Until a year ago it had seemed that BRICS, the association of five emerging economies—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—was morphing from a loose economic alliance into a geopolitical force willing and able to challenge the global order. Its members’ potential to do so appeared impressive: They account for three billion people (two fifths...
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Forty-Niners: Marx, Engels, and Harrod’s
The other day, in London, I had a vision on a moving staircase in Harrod’s. Harrod’s is a department store in the British capital much loved by local duchesses and well-heeled visiting Americans—a sort of consumer-heaven with chic, from its delicatessen to its china and its sumptuous furnishings. It is less noted for its mystical...
On Seeing America’s Wars Whole
Six Questions for A.G. Sulzberger March 20, 2018 Dear Mr. Sulzberger: Congratulations on assuming the reins of this nation’s—and arguably, the world’s—most influential publication. It’s the family business, of course, so your appointment to succeed your father doesn’t exactly qualify as a surprise. Even so, the responsibility for guiding the fortunes of a great institution...
The Decline and Fall of the American Economy
The United States has three large economic problems. The overarching one is that the U.S. dollar’s role as world reserve currency is wearing out from continuous and large trade deficits and from government budget deficits that have to be financed by foreigners because the U.S. savings rate is approximately zero. Judging by the dollar’s loss...
The Yellow Brick Road to Jobs and Stability
“Let the Yankees Freeze in the Dark” read the bumper stickers in Texas in February 1982, the month I flew back from West Germany, mustered out of the U.S. Army at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and returned to my hometown of Wayne, Michigan. Oil had soared from $3.60 per barrel in 1972 to $37.42 in...
Time to Share the Foreign Policy Vision (If Any)
The way to have the foreign policy you want is first to figure out what kind of foreign policy you want. It is a task at which American leaders grow less and less adept, possibly on account of Americans’ general inability to figure out what they want: involvement, isolation or variations of the two? What,...
Books in Brief: October 2023
Short reviews of The Constitution of Non-State Government, by T. L. Hulsey, and The Past Is a Future Country, by J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles.
The Clintons Are Back
Hillary Clinton’s appointment as the third woman U.S. secretary of state is likely to deepen the crisis of the once-venerable institution at Washington’s Foggy Bottom, to which her two female predecessors have contributed in different ways. Madeleine Albright will be remembered for her hubris, coupled with studied callousness. (“If we have to use force, it...
A Formidable Challenge
The Soviet Empire these days offers a formidable challenge even for the most experienced Kremlin watchers. While economic collapse, the communications revolution, the threat of another nuclear disaster like Chernobyl, the decline in life expectancy, and the environmental crisis are all tinder for fires of change, the power of nationalism still remains central. Shortly after...
‘Greece-EU clash over anti-Russia statement: others may follow Athens’ suit’
Srdja Trifkovic on RT published January 28, 2015. A strongly worded anti-Russian statement, which was issued on January 27 by European Union heads of governments, did not have the consent of Greece’s new Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, according to Greek officials. They insist that the European Council, the body which issued the statement, did not follow...
Buchenwald’s Second Life
Even in an age of glasnost, hardly anyone troubles to recall that when the Soviet Union occupied East Germany in 1945 it kept two Nazi concentration camps in full use for nearly five years, till February 1950, and at their old task of death. Soviet Buchenwald comes as a surprise, and that surprise is perhaps...
Letter From a Hot Town
Cimabue the painter, passing on the road to Bologna, saw, as he walked through the village of Vespignano, a boy called Giotto drawing a sheep on a flat piece of rock. This was the moment with which, more than a century later, Lorenzo Ghiberti, the sculptor and the first art historian of the Renaissance, began...
The Suicide of the West
The issue of Kosovo, which has been simmering since the United States waged a war of unprovoked and unjustifiable aggression against the former Yugoslavia, is boiling over. While Serbian “public opinion” is said to be more interested in economic questions, the resentment against the international community is real. As one senior advisor to Prime Minister...
The Path to Victory for Trump
Trump’s best chance in 2024 is to ignore the noise and prove, contrary to the smear campaigns, that he is the superior candidate in terms of competence, stability, and sanity.
What the Editors Are Reading
Not a find, but an old friend, is Malcolm Muggeridge. I am reading a collection of his essays called Time and Eternity, and his golden spiritual autobiography, Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim, written after he and his wife, past their four-score years, had been received into the Catholic Church. I cannot read the latter without...
All Talk, No Action
By Monday, interestingly enough, the Russian invasion of Syria was receding as a topic of public concern. Apparently there no longer seemed anything explosive in the tidings of Vladimir Putin’s slam-bang entry into that remote theater of conflict. This was notwithstanding those Russian airstrikes against the anti-Assad rebels whom the United States, supposedly, has been...
Ramaswamy: A Trump Versus Trump?
Trump wasn't on stage in Milwaukee, but Trumpism was, thanks to Vivek Ramaswamy. Will Ramaswamy take votes from establishment candidates, or from Trump himself?
