Foreign Policy

Defense Rests

Featured image Joe Biden seems aware that the people “slaughtered in Israel” include “at least 32 American citizens” and “scores of innocents,” from infants to elderly grandparents, have been “taken hostage.” Biden claims the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are “working closely with state and local law enforcement and Jewish community partners to identify and disrupt any domestic threat that could emerge in connection with these horrific »

Russia: No One Knows Anything

Featured image Screenwriter William Goldman’s famous line about Hollywood—”No one knows anything”—applies fully to the confusing scene in Russia right now. And let’s not go further without also bringing up for the millionth time Churchill’s description of Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” There’s a sentence in one of the Wall Street Journal‘s many articles about the matter today that reminds of this: “The full story behind »

What’s Wrong with American Foreign Policy in One Embassy

Featured image Sometime in the middle of our unfolding Iraq agony beginning 20 years ago, the State Department decided it needed to build a new embassy compound in Baghdad at a total cost approaching $1 billion. No one seemed to ask why our mission in Iraq, which we assumed wouldn’t last forever, needed what looked like an outpost for a permanent colonial empire rather than a mere security necessity. What security necessity—both »

Joe Biden Speaks

Featured image At the G7 meeting in Japan, Joe Biden went on a riff that seems to be about our federal budget. See if you can figure out what he is trying to say: President Biden rambles unintelligibly for 40 seconds… pic.twitter.com/eaMZB0OQzo — The First (@TheFirstonTV) May 21, 2023 Can you imagine being one of the G7 translators and trying to turn this mush into something intelligible in a foreign language? More »

The Peacemaker

Featured image Steve Hayward is the author of the two-volume history The Age of Reagan. Matt Continetti is the author of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. They agree — Steve here (Washington Free Beacon) and Matt here (Wall Street Journal) — that William Inboden’s The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink is must reading. Inboden is the executive director of the Clements Center »

Armageddon? Just Kidding

Featured image Joe Biden’s dementia took center stage in world diplomatic circles when he went off-script at a fundraiser last night. He was quoted as saying: “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since [President JFK] Kennedy and the [1962] Cuban missile crisis. “I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily use a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon.” *** Mr Biden said he »

Walter Russell Mead: The Arc of a Covenant

Featured image Walter Russell Mead is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and the Wall Street Journal’s Global View columnist. He is the author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (2002), perhaps the most important foreign policy book of the past 25 years, and, most recently, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of »

Photo of the Day

Featured image At first I thought this photo of the G-7 meeting had to be a fake, or deeply photoshopped, but apparently it is genuine: First of all, Boris Johnson looks like he just stumbled in from an all-night bender. And just where is President Biden’s right hand? I’m working on a separate piece about why this was maybe the worst G-7 meeting since the 1979 G-7 meeting in Japan, which, coincidentally, »

The Next War?

Featured image It is very likely the case that the next major war has started. No—I don’t mean the Russia-Ukraine War, which could yet spread to the rest of Europe if we’re unlucky. I mean the Israel-Iran War. It has been said that Israel and Iran have been at open war for some time now. (Actually, Iran and the U.S. have likewise been at war since 1979, though don’t tell John Kerry.) »

Mike Pompeo, Live

Featured image If you live within driving distance of the Twin Cities, you should consider joining us at next Friday’s American Experiment Annual Dinner. It is a great event that in the past has featured as keynote speakers such luminaries as Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev and the first President Bush. This year, former Secretary of State Michael Pompeo will be our speaker. With foreign policy back on the front burner, it is »

I Can’t Believe I Miss Jimmy Carter

Featured image I’m slowly working up to a long piece about the parallels between the hapless Jimmy Carter Administration and the Biden Clown Show that go beyond inflation, energy market disruptions, foreign policy cluelessness, and other totems of the dismal 1970s. Carter, we tend to forget today, was the Democratic establishment’s necessary and acceptable choice to outflank George Wallace, who had a real shot of winning the Democratic nomination in 1976. In 2020, »

Today’s Stan: On Foreign Policy

Featured image Terrific time last night in Washington speaking about Stan Evans to the Frank Meyer Society. With the Ukraine crisis dividing the right, I thought readers might like this passage from the penultimate chapter, where Evans expressed some skepticism about neoconservative foreign policy (by the way, one of his quips from this period was: “A paleoconservative is a conservative who has been mugged by a neoconservative”): When President George H.W. Bush »

Media Closing Ranks Around Biden on Ukraine

Featured image Scott noted here that it has taken over 80 years, but Hollywood finally got round to exonerating Neville Chamberlain for his malfeasance in Munich in 1938. Today’s media isn’t even waiting 80 hours to exonerate President Biden. They are already declaring this to be Biden’s finest hour. Behold the Washington Post just three days ago: With or without war, Ukraine gives Biden a new lease on leadership Six months ago, »

What does a National Conservative foreign policy look like in practice?

Featured image In this post, I linked to a New York Times op-ed by three leading National (or Common Good) Conservatives on foreign policy. The piece, called “Hawks Are Standing in the Way of a New Republican Party,” was written by Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, and Gladden Pappin. My post didn’t discuss the merits of the New York Times op-ed. Instead, I cited it as an example of what looks like a »

Why does Biden always get it wrong?

Featured image Joe Biden’s record on major foreign policy defies the law of averages. It seems almost impossible to have been wrong time after time on the big questions. Peter Wehner provides the following partial list of Biden’s misses: In 1975, Biden opposed giving aid to the South Vietnamese government during its war against the North, ensuring the victory of a brutal regime and causing a mass exodus of refugees. In 1991, »

Should concern over “hate crimes” influence American foreign policy?

Featured image The mainstream media is struggling to reconcile its attacks on Donald Trump for speaking harshly about nations like China and Iran with its approval of (or at least non-judgmental posture towards) Joe Biden doing the same thing. To this struggle, we can add the task of defending Biden’s anti-China rhetoric while continuing to blame Trump’s rhetoric for “hate crimes” against Asian-Americans. Two Asian-American professors, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janelle Wong, »

Inside the COVID Pork Bill

Featured image Did you know that today is National Bacon Day? I didn’t—but then I tend to think that every day is national bacon day. Or at least ought to be. Maybe when Homer Simpson is president. In any case, our mind is on pork a lot at the moment because of the 5,593-page COVID relief and omnibus spending mashup Congress passed and President Trump reluctantly signed a couple days ago. There »