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Francis P. Sempa
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August 11, 2023
Maybe empires aren't so bad?"Robert Kaplan's Two Cheers for Empire" By FRANCIS P. SEMPA The Wilsonian strain of American foreign policy emphasizes the self-determination of peoples and the promotion of democracy as goals of U.S. foreign policy. It wa...
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January 24, 2023
Virtue-signaling tennis networks erase players' flagsAs I relaxed on my sofa to watch the opening round of the Australian Tennis Open on ESPN, I noticed that during some of the matches, the score box at the lower left-side of the screen had some blank white boxes that normally displayed the flag of the...
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October 29, 2022
America’s Strategy in World PoliticsThe Biden administration confronts potential enemies in Europe, the Indo-Pacific, and the Middle East -- the key power centers of the Eurasian landmass. Yet, its recent National Security Strategy emphasizes climate change as the world’s greates...
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October 5, 2022
Mike Pompeo and the Guns of OctoberFormer secretary of state and CIA director Mike Pompeo has written an op-ed piece in the Washington Times advocating what amounts to belligerent status for NATO and the U.S. in Russia's war with Ukraine and economic warfare against...
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September 27, 2022
'Trump is Hitler' rears its ugly head againKen Burns admits that his new PBS documentary on America's response to the Holocaust, which was originally planned to be released in 2023, was deliberately moved up to this year because of the threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump and his sup...
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September 20, 2022
Democrats have got to stop using James TaylorWhat is it with singer James Taylor and the Democrats? In 2015, secretary of state John Kerry brought Taylor to France to sing "You've Got a Friend" in response to a major terrorist attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris. ...
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August 31, 2022
Progressives and the new great power rivalryStephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace and a lecturer at Yale Law School and Catholic University, has written an essay in Foreign Affairs that inadvertently exposes "progressive" fo...
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August 26, 2022
The Man Who Won the WarAir Force general Curtis LeMay rarely gets mentioned when military historians rank America's greatest commanders, but he should. Most Americans, if they have ever heard of LeMay, know him from the caricatures created by Hollywood in the fictio...
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August 26, 2022
George Weigel attacks an America First foreign policyGeorge Weigel, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and regular contributor to First Things, uses a column claiming that there is no distinction between "wars of choice" and "wars of necessity" to ...
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August 10, 2022
What Joe McCarthy got rightOn Monday, the conservative Washington Times published an op-ed piece by Gerard Leval on "McCarthyism" that featured an illustration with McCarthy's face in the background and four dead victims hanging from ropes connected to a human ha...
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August 10, 2022
It’s Time for a 21st Century NSC-68It is time to dust off the strategic maps of the early 1950s and place them on the walls of Pentagon and State Department offices. It is time to place some old books on the shelves of our national security officials -- Halford Mackinder’s Democ...
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August 2, 2022
Americans who don't know their geography can't understand the Ukraine warThe 19th-century German geographer Friedrich Ratzel once wrote that "great statesmen have never lacked a feeling for geography." "When one speaks of a healthy political instinct," Ratzel continued, "one usually mea...
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July 30, 2022
How about some international restraint on Ukraine?Robert D. Kaplan is one of America's most important foreign policy thinkers. He currently holds the Robert Strausz-Hupe Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His recent essay in The National Interest...
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July 27, 2022
Condoleezza Rice joins the Old Guard in denial about RussiaSpeaking Friday at the Aspen Security Forum, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice defended the Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama administrations' efforts "to integrate Russia into the international system." All three administ...
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July 26, 2022
Codevilla's last words on America's Asia-Pacific policyEncounter Books has just published (posthumously) Angelo Codevilla's last book, America's Rise and Fall Among Nations, which is a fierce and unvarnished criticism of U.S. foreign policy in the 20th and 21st centuries. Codevilla, wh...
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July 21, 2022
Is détente with China a good idea?Kevin Rudd served as Australia's prime minister and foreign minister and currently is president of the Asia Society. In an article in Foreign Affairs, Rudd advocates what he calls "managed strategic competition" between the U...
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July 14, 2022
An academic tells us the 'safe' way to escalate the Ukraine WarDan Altman is an assistant professor of political science at Georgia State University. He has a Ph.D. from MIT and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center and Dartmouth's Dickey Center. He has just written a...
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July 13, 2022
The key to understanding our ruling elitesIn the United States, Congress passes laws but exempts its members from the law's reach. Presidents sign "executive orders" that are nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. Courts often make policy and change or obs...
