Since China devalued its currency 3 percent, global markets have gone into a tailspin. Why should this be? After all, 3 percent devaluation in China could be countered by a U.S. tariff of 3 percent on all goods made in China, and the tariff revenue used to cut U.S. corporate taxes. The crisis in world...
780 search results for: Ukraine
Left and Right in Eastern Europe
Not much can be understood about the new role of the political left and right in Eastern Europe without taking into account two fundamental factors, generally ignored by both critical and enthusiastic observers of the post-1990 years. One is the historic trauma of the five-century-old division of Europe into two halves, effected by the Turkish...
Silvio Berlusconi: An Italian Saga
Berlusconi was a singular phenomenon in Italian politics, a revolutionary and explosive blend of dynamic innovation and respect for tradition. With his death, a major chapter in the history of the Italian Republic comes to a close.
Orwell in Chains
George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” remains a lighthouse, the beam sweeping past the scene for a moment of blinding illumination before passing on to darkness. Though Orwell enjoined us against cliché, Hamlet’s “More honoured in the breach than the observance” applies: Everybody lauds Orwell, but few appear to have read him. And of...
The Way Our World Ends
“This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper,” wrote T.S. Eliot in the closing couplet of “The Hollow Men.” Eliot’s poem was written after the Great War of 1914-1918 had carried off 9 million soldiers, wounded twice as many more, brought down the Romanov, Hohenzollern and Habsburg empires, and ushered...
Gelded Europeans
From 1979 to 1982, I was a Russian linguist stationed in Frankfurt, West Germany, with the 533rd Combat Electronic Warfare Intelligence (CEWI) Battalion, part of the 3rd Armored Division. If a war had come, assuming we hadn’t been nuked right away, we would have deployed within hours northeast to the Fulda Gap to listen to...
Breakup of the West?
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...
Rummy Reduced
Had President George W. Bush fired Donald Rumsfeld a month before, rather than a day after, November 7, the Republican Party could have retained control of both houses. Still, doing it late is better than not doing it at all. Rumsfeld was a liability and an embarrassment, the embodiment of all that went wrong in...
George H.W. Bush: An honest obituary
Praise, not precision, carries the day when a significant figure dies. But the eulogies extolling George H.W. Bush have so surpassed his performance that we run the risk of distorting historical reality. There is, no doubt, much to praise in the character of the forty-first president. George Bush served courageously in World War II. He...
Allies on the Transatlantic Right
Conservative nationalists in Europe face the same uphill struggle against the dominant left as do their American counterparts.
The Dangerous Myth of Human Rights
Even if I had done all the things the prosecution says I did, I would still not be guilty of any crime, because I am fighting against colonialism. We have heard such arguments in recent years from a variety of sources: IRA bombers, African National Congress supporters (bishops and necklacers), and Marxist rebels all over...
A Report from Europe: There is Hope
A quiet majority of Europeans who do not cherish self-annihilation are waking up.
Our Pushover President
Our Pushover President by Patrick J. Buchanan • November 24, 2009 • Printer-friendly “This state visit is . . . a terrible mistake,” said Rep. Eliot Engel, chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. “He is illegitimate with his own people, and Brazil is now going to give him the air of legitimacy...
Patching It Up With Putin
President Donald Trump flew off for his first meeting with Vladimir Putin—with instructions from our foreign policy elite that he get into the Russian president’s face over his hacking in the election of 2016. Hopefully, Trump will ignore these people. For their record of failure is among the reasons Americans elected him to office. What...
The Mind of Mr. Putin
“Do you realize now what you have done?” So Vladimir Putin in his U.N. address summarized his indictment of a U.S. foreign policy that has produced a series of disasters in the Middle East that we did not need the Russian leader to describe for us. Fourteen years after we invaded Afghanistan, Afghan troops are...
Don’t Tread on Us
In the closing days of 1993 two familiar specters, recently absent from our nightmares, returned to haunt the global consciousness: the Russian bear, in the person of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the Yellow Peril, in the form of North Korea. There were, of course, other bugbears to frighten the children of democracy—the parade of new Hitlers...
Joe Biden: Impeachment’s First Casualty
Even before seeing the transcript of the July 25 call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Nancy Pelosi threw the door wide open to the impeachment of Donald Trump by the Democratic House. Though the transcript did not remotely justify the advanced billing of a “quid pro quo,” Pelosi set in motion...
