“Ten days ago, President Trump was saying ‘the United States should withdraw from Syria.’ We convinced him it was necessary to stay.” Thus boasted French President Emmanuel Macron Saturday, adding, “We convinced him it was necessary to stay for the long term.” Is the U.S. indeed in the Syrian civil war “for the long term”?...
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Théâtre Syrien
There are several conflicting narratives on who is doing what to whom in Syria, and why. That a false-flag operation was followed by an act of aggression by the U.S. and its European satellites is clear. Everything else is murky. Three initial impressions deserve particular attention. 1. False flags work if they are supported by...
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Another Reason Why the Agrarians Lost
Andrew Lytle’s “The Hind Tit” is the best essay in I’ll Take My Stand (1930), not only because it focuses on the small, independent farmer, the class the Agrarians most admired, but also because Lytle nails the volume’s primary thesis to the church door, the dilemma his region and nation faced in 1930—the choice between...
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Is Trump Standing Down in Syria?
Wednesday morning, President Trump jolted the nation with a tweet that contained both threat and taunt: “Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart!’ You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and...
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Professor Burnham, Mafioso Costello, and Me
Not long after the conviction of Alger Hiss, Professor James Burnham, Karl Hess, and I met in my apartment on Riverside Drive to discuss a matter that had concerned us for some time. Jim Burnham was then working on his book The Web of Subversion. Karl, like me, was a Newsweek editor, and he had...
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Inescapable Horizons
Weighing in at more than 500 dense and provocative pages, Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self (Harvard, 1989) was clearly not intended for the general reader; at just over 100 pages. The Ethics of Authenticity is much more accessible. While not a fully “polished” work, this slim volume is so full of valuable insights I...
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Has the War Party Hooked Trump?
With his Sunday tweet that Bashar Assad, “Animal Assad,” ordered a gas attack on Syrian civilians, and Vladimir Putin was morally complicit in the atrocity, President Donald Trump just painted himself and us into a corner. “Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria,” tweeted Trump, “President Putin, Russia and Iran...
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Syrian Showdown: Trump vs. the Generals
With ISIS on the run in Syria, President Trump this week declared that he intends to make good on his promise to bring the troops home. “I want to get out. I want to bring our troops back home,” said the president. We’ve gotten “nothing out of the $7 trillion (spent) in the Middle East...
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The Moscow Manifesto
Yesterday’s two panels on world affairs at this year’s Moscow Economic Forum raised issues that are well outside the permitted mainstream discourse in the West. As a German colleague remarked, “only here I meet people who are not focused on the disjointed, piecemeal fragments of reality, who have no doubt that the Chinese or Persian...
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The Joke’s On Us
I did mention Elvis once in a column, and in the ’90s I pointed to one Donald Trump as the TV star you’d least likely want sitting next to you at a dinner party. And yet the likelihood, back then, of ever mentioning Roseanne Barr—it just didn’t compute. But these days . . . I...
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Moscow Notes: The Curse of Liberalism
The first day of this year’s Moscow Economic Forum (MEF, April 3-4), the premium gathering of Russian and foreign business leaders, economic strategists and geopolitical analysts, started with a plenary session reminiscent of the opening of last year’s event. Speaker after speaker complained that President Putin has no coherent strategy for Russia’s comprehensive development, and...
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How Trump’s Presidency Will Be Judged
On many issues—naming Scalia-like judges and backing Reagan-like tax cuts—President Trump is a conventional Republican. Where he was exceptional in 2016, where he stood out starkly from his GOP rivals, where he won decisive states like Pennsylvania, was on his uniquely Trumpian agenda to put America and Americans first—from which the Bush Republicans recoiled. Trump...
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Must the U.S. Be a Merchant of Death?