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July 11, 2022
Henry Kissinger on leadershipIn his new book, Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy, Henry Kissinger, now age 99, expresses the concern that the ongoing cultural shift from the printed word — especially in books — to the more visual stimuli of the internet a...
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July 10, 2022
'I told you so': MacArthur called it 70 years agoAs a young lieutenant in the U.S. Army, Douglas MacArthur served as an aide-de-camp to his father, General Arthur MacArthur, and visited Japan, China, Burma, India, Ceylon, Singapore, Java, and other Asian lands. In Reminiscences, his memo...
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July 7, 2022
Can Liz Cheney really escape the shadow of her father?Wyoming congresswoman Elizabeth Cheney has become the darling of Democrats and their anti-Trump media allies. The Economist portrays her as the Gary Cooper character in the film High Noon, as if she were a lone, principled marshal battling...
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July 5, 2022
Charles Kupchan is half-right in his call for geopolitical realpolitikGeorgetown University's Charles Kupchan has written an important article in the National Interest that urges U.S. leaders to eschew "idealist aspirations" and refrain from efforts to globalize "the liberal order...
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June 30, 2022
The 'rules-based international order' is a mythAmerican foreign policy elites and their counterparts in allied countries, especially in Europe, repeatedly instruct us that diplomatic and military power should be used to "uphold" the "rules-based international order," which has...
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June 29, 2022
It looks as though the war is widening in UkraineReuters reports that the Turkish government has removed its objections to Finland and Sweden joining NATO. President Biden called it a move that "will strengthen our Alliance and bolster our collective security." More ...
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June 28, 2022
Anchors away...or should I say, 'Pronouns away'?Several weeks ago, the secretary of the Navy identified climate change as an "existential threat" to the U.S. Navy and the nation and proudly proclaimed that climate change is the "focal point" for his tenure. Now, acco...
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June 26, 2022
Conservatives need to stop supporting people who hate themIn the wake of the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood, the corporate and entertainment world have joined the pro-abortion chorus in denouncing the decision, the Court, and the pro-life movement. ...
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June 25, 2022
The 'raw judicial power' that overturning Roe v. Wade fixedThe words of Justice Samuel Alito in the Dobbs decision, in which the Supreme Court expressly overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, could not be clearer. "Roe was egregiously wrong from the start," he writes....
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June 24, 2022
'The US has undone all that Nixon accomplished'President Richard Nixon was a serious student and successful practitioner of global geopolitics. The greatest foreign policy achievement of his presidency was his skillful exploitation of the Sino-Soviet split. Nixon's strategic concep...
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June 21, 2022
The war in Ukraine and 'the follies of the victors'Winston Churchill titled the first chapter of the first volume of his history of the Second World War (The Gathering Storm) "The Follies of the Victors." Churchill recounted the missteps and errors committed by the victorious pow...
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June 20, 2022
Edward Luttwak's take on UkraineEdward Luttwak, the famed author of books on history and strategy including The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (1976), Strategy and Politics (1980), The Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union (1983), The Pentagon an...
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June 19, 2022
The N.Y. Times’ Bret Stephens fails Geopolitics 101Bret Stephens recently took to the pages of the New York Times to summarize the war in Ukraine: “The Russians are running out of precision guided weapons. The Ukrainians are running out of Soviet-era munitions. The world is running out of ...
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June 18, 2022
The rise and fall of the American empireEmpires usually collapse from internal forces which are sometimes exacerbated by international events. When the great British historian Arnold Toynbee cataloged the rise and fall of civilizations in his monumental multi-volume A Study of H...
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June 13, 2022
The U.S. Needs the Mature Realism of Walter LippmannAs our country deals with the foreign policy challenges of China’s bid for global dominance and Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, it could use a dose of the mature realism of Walter Lippmann, who was, at one time, the country’s most i...
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June 6, 2022
June 6: A special day in our householdJune 6 was always a special day in our household. It was a special day because my father, Frank F. Sempa, took part in the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944, as a sergeant in the 29th Division. Like most members of t...
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June 5, 2022
Thomas Friedman and World War IIIThomas Friedman, the New York Times’ foreign policy guru, claims that he has finally fully grasped what has happened in Ukraine: “I thought Vladimir Putin had invaded Ukraine,” he writes in a recent column. “I was wrong. Pu...
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June 3, 2022
Bret Stephens Says Biden Should Channel Truman on China-Taiwan – Really?Bret Stephens is The New York Times’ resident “conservative” – which roughly translates into an opinion columnist who isn’t part of the Times’ far-left stable of writers. In his most recent column on China...
