“The Westminster bubble” refers to politicians, civil servants and journalists who work in and near the Palace of Westminster. They dwell in a world that is largely divorced from the concerns of the public beyond the M25 (or “beltway”) and is regarded as alienated from the electorate. It is also, as recent events show, alienated...

Seemingly out of nowhere, suddenly and rapidly, an obscure and evidently troubled Swedish teenager became a global celebrity. The phenomenon of Greta Thunberg was the theme of Srdja Trifkovic’s presentation at the Media Forum on Modern Journalism in Prague on November 20.   Greta Thunberg soared from an apparently lonely girl protesting climate change with...

When the wildfires of California broke out across the Golden State, many were the causes given. Negligence by campers. Falling power lines. Arson. A dried-out land. Climate change. Failure to manage forests, prune trees, and clear debris, leaving fuel for blazes ignited. Abnormally high winds spreading the flames. Too many fires for first responders to...

“Scarecrow,” an aged overcoat that saw its best days and owners generations ago, over which is thrown a hat of no known provenance but suggestive of a head underneath, the ensemble being draped over a stick. The idea is to frighten off the crows, but the smarter crows are not taken in and pillage the...

Upon his return from a week-long stay in Budapest, Srdja Trifkovic provides an assessment of Hungary’s current political scene in his weekly roundup of world affairs for Serbia’s top-rated Happy TV network. He also looks at the central European country’s role in EU politics, which occasionally may appear disproportionate to its modest size and resources....

“Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord”—a pretty flat declaration as reported by the Apostle Paul, leaving few gaps for politicians to fill at their own discretion. But you know politicians. Here we go with the impeachment hearings, an intended spectacle meant more as payback to President Donald Trump for winning the election...

The end of the phoney war is now in sight. The Conservative combatants in the general election have indulged their training exercises, which are to close squares round Boris’s deal and find evermore reasons to belittle Corbyn. Labour is engaged in its eternal war between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, with the current outcome in the balance. The ScotNats...

On November 8 Dr. Trifkovic presented a paper on China’s geostrategy and U.S. response at a major conference in Budapest, New Dimensions and Generational Leap in Warfare, which was organized by the Hungarian Defense Forces General Staff Scientific Research Centre. The event was attented by several general officers from NATO countries, over a hundred Hungarian...

[This article first appeared in the June 1990 issue of Chronicles.] The recent successes of the American right depend, in part, on its ability to deflect lower-middle-class resentment from the rich to a parasitic “new class” of professional problem-solvers and moral relativists. In 1975, William Rusher of the National Review referred to the emergence of a “verbalist” elite,...

Recently, we learned that the Mexican drug cartels are capable of defeating the Mexican Army in a pitched firefight. Then we learned that the cartels are literally building altars of human skulls. This week the Mexican cartels brutally murdered nine Americans, including young children.  In 1916, the murder of American civilians by Mexican bandits was...

Beto O’Rourke’s pullout from the presidential race leaves the Democrats with, oh, a mere dozen and a half or so candidates available to run the country. The country’s corresponding task is to keep awake for the remainder of the race. The pressing question is, or should be, what goes on here? What’s the mission—to can...

“Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” These are the offenses designated in the Constitution for which presidents may be impeached and removed from office. Which of these did Trump commit? According to his accusers in this city, his crime is as follows: The president imperiled our “national security” by delaying, for his own...

In his weekly roundup of world events for Serbia’s Happy TV network, Dr. Trifkovic discusses the future of the Islamic State. He also looks at a viable strategy for President Donald Trump to emerge victorious from the impeachment battle. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ2EPtvxQ_c&app=desktop (Translated from Serbian, slightly abbreviated.) Q: What has changed with the killing of al-Baghdadi?...

What are the roots of our present disorder, of the hostilities and hatreds that so divide us? When did we become this us vs. them nation? Who started the fire? Many trace the roots of our uncivil social conflict to the 1960s and the Johnson years when LBJ, victorious in a 61% landslide in 1964,...

The events of the past six weeks indicate that there is a system behind President Donald Trump’s seemingly chaotic decision-making process. He may sound like a syntax-challenged narcissist at times, but that does not mean that his intuition is any less astutely honed than it was three years ago. The result is puzzling at times...

From the beginning, the 2020 Democratic race has been a different kind of contest. Candidates aren’t competing to see who can run America the most efficiently. That’s the old politics. Instead, they’re pledging to remake this country entirely: rip out the old America—irredeemably tainted by racism, sexism and free enterprise—and replace it with something completely...

“Let someone else fight over this long blood-stained sand,” said President Donald Trump in an impassioned defense of his decision to cut ties to the Syrian Kurds, withdraw and end these “endless wars.”   Are our troops in Syria, then, on their way home? Well, not exactly.   Those leaving northern Syria went into Iraq....

[This review was first published in the October 2006 issue of Chronicles.] If Hitler struck at the Soviet Union to get at Britain, recalling Napoleon’s attempt in 1812 to cut Britain away from the Continental trading system, Stalin’s response to Hitler (Lukacs insists) powerfully reflected his own animosity to Britain. In each case, hostility to...

The British adore democracy and cannot abide elections. Currently they are getting neither. They seem to be within hailing distance of getting both, however—if the talk about a general election lightens into action. I have doubts that this consummation, however devoutly wished, may happen any time soon. The wretched Fixed Term Parliaments Act hangs darkly...

What happens when democracy fails to deliver? What happens when people give up on democracy? What happens when a majority or militant minority decide that the constitutional rights of free speech, free elections, peaceful assembly and petition are inadequate and take to the streets to force democracy to submit to their demands? Our world may...

