India’s prime minister Narendra Modi paid his second visit to the White House in two years on June 8. President Barak Obama was greatly pleased by Modi’s stated willingness to proceed with ratification of the Paris agreement to limit greenhouse gases, and this was the theme duly emphasized in the Western media coverage of their meeting....
Trump’s Global Vision
On April 27, Donald Trump gave a long speech on foreign policy. It was his first attempt to present his views on world affairs in detail. Refreshingly, it contained no reference to promoting freedom, democracy, and “human rights”; confronting tyranny and evil; or making the world a better place in the image of the exceptional...
Global Trumpophobia
At a press conference at the G-7 summit in Japan on May 26, President Barack Obama declared that world leaders are “rattled” by Donald Trump, “and for good reason. Because a lot of the proposals that he’s made display either ignorance of world affairs or a cavalier attitude or an interest in getting tweets and...
Davutoglu’s Demise
Ahmet Davutoglu has served Recep Tayyip Erdogan loyally for over a decade, first as his chief advisor (2003-2009), then as foreign minister (2009-2014), and finally as prime minister until his forced resignation on May 5. Loyalty is no longer enough: Erdogan now demands unquestioning obedience from his team, and Davutoglu’s willingness to provide it has...
America First Controversy
Donald Trump’s foreign policy speech last Wednesday deserves at least a solid B+ and you can read my take on it in the June issue of Chronicles. It offered an eloquent argument for offensive realism, based on the fact that the international system—composed of sovereign nation-states pursuing their interests—is still essentially competitive and Hobbesian. Trump...
A Myth Demolished
Over the past two decades a great chasm has opened up between the tenured American professoriate specializing in the humanities and social sciences, and the meaningful discussion of its subjects in the public arena. It is hard to find a recent work by an academic authority on social, historical, and cultural anthropology in general, or...
Avoiding Europe’s Mistakes
The two jihadist attacks in Brussels on March 22, which killed 32 people and injured 300 others, have changed the tenor of European media commentary. While many editorialists have routinely bewailed “alienation” among Muslim youths and warned against “Islamophobia” and “intolerance,” a significant minority are considering the causes of terrorism with courage and frankness. In...
Obama’s Svengali
In an interview with FOX News aired on Sunday, April 10, President Barack Obama said that failing to prepare for the aftermath of the ousting of Libyan leader Col. Muammar Qaddafi was the worst mistake of his presidency. He added that intervening in Libya nevertheless had been “the right thing to do.” The second part...
China’s Win-Win Regional Strategy
Faced with a fresh barrage of threatening rhetoric by North Korea, its fourth nuclear test (January 6), and its subsequent successful launch of a ballistic missile capable of reaching the mainland United States, on March 31 President Barack Obama advocated closer security ties among America’s chief allies in the Far East. More significantly, he also...
Turkey’s Recklessness
In the millennia-long “tragedy of great power politics” we encounter a recurring phenomenon. An ambitious leader comes to power, successfully pursues an expansionist policy for a few years, succumbs to hubris, starts making risky decisions, and finally pays the price of not balancing his state’s strategic ends and means. Classic examples are provided by Cleon...
St. Patrick’s Day Postmodernized
Until about three decades ago the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day was not just another tackily “festive” occasion marked by shamrock face paintings and Guinness-soaked pub crawls. It had the markings of a Christian feast and it reflected a sense of collective awareness among the Irish that they had a lot to be proud of....
Angela Merkel: A Suicidal Bully
Not for the first time the government of Germany is acting as if it owned Europe. On two occasions in the 20th century it sought to occupy most of Europe; this time, with almost equal arrogance, it is trying to bully the rest of Europe into not resisting the ongoing Muslim occupation. The consequences of...
A Halting Dragon
The reports of China’s pending economic collapse have been greatly exaggerated. There are signs that the world’s second-largest economy is entering a period of long-term restructuring marked by a slowdown, but the process is neither unexpected nor chaotic. A sober look at China’s economic transition will allow us to assess its impact on the country’s...
In Praise of Christian Walls
“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Pope Francis declared on his flight back to Rome last week.The political implications of his statement have been considered in some detail in recent days, but his assertion also needs to be examined in the light...
Syria: Increasing Danger of Escalation
In the days and weeks ahead President Obama will face an important decision: whether to allow the conflict in Syria to escalate by approving Turkey’s and Saudi Arabia’s direct intervention, or to come to terms with the continued survival and expanding area of control of the government of Bashar al-Assad. Informed commentators note that this...
Obama’s Mosque Visit: Wrong Message, Wrong Venue
President Barack Obama’s Wednesday speech at the Islamic Society mosque in Baltimore, a venue tainted by a long history of preacing radicalism, summarizes his thinking about Islam and national security. That address has troubling implications and deserves detailed scrutiny. OBAMA: “[I]f we’re serious about freedom of religion—and I’m speaking now to my fellow Christians who...