It’s one of those stories of the century that somehow never gets treated that way. For an astounding 25 of the past 26 years, the United States has been the leading arms dealer on the planet, at some moments in near monopolistic fashion. Its major weapons-producers, including Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, regularly pour the...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Not a find, but an old friend, is Malcolm Muggeridge. I am reading a collection of his essays called Time and Eternity, and his golden spiritual autobiography, Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim, written after he and his wife, past their four-score years, had been received into the Catholic Church. I cannot read the latter without...
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Books in Brief
America’s Political Inventors: The Lost Art of Legislation, by George W. Liebmann (New York: I.B. Tauris; 272 pp., £64.00). George Liebmann, an attorney and historian, argues that Friedrich Hayek’s definition of the rule of law (“uniform rules laid down in advance”) has not been observed recently by federal and state governments. Learned Hand said that...
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The Pursuit of Happiness
Mass shootings of the sort that happened recently in Florida and Nevada, whose only conceivable motive is the perpetrator’s compulsion to make his satanic and nihilistic hatred of other people and of existence itself a compelling item in the international news, have become almost monthly occurrences here, though they are rare in more mentally and...
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Immigration and Citizenship: Ancient Lessons for the American People
Americans have been debating immigration since the Founding era. Congress passed the first Naturalization Law in 1790, which it amended and fine-tuned in 1795, 1798, and 1802. These acts experimented with different residency requirements before naturalization. From the start, children of U.S. citizens were citizens, even if born abroad. For the Founders, where citizenship was...
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Lies and Consequences
The Post Produced by Dreamworks Directed by Steven Spielberg Screenplay by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox The Phantom Thread Produced and distributed by Focus Features Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson The Post is Steven Spielberg’s account of the Washington Post’s 1971 decision to publish the Robert McNamara-ordered report...
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The Lowdown on Music Appreciation
Music Appreciation is a revealing phrase: It doesn’t mean what it says. It doesn’t mean that music is getting more expensive, though it is true that music is appreciating. It doesn’t mean even a proper regard, as in “I appreciate your efforts.” What it does mean is a matter more of pedantry than of anything...
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Venting Is Not Enough: Nassar and Injustice
Imagine a justice system that functioned as follows. While awaiting sentencing after conviction, the vilest criminals would be put in the public dock, surrounded by angry spectators. At the behest of the presiding judge, victims, along with their friends and relatives, would then unleash all of their verbal anger on the perpetrator. The victims could...
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Blame Poland
OK, all you readers: You are weak, easily manipulated, led by the nose to the gutter, susceptible to the devils of your diabolical urges, and you are crazy. In fact you are the unspeakables, the deplorables who voted for Trump, and a bald, ugly man by the name of Roger Cohen says so. Needless to...
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The Great Clarifier
Not even President Trump’s most ardent admirers would claim that he is a “Great Communicator,” the title bestowed on the last resident of the White House who could plausibly be seen as governing, at least in some respects, as a conservative. But Donald Trump might just be a great clarifier: His words and actions cause...
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Does the Pope Believe in Hell?
“Pope Declares No Hell?” So ran the riveting headline on the Drudge Report of Holy Thursday. Drudge quoted this exchange, published in La Repubblica, between Pope Francis and his atheist friend, journalist Eugenio Scalfari. Scalfari: “What about bad souls? Where are they punished?” Bad souls “are not punished,” Pope Francis is quoted, “those who do...
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Latin, The Language of the West
For generations Latin was the backbone of Christian civilization, and served as the basis for political, intellectual, and religious discourse during the most creative periods of European history. And, as a number of scholars have pointed out, the relatively recent abandonment of Latin by educators coincides rather strikingly with American culture’s collapse into vapid superficiality....
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Degradation of European Diplomacy
In his latest Sputnik International interview, Srdja Trifkovic discusses the decision by a number of European countries, as well as the United States and Canada, to expel dozens of Russian diplomats over the Skripal case. Dr. Trifkovic was first asked for his overall assessment of the significance of this move. Audio (here). Article (here) ST: The...
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Is Trump Assembling a War Cabinet?
