“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there,” wrote President Donald Trump, as he ordered the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Syria, stunning the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Trump overruled his secretaries of state and defense, and jolted this city and capitals across NATO Europe and the Middle East. Yet,...
Kim Jong Un, angered by the newest U.S. sanctions, is warning that North Korea’s commitment to denuclearization could be imperiled and we could be headed for “exchanges of fire.” Iran, warns Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, is testing ballistic missiles that are forbidden to them by the U.N. Security Council. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan...
Is it coincidence or contagion, this malady that seems to have suddenly induced paralysis in the leading nations of the West? With lawyer-fixer Michael Cohen’s confession that he colluded with Donald Trump in making hush money payoffs to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, America’s stage is set for a play that will run two years....
If Donald Trump told Michael Cohen to pay hush money to Stormy Daniels about a one-night stand a decade ago, that, says Jerome Nadler, incoming chair of House Judiciary, would be an “impeachable offense.” This tells you what social media, cable TV and the great herd of talking heads will be consumed with for the...
George H.W. Bush was America’s closer. Called in to pitch the final innings of the Cold War, Bush 41 presided masterfully over the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany, the liberation of 100 million Eastern Europeans and the dissolution of the Soviet Union into 15 independent nations. History’s assignment complete, Bush 41...
In Katowice, Poland, all the signers of the 2015 Paris climate accord are gathered to assess how the world’s nations are meeting their goals to cut carbon emissions. Certainly, the communications strategy in the run-up was impressive. In October came that apocalyptic U.N. report warning that the world is warming faster than we thought and...
On departure for the G-20 gathering in Buenos Aires, President Donald Trump canceled his planned weekend meeting with Vladimir Putin, citing as his reason the Russian military’s seizure and holding of three Ukrainian ships and 24 sailors. But was Putin really the provocateur in Sunday’s naval clash outside Kerch Strait, the Black Sea gateway to...
Mass migration “lit the flame” of the right-wing populism that is burning up the Old Continent, she said. Europe must “get a handle on it.” “Europe must send a very clear message—’we are not going to be able to continue to provide refuge and support.'” Should Europe fail to toughen up, illegal migration will never...
The 633-word statement of President Donald Trump on the Saudi royals’ role in the grisly murder of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi is a remarkable document, not only for its ice-cold candor. The president re-raises a question that has roiled the nation since Jimmy Carter: To what degree should we allow idealistic values trump vital...
After adding at least 37 seats and taking control of the House by running on change, congressional Democrats appear to be about to elect as their future leaders three of the oldest faces in the party. Nancy Pelosi of California and Steny Hoyer of Maryland have led the House Democrats for 16 years. For 12...
Last week, the White House revoked the press pass of CNN’s chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, and denied him access to the building. CNN responded by filing suit in federal court against the president. Acosta’s First and Fifth Amendment rights had been violated, said CNN. The demand: Acosta’s press pass must be returned immediately...
In a rebuke bordering on national insult Sunday, Emmanuel Macron retorted to Donald Trump’s calling himself a nationalist. “Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism; nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism.” As for Trump’s policy of “America first,” Macron trashed such atavistic thinking in this new age: “By saying we put ourselves first and the...
The war in Washington will not end until the presidency of Donald Trump ends. Everyone seems to sense that now. This is a fight to the finish. A postelection truce that began with Trump congratulating House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi—”I give her a great deal of credit for what she’s done and what she’s accomplished”—was...
Did former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just take a page out of the playbook of Sen. Ed Muskie from half a century ago? In his first off-year election in 1970, President Richard Nixon ran a tough attack campaign to hold the 52 House seats the GOP had added in ’66 and ’68, and to...
Among the reasons Donald Trump is president is that his natural political instincts are superior to those of any other current figure. As campaign 2018 entered its final week, Trump seized upon and elevated the single issue that most energizes his populist base and most convulses our media elite. Warning of an “invasion,” he pointed...
Saturday, in Pittsburgh, a Sabbath celebration at the Tree of Life synagogue became the site of the largest mass murder of Jews in U.S. history. Eleven worshippers were killed by a racist gunman. Friday, we learned the identity of the crazed criminal who mailed pipe bombs to a dozen leaders of the Democratic Party, including...
By Thursday, the targets of the mailed pipe bombs had risen to nine: George Soros, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Maxine Waters, John Brennan, Eric Holder, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Joe Biden and Robert De Niro. That list contains four of the highest-ranking officials of Barack Obama’s administration: the president himself, his vice president, his secretary of...
