Events in the Russia-Ukraine situation have moved far faster than anyone imagined, and today we are watching Russian troops attempt to take Kiev as part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine. This invasion will do to the reputation of Putin’s Russia what the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 did to the reputation of...
It is strange that pundits routinely accuse Trump of being unpredictable on foreign affairs. In fact, during this year’s campaign, he has made a series of statements related to the pressing global issues which are fairly clear and reasonable.
Zelenskyy desires a Russian defeat, but the war is now generating greater risks and dangers for the U.S. than any additional rewards we might realize from "weakening" Russia with further fighting.
In crafting the platform in Cleveland on which Donald Trump would run, America Firsters inflicted a major defeat on the War Party. The platform committee rejected a plank to pull us deeper into Ukraine, by successfully opposing new U.S. arms transfers to Kiev. Improved relations with Russia were what candidate Trump had promised, and what...
Americans do not—and should not—care whether an ethnically divided, strategically unimportant, historically contested Slavic subregion or two in eastern Ukraine ultimately takes orders from Kyiv or Moscow.
Richard Engel of NBC, reporting from Maidan Square in Kiev, described what he witnessed as the Feb. 19 truce collapsed. Police began to back away from their positions in the square, said Engel. And the protesters attacked. Gunfire was exchanged and the death toll, believed to be in the dozens, is not known. In short,...
It is in the American interest to avoid the risk of direct intervention in Ukraine regardless of the course of the war because neither the security nor the prosperity of the United States depends upon its outcome.
“Get off our front porch. Get out of our front yard. And stay out of our backyard.” This might stand as a crude summary of two draft security pacts Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei A. Ryabkov delivered last week as Russia’s price for resolving the crisis created by those 100,000 Russian troops on Ukraine’s borders. Ryabkov’s...
Is the past really a foreign country? Did they do things so differently then? Or is it that the past isn’t dead after all—and isn’t even past? In Washington, it is always 1939. But the Crimea isn’t the Sudetenland, and Vladimir Putin isn’t Hitler. No Blitzkrieg threatens Europe, or even Kiev. Then it’s the 1950’s,...
Is the territorial integrity of Ukraine a cause worth America’s fighting a war with Russia? No, it is not. And this is why President Joe Biden has declared that the U.S. will not become militarily involved should Russia invade Ukraine. Biden is saying that, no matter our sentiments, our vital interests dictate staying out of...
When he arrived at Christ the Savior Cathedral to pay his respects to the ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who had died of COVID-19, Russian President Vladimir Putin carried a clutch of red roses. The man beside him was carrying a briefcase. That briefcase appeared to be Russia’s version of the “football” that is carried by a...
On the night train from Kiev to Simferopol I share a compartment with Volodymyr Prytula, a Crimean journalist. Called “Vova” by his friends, this slender man with a Zhivagoesque mustache is my sole contact in the Crimea. He speaks little English, I no Ukrainian or Russian, but we communicate with the help of Ukrainian red...
Three speeches given on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the Russo-Ukrainian War reveal that the most principled voice of realism and moderation is coming from a small European nation, Hungary, whose leader is keeping his nation out of the unfolding tragedy.
When several NATO nations revealed that they had dozens of Russian-made MiG-29s, the idea arose to fly them to Ukraine and turn them over to Ukrainian pilots familiar with the MiGs. America would provide F-16s to replace the MiGs. Poland had an even better idea. Warsaw would fly its 27 MiG fighter jets to the...
“This is worse than a crime,” Talleyrand famously said of Napoleon’s execution of the Duke of Enghien: “it is a mistake.” The same can be said of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, almost four weeks after it was launched. However the battle turns out–even if the Russian army achieves its operational...
“Could a U.S. response to Russia’s action in Ukraine provoke a confrontation that leads to a U.S.-Russia War?” This jolting question is raised by Graham Allison and Dimitri Simes in the cover article of The National Interest. The answer the authors give, in Countdown to War: The Coming U.S. Russia Conflict, is that the odds...