The last man standing between the U.S. and war with Iran may be a four-star general affectionately known to his Marines as “Mad Dog.” Gen. James Mattis, the secretary of defense, appears to be the last man in the Situation Room who believes the Iran nuclear deal may be worth preserving and that war with...
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Ominous Omnibus: Washington’s Eternal Present
My question for Paul Ryan, Republican Speaker of the House, is this: Do you believe in Judgment Day? Here’s why I ask. Our GOP-controlled Congress passed an Omnibus Spending Bill valued at $1.3 trillion in order to keep the government from shutting down. This bill preserves Medicaid “reimbursements” and Title X funding for “family planning.”...
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Will the Deep State Break Trump?
“It is becoming more obvious with each passing day that the men and the movement that broke Lyndon Johnson’s authority in 1968 are out to break Richard Nixon,” wrote David Broder on Oct. 8, 1969. “The likelihood is great that they will succeed again.” A columnist for the Washington Post, Broder was no fan of...
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Corruption and Contempt
“Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.” —Thomas Babington For those readers who know very much about Niccolo Machiavelli, the most striking feature of Michael Ledeen’s new book, which tries to explicate a number of Machiavelli’s precepts with...
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On Seeing America’s Wars Whole
Six Questions for A.G. Sulzberger March 20, 2018 Dear Mr. Sulzberger: Congratulations on assuming the reins of this nation’s—and arguably, the world’s—most influential publication. It’s the family business, of course, so your appointment to succeed your father doesn’t exactly qualify as a surprise. Even so, the responsibility for guiding the fortunes of a great institution...
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Western Media Narrative on Russia’s Election Written in Advance
In the aftermath of last Sunday’s presidential election in Russia, which he attended as an observer, Srdja Trifkovic gave an interview to the media group Politnavigator.net with his assessment of the overall problem of Western elite perceptions of Russia. Article (in Russian) Video (in Russian and Serbian) ST: In the mainstream Western media there will...
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Did Putin Order the Salisbury Hit?
Britain has yet to identify the assassin who tried to murder the double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury, England. But Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson knows who ordered the hit. “We think it overwhelmingly likely that it was (Russian President Vladimir Putin’s) decision to direct the use of a nerve agent on...
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Is the GOP Staring at Another 1930?
After the victory of Donald Trump in 2016, the GOP held the Senate and House, two-thirds of the governorships, and 1,000 more state legislators than they had on the day Barack Obama took office. “The Republican Party has not been this dominant in 90 years,” went the exultant claim. A year later, Republicans lost the...
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A Forgotten Centennial: The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
Last week saw one-hundredth anniversary of an event which greatly impacted the destinies of Europe and America for decades to come. It passed unnoticed by the media. On March 3, 1918, the Bolsheviks signed a peace treaty with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk. Far from sealing the Kaiserreich’s historic triumph in the East, its brutal...
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Globalists & Nationalists: Who Owns the Future?
Robert Bartley, the late editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal, was a free trade zealot who for decades championed a five-word amendment to the Constitution: “There shall be open borders.” Bartley accepted what the erasure of America’s borders and an endless influx or foreign peoples and goods would mean for his country. Said...
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The Managerial Mob
From the October 1998 issue of Chronicles. “Michael, we’re bigger than U.S. Steel,” boasts gangland mastermind Hyman Roth to his (quite temporary) partner, Michael Corleone, in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part II. Hyman, however, was not the first to say it, and those familiar with the life history and achievements of the gentleman on...
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Time to Get Over the Russophobia
Unless there is a late surge for Communist Party candidate Pavel Grudinin, who is running second with 7 percent, Vladimir Putin will be re-elected president of Russia for another six years on March 18. Then we must decide whether to continue on course into a second Cold War, or engage Russia, as every president sought...
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We Are Going, Gentlemen
From the August 1996 issue of Chronicles. “Poetry is the language of the state of crisis.” —Stéphane Mallarmé When Cleanth Brooks died at 87 in 1994, a great era of American literary criticism ended. Brooks had been one of John Crowe Ransom’s prize students at Vanderbilt, and when Ransom issued the call for a method...