Was the assassination of JFK by Lee Harvey Oswald still getting as much media coverage three weeks after his death as it did that first week after Nov. 22, 1963? Not as I recall. Yet, three weeks after his murder, Jamal Khashoggi, who was not a U.S. citizen, was not killed by an American, and...
Our mainstream media remain consumed with the grisly killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and how President Donald Trump will deal with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Understandably so, for this is the most riveting murder story since O.J. Simpson and has strategic implications across the Middle East....
Over the weekend Donald Trump warned of “severe punishment” if an investigation concludes that a Saudi hit team murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Riyadh then counter-threatened, reminding us that, as the world’s largest oil exporter, Saudi Arabia “plays an impactful and active role in the global economy.” Message:...
Was Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and then his body cut up with a bone saw and flown to Riyadh in Gulfstream jets owned by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman? So contend the Turks, who have video from the consulate, photos of 15 Saudi agents who flew into...
After a 50-year siege, the great strategic fortress of liberalism has fallen. With the elevation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court seems secure for constitutionalism—perhaps for decades. The shrieks from the gallery of the Senate chamber as the vote came in on Saturday, and the sight of that bawling mob clawing at the doors...
Four days after he described Christine Blasey Ford, the accuser of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, as a “very credible witness,” President Donald Trump could no longer contain his feelings or constrain his instincts. With the fate of his Supreme Court nominee in the balance, Trump let his “Make America Great Again” rally attendees in Mississippi know...
Republican leaders are “a bunch of wimps,” said Jerry Falwell Jr. Conservatives and Christians need to stop electing “nice guys.” “The US needs street fighters like Donald Trump at every level of government because the liberal fascists Dems are playing for keeps.” So tweeted the son and namesake of the founder of the Moral Majority,...
Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was approved on an 11-10 party-line vote Friday in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Yet his confirmation is not assured. Sen. Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, has demanded and gotten as the price of his vote on the floor, a weeklong delay. And the GOP Senate has agreed...
Thursday is shaping up to be the Trump presidency’s “Gunfight at O.K. Corral.” That day, the fates of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and much else, may be decided. The New York Times report that Rosenstein, sarcastically or seriously in May 2017, talked of wearing a wire into the...
By the end of his second term, President Ronald Reagan, who had called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” was strolling through Red Square with Russians slapping him on the back. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. And how have we husbanded the fruits of our Cold War triumph? This month, China’s...
Upon the memory and truthfulness of Christine Blasey Ford hangs the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, his reputation, and possibly his career on the nation’s second highest court. And much more. If Kavanaugh is voted down or forced to withdraw, the Republican Party and conservative movement could lose their last best hope for...
Our diversity is our greatest strength. After playing clips of Democratic politicians reciting that truth of modern liberalism, Tucker Carlson asked, “How, precisely, is diversity our strength? Since you’ve made this our new national motto, please be specific.” Reaction to Carlson’s question, with some declaring him a racist for having raised it, suggests that what...
Is President Donald Trump about to intervene militarily in the Syrian civil war? For that is what he and his advisers seem to be signaling. Last week, Trump said of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s campaign to recapture the last stronghold of the rebellion, Idlib province: “If it’s a slaughter, the world is going to get...
The campaign to overturn the 2016 election and bring down President Trump shifted into high gear this week. Inspiration came Saturday morning from the altar of the National Cathedral where our establishment came to pay homage to John McCain. Gathered there were all the presidents from 1993 to 2017, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and...
“It is time for this war in Afghanistan to end,” said Gen. John Nicholson in Kabul on his retirement Sunday after a fourth tour of duty and 31 months as commander of U.S. and NATO forces. Labor Day brought news that another U.S. serviceman had been killed in an insider attack by an Afghan soldier....
This summer, the sex scandal that has bedeviled the Catholic Church went critical. First came the stunning revelation that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former Archbishop of Washington and friend to presidents, had for decades been a predator-priest who preyed on seminarians and abused altar boys, and whose depravity was widely known and covered up. Came then...
“McCain’s Death Leaves Void” ran the Wall Street Journal headline over a front-page story that began: “The death of John McCain will leave Congress without perhaps its loudest voice in support of the robust internationalism that has defined the country’s security relations since World War II.” Certainly, the passing of the senator whose life story...