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June 2, 2022
Why does Biden keep on poking the Russian bear?In what is becoming a routine occurrence with this White House, President Biden says one thing, and the next day the White House "walks back" the president's statement, and then the president follows up by confirming the "walk back...
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June 1, 2022
Time for Strategic Clarity on TaiwanThere is a debate about whether to end the U.S. policy of “strategic ambiguity” toward the island of Taiwan and replace it with strategic clarity. President Biden in recent remarks has stated that the United States will militarily defend ...
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May 31, 2022
George Will on Biden's 'achievement'George Will's recent column reviewing the first 500 days of the Biden presidency includes praise for the president's "deft diplomacy" and "stunning achievement" in the administration's response to Ukraine....
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May 29, 2022
The war on police meets the Uvalde shootingSince the Obama administration, and with the rise of anti-police district attorneys in several of our major cities, law enforcement has been placed on the defensive by civil authorities, liberal politicians, and the media. "Defund the...
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May 26, 2022
Kissinger at DavosThe globalists of the World Economic Forum are meeting at Davos to plan the future world order -- the world’s elites meet there annually to tell the rest of us how we should live our lives under their guidance and tutelage. Ukraine’s Pres...
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May 25, 2022
Repeating Jimmy Carter's mistakes in the nuclear arms raceIn the 1960s, under the leadership of Defense secretary Robert McNamara, the United States voluntarily surrendered the nuclear superiority it had constructed and maintained since the beginning of the Cold War. The theory that McNamara fois...
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May 24, 2022
Bari Weiss notices that the elites have turned against AmericaBari Weiss left the Wall Street Journal because it didn't condemn Donald Trump enough during the 2016 campaign. She joined the New York Times, which condemned Trump all the time. Weiss was a little to the right of most repor...
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May 20, 2022
Should George W. Bush go down in history as one of our worst presidents?Woodrow Wilson should go down in history as one of the worst presidents of the United States. And George W. Bush should be right next to him. These are not judgments of these historical figures as men — Bush, by all accounts, was ...
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May 19, 2022
What Would America's Two Greatest Statesmen Think of NATO?As the Cold War wound down in the early 1990s and the threat from the Soviet Union receded, the reason why the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was created disappeared. But bureaucracies die hard, and bureaucratic and political in...
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May 12, 2022
Is Britain making a mistake about Finland and Sweden?British prime minister Boris Johnson announced that Britain will pledge to support Finland's and Sweden's armed forces in the event of an attack. Britain said that "the new arrangements would intensify intelligence sharin...
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May 12, 2022
The return of Vindman, clamoring to start World War IIIAmong the most fervent war hawks in America today is Alexander Vindman, a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army and a former member of the NSC, who now works at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Foreign Policy Institute...
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May 10, 2022
Heroes and villains in AbortionlandThe juxtaposition of recent news stories about Mother Teresa, the Catholic saint, and Dr. Robert D. Spencer, an abortionist from Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, could not be more revealing about the pro-abortion movement and its media allies. ...
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May 7, 2022
George Bush needs to get a grip and stop Churchill-izing ZelenskyThe New York Post reports that former president George W. Bush called Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky "the Winston Churchill of our time." Bush spoke to Zelensky on May 5, 2022 via videoconference. Then, on Inst...
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May 6, 2022
Paul Krugman needs a history lesson on Russia and UkrainePaul Krugman is a New York Times columnist who usually writes on economics. He won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2008. He attended the best schools (Yale and MIT) and taught economics at Stanford and the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeto...
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May 2, 2022
Pelosi commits the United States to Ukraine's victoryNancy Pelosi traveled to Kyiv for a photo-op with the world's new "freedom fighter," Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. She announced to the world that "America stands firmly with Ukraine" and "our commitment...
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April 27, 2022
China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a Geopolitical OffensiveEver since China launched its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), some Western analysts have portrayed it as a geopolitical offensive designed to increase China’s influence in, and ultimately control of, Eurasia. These analysts often base their por...
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April 22, 2022
Putin is not Hitler, Zelensky is not Churchill, and Biden is not FDR.Western politicians and commentators who support doing more to defend Ukraine's independence frequently invoke World War II analogies to justify their policy preferences. They compare Putin to Hitler, Zekensky to Churchill, and le...