On June 14 I was the keynote speaker at a press briefing in Kiev organized by The American Institute in Ukraine on the problem of Pridnestrovie (Transnistria). The Russian and Ukrainian majority of that self-proclaimed republic straddling the eastern bank of the Dniestr declared secession from Moldova after a brief but bloody conflict in...
When Russia’s Vladimir Putin demanded that the U.S. rule out Ukraine as a future member of the NATO alliance, the U.S. archly replied: NATO has an open-door policy. Any nation, including Ukraine, may apply for membership and be admitted. We’re not changing that. In the Bucharest declaration of 2008, NATO had put Ukraine and...
In Putin’s War, the tide is turning against the Russians, and Putin faces the prospect of having been the ruler who launched Russia's least necessary war. His situation is growing desperate.
Twenty years ago, we traditional conservatives, paleoconservatives, members of the dissident right—whatever you want to call us—had perhaps our finest hour. With the nation still looking to avenge 9/11, a number of powerful people who had been scheming to invade Iraq long before 9/11 used that tragedy to plunge America into a disastrous war of choice. Few...
NATO's recent Madrid Summit reveals a hardening, monolithic West that is likely soon to be challenged by a rising China and a multipolar world.
Vladimir Putin intends to conscript the coming winter of 2022-23 as an ally of his failing army—a strategy that has worked for Russia is past conflicts.
European leaders have a decision to make: treat Russia as an integral part of Europe with legitimate security concerns, or treat her as an Asiatic pariah to be crippled.
Former Trump advisor Robert C. O’Brien began campaigning for a spot in the next Trump admin by penning an unhinged neocon manifesto. Unfortunately, O’Brien may soon find his way into the second Trump admin.
With the party united, the odds are now at least even that the GOP will not only hold the House but also capture the Senate in November. But before traditional conservatives cheer that prospect, they might take a closer look at the foreign policy that a Republican Senate would seek to impose upon the nation....
One day after warning Russian President Vladimir Putin he would face “severe” economic sanctions, “like ones he’s never seen,” should Russia invade Ukraine, President Joe Biden assured Americans that sending U.S. combat troops to Ukraine is “not on the table.” America is not going to fight Russia over Ukraine. “The idea that the United States...
The Western political class has brazenly overturned Romania's presidential election because they won't allow a critic of the Ukraine War to take power.
One day after warning Russian President Vladimir Putin he would face “severe” economic sanctions, “like ones he’s never seen,” should Russia invade Ukraine, President Joe Biden assured Americans that sending U.S. combat troops to Ukraine is “not on the table.” America is not going to fight Russia over Ukraine. “The idea that the United States...
Among Cold War presidents, from Truman to Bush I, there was an unwritten rule: Do not challenge Moscow in its Central and Eastern Europe sphere of influence. In crises over Berlin in 1948 and 1961, the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Prague in 1968, U.S. forces in Europe stayed in...
Sometime before the end of 2023, the U.S. and its European minions are likely to face an unpleasant choice: risk an open war by reinforcing Ukraine’s depleted ranks with NATO troops, or let Russia prevail.
Asked if the U.S. should send troops to fight beside the Ukrainians, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said Sunday the time may have come. Russian President Vladimir Putin “will only stop when we stop him,” said Coons. “We are in a very dangerous moment where it is important that … we in Congress and the...
The return of GOP’s minority-party mindset is very likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy come November.
“Rule One, on page one of the book of war, is: ‘Do not march on Moscow,’” Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery told the House of Lords in 1962. “Various people have tried it, Napoleon and Hitler, and it is no good.” The victor of El Alamein made an understatement. Napoleon’s invasion in June 1812 took...
Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, Warsaw has in essence become the Kiev regime’s most fervent spokesperson in NATO and the EU. What Poland desperately needs instead is a Peace Party.
The Malaysian and Dutch embassies in Kiev are covered with heaps of flowers. But not a single little flower is brought in the memory of the victims of the bombings of Lugansk, which happened on the same day as the downing of flight MH17. And where would the flowers be brought? Kiev does not have...