In his latest interview for Serbia’s top-rated Happy TV network, Srdja Trifkovic tries to explain the intricacies of the ongoing Brexit drama to the uninitiated. Video of interview (in Serbian): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTiDNhmyWRU. The Brexit-related segment, translated verbatim below, starts at the time 14:09.   Q: What will happen to Brexit? ST: It will happen. Boris Johnson has been forced by...

The press hates Donald Trump. That’s not a newsflash. The bias the press shows toward most Republicans turns to outright hostility when it comes to Trump. Once you’ve convinced yourself your opponent is an evil racist, it’s not hard to justify doing anything you can to stop him. Many in the press corps have admitted...

[This review first appeared in the June 2009 edition of Chronicles.] One should begin a review with a summation of a book and then of its author.  The reverse is warranted in this case.  James Grant is an extraordinary American, a financial expert whose mind is enriched by his knowledge of history.  His previous book...

“Russia Assumes Mantle of Supreme Power Broker in the Middle East,” proclaimed Britain’s Telegraph. The article began: “Russia’s status as the undisputed power-broker in the Middle East was cemented as Vladimir Putin continued a triumphant tour of capitals traditionally allied to the US.” “Donald Trump Has Handed Putin the Middle East on a Plate” was...

President Donald Trump could have been more deft and diplomatic in how he engineered that immediate pullout from northeastern Syria. Yet that withdrawal was as inevitable as were its consequences. A thousand U.S. troops and their Kurdish allies were not going to dominate indefinitely the entire northeast quadrant of a country the size of Syria...

The Swamp is indignant, pretending to be outraged that Donald Trump wanted Ukrainian President Zelensky to continue an investigation of the dubious Ukrainian-related activities of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. The whole kabuki theater production is ridiculous, of course, as we know that the Democrats sought Ukrainian help in digging up dirt on Trump...

At its best, Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke’s high-octane assault on religious freedom calls for brandy and an extended lie-down in a dark room. That’s the best that can be said of it. Its worst has to do with the disdain a midlevel presidential candidate exhibits for supernatural religion. That’s if he really meant what he...

We have been witnessing a bloodless re-run of 1940. Britain is being expelled from the Continent by order of Germany and is turning to the New World and Commonwealth. Europe has an unchallenged hegemon, Germany, and France fits easily into the role once taken by Vichy. The Continent now has a single economic system, ruled...

“There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader,” is a remark attributed to a French politician during the turbulent times of 1848. Joe Biden’s Wednesday declaration that President Donald Trump should be impeached is in that tradition. Joe is scrambling to get out in front of the sentiment for impeachment...

[Above: Texas Governor Greg Abbott] The “progressive,” so to speak, vision of politics and public life envisions tighter and tighter government control over economic life, along with looser and looser controls over human behavior. I think you’d refer to the overall design as a paradox: a clash of methods and objectives.    Elizabeth Warren wants...

The backstage struggle between the Bush interventionists and the America-firsters who first backed Donald Trump for president just exploded into open warfare, which could sunder the Republican Party. At issue is Trump’s decision to let the Turkish army enter Northern Syria, to create a corridor between Syrian Kurds and the Turkish Kurds of the PKK,...

On October 8 Turkey announced that it would send troops to a 20-mile-wide zone in northern Syria which is currently controlled by the Kurds, following the withdrawal of an estimated 50 to 100 U.S. special forces soldiers from the area. The media spin is predictable: President Donald Trump has abandoned America’s gallant Kurdish allies to...

If anything can save Britain, it is the national gift for mockery. The country was startled last week to discover that it was run by Lady Hale, president of the Supreme Court, who told the Prime Minister that his prorogation of Parliament was “unlawful.” He had “misled” the Queen with his advice to her. The...

“Who Lost China?” With the fall of the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, the defeat of his armies and the flight to Formosa, that was the question of the hour in 1949. And no one demanded to know more insistently than the anti-Communist Congressman John F. Kennedy: “Whatever share of the responsibility was Roosevelt’s and...

Donald Trump should not have been on the phone with a foreign head of state encouraging another country to investigate his political opponent Joe Biden. Some Republicans are trying, but there’s no way to spin this as a good idea. Like a lot of things Trump does, it was pretty over-the-top. Our leaders’ official actions...

There’s so much to say about Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment gig that one hardly knows where to start. But here’s a live possibility: We start with Sen. Lindsey Graham’s characterization of how this game is to be played. We’re trying to “try the president of the United States based on hearsay,” the South Carolina senator says–that...

“This is a very sad time for our country. There is no joy in this,” said Nancy Pelosi Saturday. “We must be somber. We must be prayerful. … I’m heartbroken about it.” Thus did the speaker profess her anguish—just four days after announcing that her Democratic House would conduct an impeachment inquiry of President Donald...

“The English vice is not buggery, but humbuggery” was the Continental jest of long ago. It has not been heard for some time, perhaps because opinion is divided on the several assertions in the line. The key word—not that one, but the other one—has now come to the front in Boris Johnson’s speech to the...

In his speech to the UN General Assembly on September 27, Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan claimed that “Islamophobia” has grown at an alarming pace since 9-11. Saying that he wanted to clear some of the misunderstanding surrounding Islam and its followers, Khan specifically criticized “certain Western leaders” for employing labels like “radical Islam.” It is...

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...

We can’t seem to have a news event (and everything that happens in our capital city is a capital-E event these days) without the searing cry in the background, drowning out all other discourse: “Impeach! Impeach!” You might call it an echo of the old exhortation, “Hey, somebody get a rope!” One thing must be...

The Founding Fathers of the United States, in their Ur-wisdom, laid it down that the Supreme Court should consist of 6 Justices. Britain, in its belated imitation of the United States, created in 2009 a Supreme Court of 11. That meant in the first place jobs for the boys, and girls.  There are 3 female justices,...