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April 20, 2022
World War Three? Worry more about World War OneFinland and Sweden are on the brink of applying for NATO membership, despite Russian president Vladimir Putin's warning that such a move could result in the escalation of the Russia-Ukraine war. Finland's European Union minister to...
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April 15, 2022
The Slow, Agonizing Death of NeoconservatismMatthew Continetti, writing in Commentary, credits leading neoconservatives, such as Irving Kristol and his son Bill Kristol, with "modernizing" conservatism so that the Republican Party — which neoconservatives reluctantly joined aft...
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April 14, 2022
How about we fight just one Cold War at a time?In an important article in Foreign Affairs entitled "The Ukraine Temptation," Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, urges the Biden administration to reject calls to effectively reverse America...
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April 13, 2022
Maureen Dowd takes on geopolitics...and losesI must confess that until reading Maureen Dowd's recent piece in the New York Times, I had never heard of Jaron Lanier, but Dowd quotes him throughout her column, which is about why the United States needs to commit to saving Ukrai...
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April 12, 2022
New York Times plays favorites with its evil autocratsIn his latest column on the Ukraine war, the New York Times's Thomas Friedman writes that when the leader of a superpower is a "war criminal," as Vladimir Putin is, "the world as we've known it is profoundly changed. ...
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April 10, 2022
Bill Clinton's supreme NATO screw-up comes back to haunt usWriting in the foreign policy mouthpiece of the Biden administration and the Democratic Party, The Atlantic, former president Bill Clinton attempts to defend his decision to begin the post–Cold War expansion of NATO by naming the members of his...
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April 9, 2022
National Review's Kevin Williamson redefines conservatismNational Review's Kevin Williamson is urging conservatives to divorce, or at least separate, for a time, from the Republican Party — that is, from the Donald Trump-led Republican Party. In a recent column, Williamson claims that wha...
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April 6, 2022
Putin's geostrategic guru?Writing in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, University of Colorado assistant professor Steven Pittz examines the ideas of Russian geopolitical philosopher Alexander Dugin and speculates about their possible influence on the ...
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April 5, 2022
Are we sure US politicians want to end the war in Ukraine?The road to war, like the road to hell, is sometimes paved with good intentions. We appear to be chugging toward a broader European war involving nuclear-armed powers, seemingly unable to get off a rhetorical treadmill headed to catastroph...
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April 1, 2022
No more American crusades, pleaseWhen America launches crusades at home and abroad, things rarely go as planned. That is because crusades for this or that cause usually stem from ideological motives, and ideology often blinds its proponents to uncomfortable realities....
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March 28, 2022
Mike Pence's 'Berlin Airlift'Former vice president Mike Pence, channeling his Harry Truman, told Fox News that "we need an Berlin Airlift for the 21st century" that would "marshal the resources of the free world to make sure the beleaguered people of Ukraine ...
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March 21, 2022
Zelensky suspends media and opposition partiesUkraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has suspended the activities of 11 opposition political parties in Ukraine's parliament and issued a decree that combines three privately owned television networks into one media platform controlled by...
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March 18, 2022
Anti-Trump National Review has forgotten Buckley's ruleWilliam F. Buckley, Jr., in refereeing the internecine political fights within his beloved National Review magazine, laid down a rule, suggested by senior editor James Burnham, that N.R. would support the most rightward viable or electable candidate ...
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March 17, 2022
Joe Biden's crash-and-burn foreign policy exposedWriting in the Wall Street Journal, the Hudson Institute's Walter Russell Mead pronounces the Biden administration's great power diplomacy an unmitigated failure. Mead's criticism cannot be dismissed as a partisan attack ...
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March 16, 2022
Questioning the Ukraine war does not make you a 'Putin apologist'Writing in Commentary, neoconservative Joshua Muravchick labels those who believe that the roots of the current Russia-Ukraine War lie at least in part in the post–Cold War expansion of NATO as "Putin apologists." He groups...
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March 14, 2022
'This is what happens when you poke the bear'As Russia ramps up its war against Ukraine, Western media and Western politicians ramp up their moral outrage and indignation. There is, to be sure, much to be morally outraged about in Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine and war against the ...
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March 9, 2022
National Review stands athwart history and yells...and nobody listens"People who spend a lot of time in front of Fox News or MSNBC," writes Kevin Williamson in National Review Online (NRO), "are not in the main what you'd call happy and well-adjusted people." Williamson is one of t...
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March 9, 2022
Will China act as mediator between Russia and Ukraine?The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Straits Times report that China has offered to mediate the war between Russia and Ukraine, while simultaneously emphasizing its "rock solid" ties with Russi...