Europe Under Siege
The massive, overwhelmingly Muslim migrant onslaught on Europe is the most important event of 2015. Its proportions are staggering. The Babylonian captivity affected at most 75,000 Jews, and the Völkerwanderung of the late-Roman era numbered in the hundreds of thousands. It is greater, in numbers within the time frame, than the Moorish, Mongol, or Turkish...
Letter from Spain: Post-Election Imbroglio
This year my winter retreat in Gran Canaria coincides with an unprecedented political crisis in Spain which may herald some trouble for the Brussels-based superstate. More than a month has passed since the inconclusive general election on December 20. It has marked the end of the decades-long duopoly enjoyed by the center-right People’s Party (Partido...
Horror in Europe
On New Year’s Eve 121 German women were subjected to sexual attacks, robbery and violence by “concentric rings” of a thousand Middle Eastern and African migrants in and around the central railway station in Cologne. Women and girls were surrounded, poked and jeered at as “whores” and even worse insults; their blouses were ripped and...
Erdogan’s Ambush
Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian Su-24 bomber over northwestern Syria on November 24 may be a game changer in that strategically positioned Middle Eastern country. Various parties have been forced to declare their true agendas. Strategic clarity is finally emerging, which is the precondition for an eventual solution—even though no solution is yet in...
Obama’s Hypocrisy on the Plight of Middle Eastern Christians
“In some areas of the Middle East where church bells have rung for centuries on Christmas Day, this year they will be silent,” President Barack Obama said in a statement on December 23. “This silence bears tragic witness to the brutal atrocities committed against these communities by ISIL.” This is a misleading and hypocritical statement...
Letter from Bosnia: The Dayton Agreement at Twenty
The “General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina” was negotiated at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995. It ended the Bosnian war and provided for a decentralized state comprised of two entities of roughly equal size: the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Serb Republic (Republika Srpska, RS). The General Framework Agreement, including...
Defeating Domestic Jihad: A Program of Action
With mathematically predictable precision, President Barack Hussein Obama declared that last Wednesday’s slaughter of 17 American attendees of a Christmas party by two Muslims in a community center in California, and the wounding of two-dozen others, was a mystery (“We don’t know the motives)—and that the U.S. needed stricter gun laws. It was a jihadist...
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...
The SU-24 Non-Mystery
There is no single explanation for Turkey’s decision to shoot down a Russian SU-24 bomber over Syria on November 24. That it was shot over Syria (and did not merely fall inside Syria) is by now a matter of record, confirmed almost immediately by U.S. military sources: The United States believes that the Russian jet...
Immigrant Invasion: Der Untergang des Abendlandes
Over 8,000 migrants entered Serbia on November 11 on their way from the Middle East to Western Europe. The item went unreported by the major media because it was not newsworthy. Daily totals may vary, not much, as the Great Invasion of 2015 continues unabated. Millions are on the move, with unknown further multitudes tempted...
Erdogan’s Successful Gamble
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took a gamble after his Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost its parliamentary majority last June 7: he would call another election, rather than let Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu look for a coalition partner in good faith. Contrary to most preditions, last Sunday the AKP regained its majority with 49%...
Syria: Time for Maturity
A successful strategist is able to balance costs and benefits in the attainment of clearly defined objectives. This task demands prioritizing: Primary and secondary political goals need to be articulated, and military resources allocated accordingly. The Obama administration’s strategy for defeating the Islamic State (aka ISIS) has failed so far because a secondary objective—Washington’s a...
Netanyahu, the Mufti and Hitler
Last Tuesday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu caused a stir when he told the World Zionist Congress that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, inspired Hitler to proceed with the mass murder of European Jews during the Second World War. “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel...
The MH17 Report: Caveat Emptor
Reports by various commissions of inquiry – national as well as international – into politically significant tragic events tend to be distorted by politics. The Dutch-led inquiry report into last year’s downing of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, released on October 13, is no exception. The British Lusitania Inquiry, chaired by Lord...
Syria: No End Game in Sight
The Russian military intervention in Syria, and the creation of a new regional alliance which includes Iran and Iraq, removes one undesirable outcome from the complex equation. The collapse of the government in Damascus, and its replacement by some form of jihadist-dominated Sharia regime which would spell the end of the non-Sunni minorities (including Christians),...
Europe’s Ongoing Demise
“The Third Muslim Invasion of Europe is entering its mature stage by sea,” I observed in these pages in June, as thousands of Middle Eastern and African illegal immigrants sailed from Libya to Italy day after day. In the intervening four months, in a dramatic development, a new southeastern land route was stormed by a...
Letter from Greece: A Meaningless Election
For what was widely expected to be the grand finale of the Greek snap election campaign—the country’s seventh since 2012—I drove to Thessaloniki, 400 miles south of Belgrade. Greece’s marvellous second city of half a million prides itself on being the country’s cultural and artistic capital, and its diversified economy offers a broader cross-section of...