In the Daily Beast, Senior Congressional Correspondent Tim Mak is Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs over Marco Rubio’s speech Wednesday before the Council on Foreign Relations: “The student has now become the teacher. “Sen. Marco Rubio, once viewed as a protege of presidential competitor Jeb Bush, schooled the former Florida governor Wednesday evening in the first...
Returning from a Slavic land on a Slavic airline after serving a mission aiding the Catholic Church in Slavic Eastern Europe, I craved a little freedom from Slavdom. So I eschewed the late Slavic pope’s tradition and refrained from kissing the earth after touching down at O’Hare. Instead, I enjoyed a quiet cigarette outside arrivals,...
In criminal law, there are times when a crime has clearly been committed, but it’s not clear whether the perpetrator had criminal intent. The impeachment effort against Donald Trump is the opposite situation: a case where there is no high crime or misdemeanor, but the president’s intentions are said by his enemies to be so...
It has been a summer of major strategic blunders by the United States and Russia over Ukraine and by the United States in the Middle East, where the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS, now renamed simply the Islamic Caliphate) has emerged as a major player, threatening what little remains of the region’s stability....
The most important borders for Americans to worry about are our own. But the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 has certainly shifted media attention from the crisis on our southern border to the borders of Ukraine. Although we do not know with certainty, it appears likely that pro-Russian rebels were the ones who shot...
“Would you mind not shooting at the thermonuclear weapons?” is a line from the bad guy, played by John Travolta, in the 1996 action flick “Broken Arrow.” Not a great addition to our national culture, but slightly enjoyable at the time. The line keeps popping into my head during this Ukraine crisis. According to the...
A Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 bound for Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam was shot down in eastern Ukraine Thursday afternoon, killing all 298 passengers and crew. It was hit as it cruised at 33,000 feet above the war-ravaged Donetsk Oblast, 35 miles west from the Russian border. The airliner’s demise has the potential to escalate the...
Belarusian autocrat Alexander Lukashenko has cleared out the encampment at his border crossing into Poland, where thousands of Middle Eastern migrants had been living in squalor. Last week, that border crossing was the site of clashes between asylum-seekers trying to push through the razor wire and Polish troops resisting with water cannons. While the crisis...
In his latest RTTV interview our Foreign Affairs Editor discusses the developments in the Crimean Peninsula and elsewhere in Ukraine. Srdja Trifkovic: Ukraine is getting closer to disintegration, or at least a form of federalization to which the Russians can make a stabilizing contribution. Any attempt by the mobocracy that has gained power in Kiev...
Chronicles’ readers probably know James Kirchick better as the author of articles on Ron Paul’s newsletters than as an expert on European politics. The up and coming neoconservative journalist published his exposés of Ron Paul in The New Republic in 2008 and revisited the issue in the pages of The Weekly Standard in 2011. Friends...
Now that the American empire has become explicitly leftist—committed to gay rights, feminism, abortion, and “democracy”—the left has become bloodthirsty cheerleaders for its wars.
At a hastily convened meeting in Geneva last Thursday the foreign ministers of Russia, the Kiev interim regime, the European Union and the United States worked out an agreement on the principles that are supposed to defuse the crisis. It is a flawed document, open to conflicting interpretations and devoid of verifiable benchmarks. The agreement...
Because America entered both world wars of the 20th century last, while all the other great powers bled one another, and because we outlasted the Soviet Empire in the Cold War, America emerged, in the term of President George H.W. Bush, as “the last superpower.” We had it all. We were the “indispensable nation.” We...
NATO has undermined the security of its members and created enemies that, in turn, justify further NATO interference in an increasingly unstable “security environment.”
The cowardly collapse of Viktor Yanukovych’s legitimate government and the triumph of the violent, bloodthirsty neo-nazi-dominated revolutionaries may spell the last throes of modern Ukraine. After all, it is an artificial, amorphous country, created by Lenin, Stalin, and Khruschev and doomed to failure and fragmentation. As I’ve described at length exactly four years ago, after...