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March 7, 2022
Trump impeachment witness calls for 'Lend-Lease' to UkraineRetired Army lieutenant colonel Alexander Vindman, a former member of the NSC staff and "star" impeachment witness against President Donald Trump, is calling on the United States to institute a "Lend-Lease" program to help Ukraine...
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March 3, 2022
How Mississippi could cause World War IIIMississippi senator Roger Wicker may be the most dangerous officeholder in Washington. A member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Wicker keeps publicly making proposals that would effectively have the United States at war with Russia...
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March 2, 2022
Meet the man who predicted the Ukraine war 30 years agoThe Russia-Ukraine war will likely end in one of three ways: Russia will annex all of Ukraine and reincorporate it into Russia; Russia will install a puppet regime in Kyiv and exercise effective political control over Ukraine's foreign policy, or...
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February 26, 2022
The new gangster pactAs voices in the West rightly condemn Russian president Vladimir Putin for the invasion of Ukraine, it is worth remembering how the United States and England responded to Stalin's invasion of Finland in 1940, and his invasions of Poland and the B...
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February 23, 2022
Laurence Tribe revives the Alien and Sedition Acts...and then retreatsProgressive Harvard Law professor emeritus Laurence Tribe tweeted an accusation of possible "treason" against Fox News's Tucker Carlson if Carlson provided "aid and comfort" to an enemy (Russia) that wages war against "ou...
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February 22, 2022
Roger Wicker plays dominoesMississippi GOP senator Roger Wicker is at it again, urging the Biden administration to "protect our democratic friends" in Ukraine and invoking the domino theory. Wicker, a member of the Armed Services Committee, previously sugg...
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February 5, 2022
Naomi Wolf vs. the forces of darknessRecently, David Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine featured an article about Naomi Wolf's turn to God and spirituality to combat the "forces of darkness" and evil, which, she believes, are behind vaccine mandates and other rest...
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November 17, 2021
Biden administration letting America's nuclear superiority slip through our fingersThe Pentagon's annual report on China's military included a section on the PLA's nuclear buildup. The report states that the People's Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) "is developing new intercontinental ballistic m...
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October 22, 2021
Acclaimed Chinese war propaganda film bodes ill for US relationsThe Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s English-language mouthpiece, the Global Times, is boasting that a new CCP-sponsored war movie, The Battle at Lake Changjin, described as "the story about how the Chinese People's Volunteers soldiers he...
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October 12, 2021
Mahan and the Problem of ChinaChinese President Xi Jinping has publicly called for the annexation of Taiwan. Chinese warplanes have entered Taiwan’s air defense space with increasing frequency. Reuters reported on October 11, 2021, that China carried out beach-landing milit...
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September 30, 2021
When leftists start defending the military leadership...The Foreign Affairs website features an article by liberal professors Ronald R. Krebs of the University of Minnesota and Robert Ralston of MIT and Harvard's Kennedy School, which criticizes conservatives for their recent distrust of Ame...
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September 22, 2021
Repeal the 17th AmendmentOn May 13, 1912, Congress passed the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was ratified on April 8, 1913. The 17th Amendment instituted the direct election by voters of U.S. senators who until then were chosen by state legislatures...
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September 15, 2021
An Eerie Warning from Hans MorgenthauHans J. Morgenthau was one of the leading scholars of international relationships during the mid-20th century. He served as a consultant to governments and an advisor to presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, before resigning due to disagr...
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August 20, 2021
Afghanistan was a failure of our elitesRobert Gates, who served in key national security positions for both Republican and Democrat administrations, wrote that Joe Biden has "been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four deca...
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July 30, 2021
Geopolitics And An Asian PopeCommunism’s greatest enemy has traditionally been organized religion, especially the Roman Catholic Church. The beginnings of the Soviet empire’s unraveling can be traced to 6:15 pm on October 16, 1978, when Poland’s Cardinal Karol ...
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July 25, 2021
James Burnham: An Original American ThinkerJuly 28, 2021, will mark the 34th anniversary of the death of James Burnham, one of the great American thinkers of the 20th century — or, for that matter, any century. Burnham was the author of seminal books on global sociopolitical ...
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July 17, 2021
Is Democracy Worth It?The global pandemic, the ongoing cultural revolution, and the divisive politics of the 2020 election have revealed the extent to which the American republic has trended toward oligarchy. Throughout the pandemic, federal and state officials have de...