Distant Drums at Sarah’s Party
ST. PAUL, Minn.—The American Right has just died and gone to heaven. Wednesday night’s convention address by Sarah Palin here in St. Paul has confirmed the bold decision of John McCain to choose the Alaska governor as his co-pilot and united the Republican Party as it has not been since the second term of Ronald...
The Rise of Girlboss Militarism
Women on both sides of the aisle are rising through the political ranks by espousing hawkish foreign policy views. This "girlboss militarism" is the military-industrial complex's attempt to exploit an identitarian label.
Is Trump Right About NATO?
I am “not isolationist, but I am ‘America First,'” Donald Trump told the New York Times last weekend. “I like the expression.” Of NATO, where the U.S. underwrites three-fourths of the cost of defending Europe, Trump calls this arrangement “unfair, economically, to us,” and adds, “We will not be ripped off anymore.” Beltway media may...
Seven Decades of the Bomb
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...
Conversation in Warsaw
Several Nazi concentration camps, as I explained in a recent Chronicles article called “Buchenwald’s Second Life” (July 1989), were used by the Soviet occupying authorities in East Germany for some five years after the war, and for their original purpose. That was once a secret, but we are now in a wholly new age. Some...
Jinping Takes Up the U.S. Challenge
Is the U.S. up for a second Cold War—this time with China? What makes the question newly relevant is that Xi Jinping’s China suddenly appears eager for a showdown with the United States for long-term supremacy in the Asia-Pacific and the world. With the U.S. consumed by the coronavirus pandemic that has killed 100,000 Americans and...
Can Japan Rise Again?
We can thank Providence that the earthquake was not 150 miles closer to Tokyo, else Japan’s dead might number in the millions. Prime Minister Naoto Kan calls it the worst crisis since World War II. Yet, horrendous as it is, it does not, thus far, compare with that. For the earthquake dead are not...
Republic of War
For a pacific, commercial republic protected by two giant oceans and two peaceful neighbors with small militaries, America sure has fought a lot of wars. Michael Beschloss’s Presidents of War details eight American leaders beginning in 1807 who took us to war and just one, Jefferson, who didn’t. The text wraps up after the Vietnam...
Will War Cancel Trump’s Triumphs?
Asked what he did during the French Revolution, Abbe Sieyes replied, “I survived.” Donald Trump can make the same boast. No other political figure has so dominated our discourse. And none, not Joe McCarthy in his heyday in the early ’50s, nor Richard Nixon in Watergate, received such intensive and intemperate coverage and commentary as...
A Peek at the Post-COVID World
In the third week of April, the nation remained absorbed by the epidemic and its immediate effects, to the exclusion of most other concerns at home or abroad. This does not mean that the struggle for power and resources in the great, wide Hobbesian world has been suspended. It continues, just as the Hundred Years’...
A Latter-Day Munich
Kosovo has become a latter-day Munich. Over the past decade, it has been stylish for advocates of American intervention in the Balkans to justify their trigger- happy meddling by invoking “Munich.” The argument runs roughly like this: Unless the “international community” (i.e., the United States under the guise of the U.N. or NATO) acts resolutely...
Living History—September 2008
PERSPECTIVE Chinese Monkeys on Our Backsby Thomas Fleming VIEWS Beginning With Historyby Clyde WilsonRevisions and deviations. David Hume: Historianby Donald W. LivingstonThe core of the bookshelf. The Dean of Western Historiansby Roger D. McGrathBillington and the frontier culture. BIOGRAPHY George Garrettby Fred Chappell1929-2008. REVIEWS How Posner Thinksby Stephen B. Presser Richard A. Posner: How Judges...
What Trump Has Wrought
Should Donald Trump fall short of the delegates needed to win on the first ballot (1,237), there is growing certitude that he will be stopped. First by Ted Cruz; then, perhaps, by someone acceptable to the establishment, which always likes to have two of its own in the race. But Washington, the city of self-delusion,...
Alfred Rosenberg: The Triumph of Tedium
A few months after the outbreak of war, in January 1940, Nazi leaders held a merry meeting. They had plenty to be cheerful about. Poland had been crushed in a few weeks, and the new Soviet alliance had been “sealed in blood,” as Stalin put it. By a secret agreement in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of...
Quod splendet ut aurum
The Holy Grail of modern political journalism is a fallen dictator’s gold taps. Mind you, the bloodsucking hypocrite need not be actually dead when the assorted hacks and hackettes barge into what, until the new government sent out its press release, had been his bathroom; it is quite enough if the villain of the piece...
Haley’s Career Died Because of the GOP’s Poison Ideology
This is what happens to leaders who despise their voters and whose contempt for the culture, faith, and heritage of their people is palpable and overpowering—to the point that such leaders cannot contain themselves.
Ain’t It the Truth?