Henry Kissinger’s Imperfect Vision
Even in his advanced age Henry Kissinger remains hugely influential, and the remnant of the realist school in Washington’s foreign policy establishment looks upon him as its part-guru, part-patriarch. His recent pronouncements are somewhat disappointing, however, and they reflect the confused state of the realist camp after many years of the neoconservative-neoliberal duopoly’s dominance. As...
Hitler’s Legacy
Stratfor’s George Friedman published an interesting article on September 1, “Pondering Hitler’s Legacy,” to mark the 76th anniversary of the beginning of World War II. The first outcome of Hitler’s war, he says, was that it destroyed Europe’s hegemony over much of the world and its influence over the rest: Within 15 years of the...
The Iran Deal in Context
On July 14, in Vienna, the United States, Russia, China, France, Germany, and the European Union signed a 109-page Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran. The Islamic republic has accepted a comprehensive set of international, legally mandated, and (by implication) militarily enforceable safeguards that “will ensure that Iran’s nuclear program will be exclusively...
Samantha Power’s Ignorance of Islam
On August 24 the United States Mission to the United Nations published remarks by Samantha Power, the UN Ambassador, devoted to the mistreatment of homosexuals by the Islamic State. The key part of her statement reads as follows: “No religious beliefs justify throwing individuals off of buildings or stoning them to death because of who...
Alien Invasion of Europe: Now a Deluge
The Italian navy rescued 3,000 “migrants” aboard more than a dozen boats in the Mediterranean on Saturday. Like hundreds of thousands of others before them, they were taken to Europe for de facto permanent settlement. At the same time, any semblance of border control along the southeastern land route has collapsed. Thousands of migrants stormed...
The Kayla Mueller Case: Rape is Endemic to Islam
American aid worker Kayla Mueller was regularly raped by the head of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in the months between her capture by ISIS in August 2013 and her death last February. The Western media have been quick to claim that the 26-year-old’s ordeal was due to a particularly perverted, un-Islamic ideology of...
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...
Bumpy BRICS Road
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...
The “Tolerant” Islam of the Crimean Tatars
The post-Maidan Ukrainian government is often criticized in Poland and Russia (a rare point of convergence) for indulging in historical revisionism over the controversial role of Stepan Bandera during the Second World War, and in particular for glossing over his followers’ slaughter of hundreds of thousands of eastern Poles, Jews, and other minorities in Galicia...
U.S. “Interest” in Kyrgyzstan
In his latest RT live interview (video; transcript) Srdja Trifkovic discusses the U.S. State Department’s decision to give its Human Rights Defenders Award to a Kyrgyz national, Azimzhan Askarov, who, as an ethnic Uzbek activist, in 2010 played an active role in Kyrgyz-Uzbek ethnic riots that shook the country. Askarov was arrested during the violence,...
Srebrenica, Twenty Years Later
“Truth and reason are eternal,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to Rev. Samuel Knox in 1810. “They have prevailed. And they will eternally prevail…” Jefferson was wrong. As the current media pack coverage of the 20th anniversary of the “Srebrenica massacre” indicates, his belief that “error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left to combat it” was...
Greece’s Abject Capitulation
The bohemian Left in Europe is as untrustworthy as the GOP “Right” in America when it comes to taking a tough, principled stand. As I have repeatedly predicted that it would do (here and here), the government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has caved in to EU creditors. The package he accepted after a marathon...
Greece’s Oxi! What Next?
Last week I made a prediction that went against the media pack consensus, when I wrote on July 1 that the Greeks would vote “no” in last Sunday’s referendum. The banks had been closed for a week, cash withdrawals were limited to 60 euros ($66) a day, and they still did it. My assessment was...
The Facts Behind the Greek Melodrama
Greece is now technically in default, having failed to pay its $1.8 bn monthly installment to the IMF which was due June 30. Contrary to the mainstream media treatment of the story, there will be no ripple effect and no major financial crisis. The Greeks are in dire straits, but their economy (the size of...
An Unhinged World
A few years after he was removed from office in 1890, Otto von Bismarck remarked that “Europe today is a powder keg, and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal.” At present, the Iron Chancellor’s dictum is applicable to the entire planet. The most important event by far this year has been Europe’s...
Canada Entry Ban: I Have Finally Won
It’s taken over four years, tens of thousands of dollars, and a dozen trans-Atlantic trips… but my Kafkaesque ordeal north of the border is finally over. Having lost the initial case against me in September 2013, and the appeal on April 27 of this year, the government in Ottawa has missed the deadline for appeal...
Erdogan’s Welcome Miscalculation (II)
There was only an en passant reference to Syria at the end of my analysis of Erdogan’s defeat three days ago. This subject deserves closer scrutiny. His controversial policy vis-à-vis Damascus now appears to have been a major factor in his defeat, and Turkey’s likely fine-tuning of her posture in the months ahead may have...