Plus ça Change . . .
In the December 27, 2002, issue of the English edition of Forward, self-described Orthodox Jew David Klinghoffer attacks Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for his recent book Two Hundred Years Together. In this historical work, Solzhenitsyn deals with Jews and Russians living side by side from 1775, when Russia came to occupy the heavily Jewish regions of Eastern...
Newt, Sarah and a New GOP
“Sometimes party loyalty asks too much,” said JFK. For Sarah Palin, party loyalty in New York’s 23rd congressional district asks too much. Going rogue, Palin endorsed Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman over Republican Dede Scozzafava. On Oct. 1, Scozzafava was leading. Today, she trails Democrat Bill Owens and is only a few points ahead of...
Russia Baiters and Putin Haters
“Is Russia an enemy of the United States?” NBC’s Kasie Hunt demanded of Ted Cruz. Replied the runner-up for the GOP nomination, “Russia is a significant adversary. Putin is a KGB thug.” To Hillary Clinton running mate Tim Kaine, the revelation that Donald Trump Jr., entertained an offer from the Russians for dirt on Clinton...
POSTMODERN STALINISM
In his latest Sputnik Radio International interview Srdja Trifkovic discusses the Czech Republic government’s establishment of an information unit to counter what it says is pro-Russian, anti-Western and anti-NATO propaganda. “We want to get into every smartphone,” said Milan Chovanec, the Czech interior minister. Audio (unedited verbatim transcript) ST: It is strangely reminiscent of the...
Trump’s Last Chance
As President Donald Trump starts his reelection campaign in earnest, a major segment of his 2020 platform remains ambiguous. In the field of foreign and security policy, the next five or six months present Trump with the last opportunity to become his former self: to reverse some of his many surrenders to the neoconservative agenda,...
Blood and Iron Pyrite
During the late 19th century, when the star of American industrial power was on the rise, protectionist Pennsylvania Congressman William Kelley declared, “A people who cannot supply their own demand for iron and steel, but purchase it from foreigners beyond seas, are not independent . . . they are politically dependent.” The 21st century has...
Sleepwalkers Awake
The House of Lords European Union Committee is chaired by Lord Tugendhat. I don’t know anything about the man, and it may well be that his is a noble title going back to the Battle of Hastings, but I think most people will agree it’s one hell of a funny name. Then there’s Nigel Farage,...
The President’s Painted Corner
A prudent power will always seek to keep open as many options as possible in its foreign-policy making. An increasingly rigid system of alliances, coupled with mobilization blueprints and railway timetables, reduced the European powers’ scope for maneuver in the summer of 1914 and contributed to the ensuing catastrophe. The United States, by contrast, entered...
On Liberty and the Grand Idea
For a long time I thought I knew how to evade the discourse of the Grand Idea. It began when I was in the Yugoslav People’s Army. The war was barely over, but victory brought no greater liberty to those who had suffered the Nazi occupation, and the brainwashing in the barracks grew more and...
To End Wars—Trump vs. Sanders
Barack Obama sought as his legacy to bring an end to the two longest wars in U.S. history. On Oct. 15, he, again, admitted failure. The 9,800 U.S. troops in Afghanistan will remain another year. And, on Inauguration Day 2017, 5,500 U.S. troops will still be there. Why cannot we leave? Because, if we do,...
A Towering Genius, Greatly Missed
On April 1, 1815, Otto Eduard Leo pold von Bismarck was born on the family estate at Schönhausen near Berlin, in what used to be Prussia. He came into this world at the end of a quarter-century of pan-European crisis, which started with the French Revolution and ended with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Bismarck’s bicentennial...
The Untimely Death of Vice President Hobart
Little does history remember the death of Vice President Garret Augustus Hobart at the tender age of 55, barely a month before the beginning of the present century. Yet we have cause to lament that, in the words of the Psalmist, this humble personage was not granted a span of 70, or even 80, years....
Murray Rothbard, R.I.P.
If a man could be judged only by the friends he has kept and the enemies he has made, Murray Rothbard was one of the best men produced by the American right. Some of Murray’s friendships go back, without interruption, to the 1950’s, and his collection of personal enemies constitutes a rogues’ gallery of conservative...