“If anyone is looking for a good lawyer,” said President Donald Trump ruefully, “I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen.” Michael Cohen is no Roy Cohn. Tuesday, Trump’s ex-lawyer, staring at five years in prison, pled guilty to a campaign violation that may not even be a crime. Cohen...
In backing John Brennan’s right to keep his top-secret security clearance, despite his having charged the president with treason, the U.S. intel community has chosen to fight on indefensible terrain. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper seemed to recognize that Sunday when he conceded that ex-CIA Director Brennan had the subtlety of “a freight...
If ex-CIA Director John Brennan did to Andrew Jackson what he did to Donald Trump, he would have lost a lot more than his security clearance. He would have been challenged to a duel and shot. “Trump’s . . . performance in Helsinki,” Brennan had said, “exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors.’ It...
Friday, deep into the 17th year of America’s longest war, Taliban forces overran Ghazni, a provincial capital that sits on the highway from Kabul to Kandahar. The ferocity of the Taliban offensive brought U.S. advisers along with U.S. air power, including a B-1 bomber, into the battle. “As the casualty toll in Ghazni appeared to...
Is it any of Canada’s business whether Saudi women have the right to drive? Well, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland just made it her business. Repeatedly denouncing Riyadh’s arrest of women’s rights advocate Samar Badawi, Freeland has driven the two countries close to a break in diplomatic relations. “Reprehensible” said Riyadh of Freeland’s tweeted attack. Canada...
On meeting with the EU’s Jean-Claude Juncker last month, Donald Trump tweeted: “Both the U.S. and the E.U. drop all Tariffs, Barriers and Subsidies! That would finally be Free Market and Fair Trade.” Did Larry Kudlow somehow get access to Trump’s phone? We know not. But, on hearing this, Steve Forbes, Stephen Moore and Arthur...
A war with Iran would define, consume and potentially destroy the Trump presidency, but exhilarate the neocon never-Trumpers who most despise the man. Why, then, is President Donald Trump toying with such an idea? Looking back at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, wars we began or plunged into, what was gained to justify the...
On July 19, the Knesset voted to change the nation’s Basic Law. Israel was declared to be, now and forever, the nation-state and national home of the Jewish people. Hebrew is to be the state language. Angry reactions, not only among Israeli Arabs and Jews, came swift. Allan Brownfeld of the American Council for Judaism...
“Make America Great Again!” will, given the astonishing victory it produced for Donald Trump, be recorded among the most successful slogans in political history. Yet it raises a question: How did America first become the world’s greatest economic power? In 1998, in The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to...
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce,” a saying attributed to Karl Marx, comes to mind in this time of Trump. To those of us raised in the Truman era, when the Red Army was imposing its bloody Bolshevik rule on half of Europe, and NATO was needed to keep Stalin’s armies from...
“Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Under the Constitution, these are the offenses for which presidents can be impeached. And to hear our elites, Donald Trump is guilty of them all. Trump’s refusal to challenge Vladimir Putin’s claim at Helsinki—that his GRU boys did not hack Hillary Clinton’s campaign—has been called treason, a...
Beginning his joint press conference with Vladimir Putin, President Trump declared that U.S. relations with Russia have “never been worse.” He then added pointedly, that just changed “about four hours ago.” It certainly did. With his remarks in Helsinki and at the NATO summit in Brussels, Trump has signaled an historic shift in U.S. foreign...
Of President Donald Trump’s explosion at Angela Merkel’s Germany during the NATO summit, it needs to be said: It is long past time we raised our voices. America pays more for NATO, an alliance created 69 years ago to defend Europe, than do the Europeans. And as Europe free-rides off our defense effort, the EU...
If Mitch McConnell’s Senate can confirm his new nominee for the Supreme Court, President Donald Trump may have completed the capture of all three branches of the U.S. government for the Republican Party. Not bad for a rookie. And the lamentations on the left are surely justified. For liberalism’s great strategic ally and asset of...
With never-Trump conservatives bailing on the GOP and crying out for the Party of Pelosi to save us, some painful truths need to be restated. The Republican Party of Bush I and II, of Bob Dole and John McCain, is history. It’s not coming back. Unlike the Bourbons after the Revolution and the Terror, after...
“No Borders! No Nations! No Deportations!” “Abolish ICE!” Before last week, these were the mindless slogans of an infantile left, seen on signs at rallies to abolish ICE, the agency that arrests and deports criminal aliens who have no right to be in our country. By last week, however, “Abolish ICE!” was no longer the...