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The Middle East: The Current Score
“Peace in the Middle East” is like the unicorn: we can envisage the beast, paint it in detail even, but we can’t groom a living specimen. The problem transcends geopolitics and ideology, it is also metaphysical. The people inhabiting the region are vying for limited resources, such as land and water. In addition, many also...
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Why Is the GOP Terrified of Tariffs?
From Lincoln to William McKinley to Theodore Roosevelt, and from Warren Harding through Calvin Coolidge, the Republican Party erected the most awesome manufacturing machine the world had ever seen. And, as the party of high tariffs through those seven decades, the GOP was rewarded by becoming America’s Party. Thirteen Republican presidents served from 1860 to...
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The Great Tariff Panic
President Trump’s announcement that he intends to impose tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum produced what can only be described as hysteria across the admittedly narrow spectrum of establishment opinion. Missing from all this commentary was any recognition that Trump’s recent tariffs on foreign washing machines and solar panels had already brought favorable results for...
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Fatal Delusions of Western Man
“We got China wrong. Now what?” ran the headline over the column in the Washington Post. “Remember how American engagement with China was going to make that communist backwater more like the democratic, capitalist West?” asked Charles Lane in his opening sentence. America’s elites believed that economic engagement and the opening of U.S. markets would...
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Putin’s New Weapons
The most interesting part of President Vladimir Putin’s two hours long state of nation address on March 1 was his announcement—accompanied by a video presentation—that Russia has developed a hypersonic state-of-the-art missile 20 times faster than the speed of sound, as well as a nuclear-powered cruise missile, both supposedly safe from interception. Putin claimed that...
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“Little Democracies”: The Disunification of Italy
I’ve been sent on a fool’s errand: to explain Italian politics. As those of you who have spent extended periods of time in the “Mediterranean boot” know, this is a challenging task. Understanding it requires doggedness—and a bit of masochism, too—given the internecine struggles for power and influence, the political divisions, intrigue, and tensions that...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Outside of my regular reading for the courses I’m teaching—this semester, this week, Livy’s History of Rome, Books 1-5, and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book 1—I have been reading mainly books and articles with some relation to nostalgia, broadly speaking. That has included what for me have been some gratifying discoveries, such as Thomas Molnar’s...
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The Loss of the Familiar
From the late 19th or early 20th century down to the present day, liberalism has been progressively oriented to psychology and therapeutic technique. Yet advanced liberalism in the 21st century is as materialist a creed as classical liberalism was in the 19th, and liberal psychology remains as firmly grounded in a materialist philosophy as it...
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Books in Brief
The Last 100 Days: FDR at War and Peace, by David B. Woolner (New York: Basic Books; 368 pp., $32.00). The author of this engaging, highly interesting, and extremely well-written book is senior fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian at the Roosevelt Institute, in addition to holding academic professorships at both Marist and Bard College. ...
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Korean Games
In his latest interview for the Iranian English-language TV network, live from their studio in Beirut, Srdja Trifkovic discusses the developments surrounding the Korean peninsula. [Watch interview here.] Q: Foreign affairs editor of Chronicles magazine Srdja Trifkovic joins us via satellite from the Lebanese capital Beirut . . . First of all, what are your...
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New Light on the Lakes
We had been dreaming about Andalusia. But plans sometimes must be altered, and so one August evening we found ourselves instead entering into Ulverston, 1,300 miles from Andalusia, and even more distant climatically, culturally, and historically. The Lake District—“England’s Switzerland,” Manchester’s playground, stamping grounds of Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter—is a magnet to millions of tourists,...
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Special Again
The British, like everyone else, enjoy feigning horror at President Donald Trump. Deep down, however, we know we need him, and we like him a lot more than we let on. The United Kingdom is in a difficult diplomatic position as it seeks to extricate itself from the European Union, and the transatlantic alliance with...