is there any value to be found in an essay, a...

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...

Donald Trump’s election triumph is among the more astonishing in history. Yet if he wishes to become the father of a new “America First” majority party, he must make good on his solemn promise: To end the trade deficits that have bled our country of scores of thousands of factories, and to create millions of...

After a week managing the transition, vice president-elect Mike Pence took his family out to the Broadway musical “Hamilton.” As Pence entered the theater, a wave of boos swept over the audience. And at the play’s end, the Aaron Burr character, speaking for the cast and the producers, read a statement directed at Pence: “(W)e...

by Edward Lozansky and Jim Jatras With the defeat of Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump, we may never know how close America and all mankind came to nuclear war. Driven by the globalist agenda of the “indispensable” neoconservatives and liberal-interventionists calling the shots in a Clinton administration, it would have been only a matter of...

Speaking in Greece on his valedictory trip to Europe as president, Barack Obama struck a familiar theme: “(W)e are going to have to guard against a rise in a crude form of nationalism, or ethnic identity, or tribalism that is built around an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ . . . “(T)he future of humanity and...

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...

However Donald Trump came upon the foreign policy views he espoused, they were as crucial to his election as his views on trade and the border. Yet those views are hemlock to the GOP foreign policy elite and the liberal Democratic interventionists of the Acela Corridor. Trump promised an “America First” foreign policy rooted in...

Among those surprised by Donald Trump’s resounding victory was my old nemesis at National Review, Kevin Williamson. “Well, that was unexpected,” wrote the rag’s “roving correspondent,” whose roving didn’t uncover the obvious and overwhelming groundswell of support out there in the Real America for the real estate baron. You might recall my Chronicles blog post...

There are at least three striking facts in Mr. Trump’s election. First there is the geographic distribution of voters: Roughly speaking the East and West coasts voted against Mr. Trump. Then there is the charge leveled at him: He’s a “populist,” whereas Mrs. Clinton is a faithful democrat (no pun intended), a charge supported by...

The Washington Post, which spent the election doing all it could to stop Donald Trump from becoming president, is now reporting something that happened only because Donald Trump became president: the Trans-Pacific Partnership is dead. The Post story quotes Chuck Schumer, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell, and notes that “Trump’s rise has decimated support for...

“In victory, magnanimity!” said Winston Churchill. Donald Trump should be magnanimous and gracious toward those whom he defeated this week, but his first duty is to keep faith with those who put their faith in him. The protests, riots and violence that have attended his triumph in city after city should only serve to steel...

As regards the recent battle between the Entitled and the Deplorable, I’m thrilled that Hillary Clinton lost but mildly terrified that Donald Trump won.  Ms. Clinton would have established an administration dedicated to prosecuting war in the Middle East, beginning with Syria followed by who knows what other provinces of the ongoing Arab nightmare. She’d...

I am one of those who has hoped for a Trump victory since he announced his intention to run in the Republican primary. It was simple. He came out forcefully on the issue of immigration, which normally caused Republican candidates to be struck dumb and blind. We here in California have seen the deleterious effects...