Foreign Policy
April 29, 2022 — John Hinderaker
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
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April 21, 2022 — Steven Hayward
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,
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March 23, 2022 — Steven Hayward
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
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February 23, 2022 — Steven Hayward
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,
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February 14, 2022 — Paul Mirengoff
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
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August 18, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
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,
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March 21, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
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,
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December 30, 2020 — Steven Hayward
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
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December 14, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Anne Gearan has an article in today’s Washington Post about Joe Biden and his likely approach to Israel and Saudi Arabia. I classify it as mostly good news, if true. I’m thinking, for example, of this passage: Biden has welcomed diplomatic deals among Israel and three Arab neighbors that Trump helped midwife and that are bitterly opposed by the Palestinian Authority. Biden also has said he will not revisit the
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November 25, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
I wanted to write a hard-hitting post about Joe Biden’s selections for key foreign policy jobs — Antony Blinken (Secretary of State), Alejandro Mayorkas (Secretary of Homeland Security), and Avril Haines (Director of National Intelligence). Then I found out that three Republican Senators have already done the work. According to the Washington Post, Sen. Tom Cotton called this collection “panda huggers who will only reinforce [Biden’s] instincts to go soft
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February 23, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Has Bernie Sanders ever lavished the kind of praise on the United States that he has heaped on the old regime of the Soviet Union, the dictators of Venezuela, or the Communist masters of Cuba? Has he ever praised the United States, period? When it comes to the United States versus its enemies, the guy is on the other side. It’s probably past time to take Sanders seriously and take
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January 6, 2020 — Steven Hayward
The fuss over President Trump’s decision to kill Iranian General Qasem Soleimani is causing the usual hair-on-fire reaction among the media and foreign policy elites. Everyone is playing the parlor game of wondering how Iran might respond, and how we might respond to Iran’s well-develop capacity for “asymmetric warfare.” I got to wondering what my late professor of international relations Harold W. Rood (d. 2011) might think of the scene.
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January 6, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Over at Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds posted an interesting message from a Facebook friend who wishes to remain anonymous. Here’s the relevant part: Following the death of Soleimani, it seems like nearly the entire DC / academia / journo natsec/forpol commentariat has penned variations on exactly the same essay: the President has acted hastily, has no plan, and isn’t capable of envisioning or handling what happens next. The template was established
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October 11, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Nationalism is the subject of the moment, and both the term and the idea come with more baggage than Paris Hilton and Khloe Kardashian after an afternoon of shopping on Rodeo Drive. I’ve had a few things to say about this controversial topic myself, but I am delighted to feature as this week’s special guest Colin Dueck of George Mason University, who is the author of a new book coming
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July 30, 2019 — Steven Hayward
I’m posting up our podcast early this week, as I thought might be traveling overseas tomorrow on a sudden mission, but instead a bad back is likely going to keep me immobile. In any case, by popular demand from listeners, this special edition of the Power Line Show features both Kelly Jane Torrance of the Washington Examiner and “Lucretia,” Power Line’s International Woman of Mystery. Kelly Jane is just back from
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December 19, 2018 — Steven Hayward
The left has long liked to charge America with being an imperial hegemon, and in general a bad force in the world. The old isolationist right sometimes joins them, lamenting the presence of American military outposts around the world, and the large cost of this footprint, not to mention the way it embroils us in conflicts in so many places. In other words, as someone (I forget who, but it
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July 21, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Nicholas Frankovich at NRO writes: Foreign-policy veterans of past Republican administrations figure disproportionately in the ranks of prominent conservatives who have checked out of the GOP since 2016. Some have concluded in good faith that the foreign-policy instincts of the Democratic party are less incompatible [than President Trump’s] with America’s best interest. To Republicans who chide them for party disloyalty, they answer that loyalty to country takes precedence. Republican foreign
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