Vladimir Putin

What is to be done?

Featured image Russia’s attempted murder of former Russian spy Serge Skripal and his daughter Yulia on British soil is an act of war, isn’t it? Austin Bay takes up the question here. I take it that if it’s not, it may be close enough for government work. Someone remind me. What did President Obama do about Iran’s attempted assassination of the Saudi ambassador to the United States in Washington, DC. Whatever it »

Trump’s 2013 letter to Putin

Featured image A front-page story in the Washington Post informs us that, in 2013, Donald Trump wrote a note to Vladimir Putin inviting him to attend the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. As the Post puts it, “Donald Trump was so eager to have Vladi­mir Putin attend the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow that he wrote a personal letter to the Russian president inviting him to the event, according to multiple »

Putin could not be reached for comment

Featured image Rep. Adam Schiff is a highly partisan proponent of the thesis that the Trump campaign colluded with Putin in the 2016 election. This week he made his incredibly thin case in this Wall Street Journal column (behind the Journal’s paywall). I infer from Schiff’s column that the collusion thesis is impervious to the failure of proof. “Complex global investigations take time,” he explained. Schiff went further on CNN. There he »

At the Washington Post, if it misleads, it leads

Featured image The lead headline on the Washington Post’s web page right now is: “Putin thanks Trump for CIA intel that foiled a planned terrorist attack in Russia.” The story isn’t earth-shattering but has the virtue of enabling the Post to write a lead headline that includes “Putin” and “Trump.” Post reporter David Filipov characterizes Putin’s call as “unusual.” He says “countries share intelligence all the time, but presidents rarely publicly thank »

Trump vouches for sincerity of Putin’s “meddling” denial

Featured image President Trump returned today to the question of Russian meddling in 2016 president election. He stated that Vladimir Putin, in response to his questions about the matter, has repeatedly denied meddling. Trump added that he believes Putin’s denials are sincere. Trump didn’t say he believes Putin’s denial, only that the denial is sincere. It’s unlikely, however, that if Putin meddled, his denial is sincere. Putin almost surely has a firm »

How to think about Putin

Featured image Imprimis recently published a shortened version of Weekly Standard senior editor Christopher Caldwell’s lecture at Hillsdale College under the heading “How to think about Vladimir Putin.” Last week Hillsdale got around to posting the video of Caldwell’s lecture (below). I found both the condensed written version and full video of Caldwell’s lecture of interest. I thought some readers might as well. Caldwell says early on in his lecture: “[I]f we »

The Russians Are Coming!

Featured image I’m actually on a train today—yes, a train in California—and so I can’t watch either the intelligence committee hearings or the Gorsuch nomination hearings. But I see that Paul is on the case, so we’ve got it covered. I can’t think the left and the media (but I repeat. . .) are happy to have both of these hearings going on simultaneously, because they commit fratricide against their outrage efforts. »

The Case For Russian Hacking

Featured image I wrote here, here and here about the Obama administration’s two reports that purport to show that the DNC’s email system was penetrated by Russian intelligence. (For reasons about which we can only speculate, they don’t talk about the intrusion into the email account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta.) I concluded that those reports completely failed to make the case that the Russians were behind the DNC hack. »

Those Inscrutable Russians

Featured image As previously observed here and elsewhere, it makes no sense to think that Vladimir Putin actually favored Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton on the merits of policy. More likely Putin’s goons were merely celebrating—even as most Never Trumpers did—the schadenfreudtastic spectacle of Hillary losing, and the chaotic potential it might augur. Perhaps Putin thinks that an inexperienced American president is preferable to Clinton, but that seems a risk. On the »

Obama’s useful idiocy: A look back

Featured image In the closing hours of his second term, President Obama has emerged as a sort of anti-Russian Cold Warrior. He presents such a bizarre spectacle it’s enough to make one wonder whether something else is going on. Is the Emperor fully clothed? The mischievous Victor Davis Hanson says aloud: In its remaining days in power, the Obama administration suddenly punished Vladimir Putin’s Russia for allegedly interfering in the U.S. presidential »

Russian Hackery for Hacks [With Comment by John]

Featured image In case you missed it last Friday in the run-up to Christmas, Brian Kennedy of the American Strategy Group offered up an extremely lucid analysis of the complete absurdity of the thesis that Putin’s Russia hacked into our election process with the deliberate intent to help Donald Trump win. To be sure, Trump’s equivocal statements about Putin lend some superficial plausibility to this idea—if you’re six years old. Or a »

Putin’s infowar on America

Featured image Donald Trump induced some kind of a nervous breakdown in the Democrat/Media Complex last week with his invitation that Russia release its putative trove of deleted Clinton emails. The Democrats’ hysteria constituted an exercise in bad faith, the Media’s hysteria an exercise in servile stupidity. That’s just the way it is. They have moved on. They now seek to exploit Donald Trump’s refusal to abide by the first law of »

For Obama, trash talk is cheap

Featured image Given the number of times Vladimir Putin has rubbed President Obama’s face in it, one shouldn’t be surprised to see Obama talk trash about the Russia strong man. Today, at his press conference, the president claimed to have gotten the better of Putin in Syria — adding, with equal doses of condescension and chutzpah, that he takes no pleasure in it. According to Obama, Putin now finds himself in a »

If Putin is reading her email…

Featured image It is highly likely that Vladimir Putin’s minions obtained Hillary Clinton’s emails while they were hanging out there on her insecure private server. Even former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said so. (I’m sure the same applies to the intelligence services of other hostile states as well.) Well, so what? Paul Roderick Gregory addresses the question in an intensely interesting Forbes column. Gregory reviews the course of »

U.S. foreign policy: from bad to worse in 2016?

Featured image 2015 was a bad foreign policy year for America. Our enemies in Tehran won a pathway to prosperity and additional regional influence without losing the ability to obtain nuclear weapons within 10 to 15 years, or sooner if they choose. Our enemy in Moscow enjoyed an enormous expansion of his influence in the Middle East and continues to menace U.S. allies in Europe. Our enemy in Damascus, propped up by »

Putin Endorses Trump

Featured image I wrote yesterday that the politician on the world stage who reminds me most of Donald Trump is Vladimir Putin. Some Trump fans howled at being compared with a Communist, or oligarch, or master thief, or whatever Putin is. (The point I made was that Putin, like Trump, is a populist who ran on a “Make Russia great again!” platform and whose crude macho shtick is beloved by his fans.) »

The Bear Pokes the Unbearable Obama

Featured image A totally unsurprising news item from Reuters this morning: U.S. Navy scrambled jets as Russian warplanes approached carrier WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier scrambled four fighter jets to intercept approaching Russian warplanes as it carried out a military exercise on Tuesday in the Sea of Japan, U.S. military officials said on Thursday. The two Russian TU-145 “Bear” jets came as close as a nautical mile from the »