[This article first appeared in the June 1985 issue of Chronicles.] “Fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium et ingens Gloria Teucrorum.” (We once were Trojans, there once was Troy, and the vast glory of the Teucrian race.) -Vergil Peter Ackroyd: T. S. Eliot: A Life: Simon & Schuster; New York. “Ackroyd’s is the most comprehensive full-length critical biography...
“Send her back! Send her back!” The 13 seconds of that chant at the rally in North Carolina, in response to Donald Trump’s recital of the outrages of Somali-born Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, will not soon be forgotten, or forgiven. This phrase will have a long shelf life. T-shirts emblazoned with “Send Her Back!” and Old...
In October 1950, as U.S. forces were reeling from hordes of Chinese troops who had intervened massively in the Korean War, a 5,000-man Turkish brigade arrived to halt an onslaught by six Chinese divisions. Said supreme commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur: “The Turks are the hero of heroes. There is no impossibility for the Turkish Brigade.”...
Last Sunday President Trump triggered off a major controversy with a series of tweets directed at Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA). The president berated the far-left quartet for “telling the people of the United States…how our government is to be run,” and suggested that they should...
The time for Theresa May’s political obituary is at hand. I write it with relish. There never was a politician on whom the gods lavished such favors, and who squandered their gifts with such perverse determination. She was presented with the leadership of the United Kingdom on a silver plate, without having to fight for...
Recently, Americans were implored to pay attention to a sport most of us do not follow for reasons that have little to do with the dramatic nature of the competition. Turning on a computer brought regular reminders of this sport, with Google Doodles dedicated to each of the participating teams and news feeds filled with...
It’s always the oil. While President Trump was hobnobbing with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the G-20 summit in Japan, brushing off a recent U.N. report about the prince’s role in the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in Asia and the Middle East, pleading with...
When Sir Kim Darroch’s secret cable to London was leaked to the Daily Mail, wherein he called the Trump administration “dysfunctional … unpredictable … faction-riven … diplomatically clumsy and inept,” the odds on his survival as U.K. ambassador plummeted. When President Donald Trump’s tweeted retort called Darroch “wacky,” a “stupid guy” and “pompous fool” who...
This piece first appeared in the December 1985 issue of Chronicles. “Liberty, the daughter of oppression, after having brought forth several fair children, as Riches, Arts, Learning, Trade, and many others, was at last delivered of her youngest daughter, called FACTION.” —Jonathan Swift There are many things wrong with this book, beginning with its title. The...
The sensationally miscast Sir Kim Darroch, H.M. Ambassador to the United States, has now gone, followed by a grieving cortège of the Foreign Office. Their clan spirit is that of Macbeth. Even Sir Christopher Meyer, a pretty good Ambassador in his day (his memoir DC Confidential is highly readable), went in hard for Darroch within...
Since the Democratic debates in June, the tide seems to have receded for the party and its presidential hopefuls. In new polls, only Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump comfortably. The other top-tier candidates—Sens. Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg—are running even with Trump, a measurable drop. A Washington Post-ABC...
Sir Kim Darroch’s epic misjudgment has as good as ended his time as H.M. Ambassador in Washington, and his career. His dispatch to the Foreign Office complaining of the utter ineptitude of the Trump administration has been leaked with devastating consequences. “He has not served Britain well,” said the President, showing a capacity for understatement...
Last Wednesday China completed a major naval exercise in the disputed waters of the South China Sea. On July 3 it was reported that China was testing a new naval helicopter which “could fill a big gap” in its expanding fleet. Over the weekend, Australian media reported that the country’s navy was monitoring a Chinese...
Despite all the grousing and griping about his “politicizing” of the Fourth of July and “militarizing” America’s birthday, President Donald Trump turned the tables on his antagonists, and pulled it off. As master of ceremonies and keynote speaker at his “Salute to America” Independence Day event, Trump was a manifest success. A president acting as...
The elephant in the next room is Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. For a graphic proof, look at the media, TV, and newspapers lately. The European Parliament met in Strasbourg for the first plenary session of its newly-elected members. Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”—a title engrafted by the EU upon the last movement of the 9th Symphony,...
This article first appeared in the December 1987 issue of Chronicles. American conservatism in the late 18th century was unlike the European species, where popular “peasant” and articulate “aristocratic” conservatism were able to develop together and to maintain a common front against the ascendant bourgeoisie. With the exile of loyalists and the waning of the...
“The liberal idea has become obsolete. … (Liberals) cannot simply dictate anything to anyone as they have been attempting to do over the recent decades.” Such was the confident claim of Vladimir Putin to the Financial Times on the eve of a G-20 gathering that appeared to validate his thesis. Consider who commanded all the...