The Anglican Church of Canada clutches its throat at the prospect of—Lord have mercy—shutting down its ministries and works 20 years from now. You know—putting up the “Closed” sign, the public demand for said ministries dwindling more with every passing year. So sharply have Anglican membership rolls declined since 2000 that, according to an internal...
Too Many Wars. Too Many Enemies.
If Turkey is not bluffing, U.S. troops in Manbij, Syria, could be under fire by week’s end, and NATO engulfed in the worst crisis in its history. Turkish President Erdogan said Friday his troops will cleanse Manbij of Kurdish fighters, alongside whom U.S. troops are embedded. Erdogan’s foreign minister demanded concrete steps by the U.S....
Italy’s Donald Trump
Politicians and businessmen do not always see eye to eye. In ancient Rome the political elite, the Senatorial Order, squabbled with the wealthy Knights of the Equestrian Order. Cicero advocated a “Concord of the Orders,” where senators and knights would work together against the political ambition and military might of Crassus and Julius Caesar. Neither...
Europe’s Hollow Socialism
With the victory of the Social Democrats in Germany, a year and more after Labour finally managed to win a British election, 11 of the 15 states in the European Union now have governments in the socialist tradition. That is surprising. Socialism is yesterday’s idea, after all, and since the Soviet collapse of 1989-90, hardly...
A Little List, 1
As Some day it may happen that a victim must be found I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list Of society offenders who might well be under ground And never would be missed, who never would be missed. A recent comment of Robert Peters (a pleasure, as always,...
The Misguided System Without Historical Precedent
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has pushed neoconservative party lines on foreign policy for decades; the last time I read a dissenting view on that subject in the Journal was when I wrote an editorial for it in 1989. Although my caustic remarks on a global democratic foreign policy were published on the editorial...
Who Commissioned Us to Remake the World?
U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul, Obama’s man in Moscow, who just took up his post, has received a rude reception. And understandably so. In 1992, McFaul was the representative in Russia of the National Democratic Institute, a U.S. government-funded agency whose mission is to promote democracy abroad. The NDI has been tied to color-coded...
The Most Foreseeable Disaster in U.S. History
America has one generation left before it careens over the debt cliff. We are crossing the point where no amount of taxation will be able to save us.
Swan Song From Our Second Worst President
President Obama’s final State of the Union address was long on themes and short on specifics. It clearly was an attempt to secure a legacy of accomplishment. That attempt is at best questionable. It is important to divide Obama’s record between what he failed to do and what he has succeeded in doing—most of it bad. Either...
Capitol Obsequies
It used to be said of the Anglican Church that it was “the Tory Party at prayer.” On the occasion of Sen. John McCain’s funeral service in Washington National Cathedral last September 1, the United States and the world were given another opportunity to observe the American Establishment at prayer. For a couple of hours,...
What This Country Needs
“The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!” —Hamlet, Act I, Sc.5 The Amazing Media Machine, dripping oil and self-satisfaction, roared to new life with Jeb Bush’s declaration of his presidential candidacy. At last—something to talk about. We have Jeb—”Jeb!” as the campaign button puts...
Searching for Foes in the Post-Cold War Era
Despite the President’s and Congress’s promises, the budget is unlikely to be balanced in the year 2002. The bulk of the promised spending cuts come after the year 2000, and future Congresses and Presidents are unlikely to be any more willing than present ones to make tough political decisions. Equally problematic is the fact that...
There May Be Many Mushroom Clouds in Our Future
The success of the Bush regime’s propaganda, lies and deception with gullible and inattentive Americans since 9-11 has made it difficult for intelligent, aware people to be optimistic about the future of the United States. For almost eight years, the U.S. media have served as Ministry of Propaganda for a war criminal regime. Americans incapable...
Moldovan Elections: A Deadlock on Europe’s Periphery
Occupying some two thirds of the old czarist province of Bessarabia, with the rivers Dniester to the east and Prut to the west, the Republic of Moldova is a small, poor, landlocked state. Its parliamentary election, held on November 28, should have been irrelevant to anyone except the faraway country’s three and a half million people, of whom we know...
Why Freedom Persists in Poland and Withers in Canada
Why are Poles so conservative? And why are Western countries like the United States, and my country of Canada, so liberal? Although Poland claims to be Western and democratic, its government and culture are markedly different from those of Western countries such as Canada. Poland and Canada have been shaped by their pasts to evolve along...
Hillary Rejects ‘America First’
“Clinton to Paint Trump as a Risk to World Order.” Thus did page one of Thursday’s New York Times tee up Hillary Clinton’s big San Diego speech on foreign policy. Inside the Times, the headline was edited to underline the point: “Clinton to Portray Trump as Risk to the World.” The Times promoted the speech...
Moscow Notebook
This year’s mid-fall was not pretty in Moscow, where I write this column. Wind, drizzle, and early frost herald a long winter. It won’t be the winter of Russian discontent, however. Western sanctions and low oil prices have harmed the economy—it contracted by 4.3 percent in the third quarter—but Putin’s approval rating is consistently well...