From the November 1998 issue of Chronicles. The latest fad among leftist historians, according to the New York Times, is the study of the conservative movement. “By marrying social and political history,” the Times announced, “this new wave of scholarship is revising the history of Americans on the right”—a prospect that is at once depressing...
Justin Raimondo, long-time Chronicles columnist, vociferous anti-war activist and a leading member of the paleolibertarian political movement, died Thursday at age 67 after a long battle with lung cancer. An influential champion of anti-interventionist foreign policy within the Libertarian and Republican political parties, Raimondo lobbed broadsides at warmongers left, right, and center from his post...
“For too long our leaders have failed us, taking us into one regime change war after the next, leading us into a new Cold War and arms race, costing us trillions of our hard-earned tax payer dollars and countless lives. This insanity must end.” Donald Trump, circa 2016? Nope. That denunciation of John Bolton interventionism...
A hundred years ago, on June 28, 1919, the Treaty of Versailles was signed in the illustrious Hall of Mirrors, the same spot where the German Empire was proclaimed in January 1871. It was the most ambitious gathering of its kind in history. Leaders and diplomats of 27 nations convened to establish a new order...
“The necessary man” is the term that explains everything in British politics. Boris is the target of all the focused loathing of the Establishment, a force so powerful and widespread that no man can say who drives it. But in a myriad outlets—BBC, The Times, the Platonically-named Guardian, the City of London, academe high and...
This article first appeared in the December 1986 issue of Chronicles. In his novel 1984, George Orwell created a world devoid of freedom and justice, truth and goodness. But there is another void in the book that critics seldom notice: the utter lack of religious faith. The absence of any vestige of religion seems to...
Visualizing 150 Iranian dead from a missile strike that he had ordered, President Donald Trump recoiled and canceled the strike, a brave decision and defining moment for his presidency. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Vice President Mike Pence had signed off on the strike on Iran as the right response to Tehran’s...
For an informed insight into British politics, avoid the mainstream media. You would rest on a waterbed of misconceptions. The final ballot for the Tory leadership candidates closed with this result: Boris, 160; Hunt, 77; Gove, 75. So the top two go into a series of nationwide hustings, with the run-off put to Conservative Party...
“Apologize for what? Cory should apologize. He knows better. There’s not a racist bone in my body.” Thus did a stung Joe Biden answer rival Cory Booker’s demand he apologize for telling contributors, in a southern drawl, “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland, He never called me ‘boy.’ He always called me...
From the October 1990 issue of Chronicles. In 1858, as British and French forces pushed their way to Peking in the Opium Wars, Josiah Tatnall, commander of the neutral American naval squadron, intervened to save the British ships from Chinese guns and tow them safely out of range. When asked why he had abandoned his...
“Excruciating” was the verdict on the TV debate of the five remaining candidates for the Tory leadership. They were perched on stools, like five barflies in search of a bar. I regretted the absence of a woman, though not for the standard reason. It would have been diverting to see a candidate clad in a...
Judging by the corporate media obituaries, “Egypt’s first democratically elected president”–who died while on trial in a Cairo courtroom on June 17–was a well-meaning but inept leader who “governed clumsily” before being overthrown by the military. In reality Mohamed Morsi was an Islamist supremacist. He tried to use his narrow electoral victory in 2012 to...
President Donald Trump cannot want war with Iran. Such a war, no matter how long, would be fought in and around the Persian Gulf, through which a third of the world’s seaborne oil travels. It could trigger a worldwide recession and imperil Trump’s reelection. It would widen the “forever war,” which Trump said he would...
“Soft Power” is real power. The State Banquet at Buckingham Palace earlier this month showed royals and the President at their best, with an unstated but perfectly clear implication: no other country can do this. It were well to keep on good terms with the people who can put on a show like this. Everyone was at the top of their form: Trump behaved impeccably, and...
“History is repeating itself, and with a vengeance,” John Dean told the judiciary committee, drawing a parallel between Watergate, which brought down Richard Nixon, and “Russiagate” which has bedeviled Donald Trump. But what strikes this veteran of Nixon’s White House is not the similarities but the stark differences. Watergate began with an actual crime, a...
“The main lesson to draw from the Peterborough by-election is that the Brexit Party can wound but it cannot kill.” Thus the London Times, in all its majestic myopia verging on outright blindness. Have the wordsmiths who write its editorials ever heard of “mortal wounds,” or wounds that are so serious they require years in...
To Mike Pompeo’s and John Bolton’s great regret, the conspiracy to push the U.S. into yet another war in the Middle East—likely more catastrophic in cost and consequences than all previous ones taken together—has been averted, for now at least. For several months until the end of May, tensions between the United Stated and Iran...
“My religion defines who I am. And I’ve been a practicing Catholic my whole life,” said Vice President Joe Biden in 2012. “I accept my church’s position on abortion as . . . doctrine. Life begins at conception. . . . I just refuse to impose that on others.” For four decades, Biden backed the...
Ten Tenets of Air Power That I Didn’t Learn in the Air Force From Syria to Yemen in the Middle East, Libya to Somalia in Africa, Afghanistan to Pakistan in South Asia, an American aerial curtain has descended across a huge swath of the planet. Its stated purpose: combatting terrorism. Its primary method: constant surveillance...
In 2018, a record turnout of women, minorities and young added 40 House seats to Democratic ranks and made Nancy Pelosi speaker. This, we were told, is the new diversity coalition—women, people of color, millennials—that will take down The Donald in 2020. So, how has the Democratic field sorted itself out half a year later?...
From the December 1990 issue of Chronicles. Let Vermont State Senator John McClaughry describe himself (with what he calls “a notorious Ozark accent”): “I am a 1700’s Virginia republican, an 1800 Tertium Quid, an 1830’s Loco Foco, an 1850’s Republican, an 1890’s Western progressive, a 1930’s agrarian distributist, and today a plain old decentralist agrarian...
For a president who won his office by denouncing the Middle East wars into which George W. Bush and Barack Obama plunged the nation, Donald Trump has assembled the most unabashedly hawkish conclave of foreign policy advisers in memory. And he himself seems to concede the point. If foreign policy were decided by my security...
From the October 1986 issue of Chronicles. “The obscurest epoch is today.” —Robert Louis Stevenson Taken together, these three books serve nicely as a kind of group portrait of Clio and her several faces. In reverse order we have the historian as diarist and memoirist, as documentarian, and as reflective sage. As one of the...
What is it about special counsel Robert Mueller that he cannot say clearly and concisely what he means? His nine-minute summary of the findings of his office, after two years of investigation, was a mess. It guarantees that the internecine warfare that has poisoned our politics continues into 2020. If it was the intention of...
From the June 1988 issue of Chronicles. The Present Age begins with the First World War, the Great War as it is deservedly still known. No war ever began more jubilantly, among all classes and generations, the last including the young generation that had to fight it. It is said that when Viscount Grey, British...
The trouble with last week’s elections for the European Parliament is that its results offer grounds for widely different interpretations of their meaning. Too many glasses are half-full or half-empty. One thing is certain: the upsurge of Euroskeptic, sovereignist-identitarian parties – feared by some, hoped for by others – has not materialized. The EU is...
“Thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting.” The verdict on Theresa May is the same as that on Belshazzar. The Book of Daniel records other similarities: Belshazzar’s Feast uncannily foreshadows the Buckingham Palace banquet in which President Trump will be entertained, along with the still-in-office Prime Minister who steps down as Leader...
After a stroke felled Woodrow Wilson during his national tour to save his League of Nations, an old rival, Sen. Albert Fall, went to the White House to tell the president, “I have been praying for you, Sir.” To which Wilson is said to have replied, “Which way, Senator?” Historians are in dispute as to...
“Pass me the can, lad; there’s an end of May.” A.E. Housman, in a different key, has the right words for a nation celebrating the exit of Theresa May. The impossible dream has come to pass, and the worst Prime Minister in living memory—the competition is stiff, including Edward Heath and John Major—has at last...
“Regardless of their doom, / The little victims play.” All eyes are on the impending fall of Theresa May, whose tragedy is hyperbolically termed “Shakespearean” by scribes who are yet to acquaint themselves with more than his titles. We are not looking at a Lear, or Othello, or Coriolanus. The failure of May is on...
The hour of Boris is at hand. He has been in backbench exile since last July, when he resigned as Foreign Secretary. He could not take Theresa May’s preposterous Chequers Agreement, and gave up the glories of Chevening. (How many of us could bear to part with a fine country house, said to be designed...
A week from today, Europeans may be able to gauge how high the tide of populism and nationalism has risen within their countries and on their continent. For all the returns will be in from three days of elections in the 28 nations represented in the European Parliament. Expectation: Nationalists and populists will turn in...
From the August 1989 issue of Chronicles. A nation lives by its myths and heroes. Many societies have survived defeat and invasion, even political and economic collapse. None has survived the corruption of the picture it has of itself. High art and popular art are not in competition here. Both may and do help citizens...