Category Archives

Archive of posts published in the category: Foreign policy

Selective Collusion

We are supposed to consider every transaction anybody on Trump’s team had with the Russians to be an existential threat, yet we are supposed to ignore the $500,000 speaking fee Bill Clinton got and the millions they gave to the Clinton Foundation.

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The Alternative to Dominance

from James Dobbins at The WSJ, American Retrenchment Is a Golden Oldie But we don’t know how the country will respond to the next crisis. It took the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, nine months after Luce’s call to

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Surrender of Influence

from Thomas Donlan at Barron’s, Ignorance is Not Bliss German Chancellor Angela Merkel has had the chance to take Trump’s measure in the recent NATO and G-7 meetings, and her reading was not good. She reported this to her citizens: “The

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Eisenhower’s Footprint in The Middle East

Ike’s Gamble by Michael Doran is an account of the 1956 Suez Crisis with a perspective different from many previous ones which were directed from narratives from CIA players at the time. The United States under Eisenhower supported the rise

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Isolationism on the Left and Right

from The World According to Trump by Charles Krauthammer in National Review: Both the Left and the Right have a long history of advocating American retreat and retrenchment. The difference is that liberals want to come home because they think

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The Loss of American Competitiveness

from The Great Degeneration by Niall Ferguson Experts on economic competitiveness, like Michael Porter of Harvard Business School, define the term to include the ability of government to pass effective laws; the protection of physical and intellectual property rights and lack of

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The Hobbesian Optimist

From Bret Stephens at the WSJ,  Barack Obama Checks Out: Summing up the president’s worldview, Mr. Goldberg describes him as a “Hobbesian optimist”—which philosophically must be the equivalent of a Jew for Jesus. But Mr. Obama has shown that he

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A Policy of Impatience

from Victor Davis Hanson in National Review Online, The Costs of Abandoning Messy Wars Donald Trump has rightly reminded us during his campaign that Americans are sick and tired of costly overseas interventions. But what Trump forgets is that too

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Can The GOP Be Populist AND Realistic

from Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish, Conservatism Isn’t Dead: If conservatives want to win elections, their platform is going to have to be populist and realistic. That means small government, but the cuts have to start with the left’s sacred

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The Need for Sober Choices

from The Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens’ America’s Year of Living Dangerously The U.S. has lived through dangerous years before—1968 and 1980 come to mind. Hindsight is often the great redeemer, but both years ended with the American people making

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A Whirlpool of Blood

from The Middle East As it Will Be by Eliot Cohen in The American Interest: The future will be ghastly for that part of the world, and all that borders it. The United States will be somewhat distant from this whirlpool

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The Sweetness of Illusion

from Leon Wieseltier at The Atlantic,  The Iran Deal and The Rut of History. excerpt: But what is the alternative? This is the question that is supposed to silence all objections. It is, for a start, a demagogic question. This

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Intervention and Abdication

from the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, The West’s Refugee Crisis The lesson is that while intervention has risks, so does abdication. The difference is that at least intervention gives the West the opportunity to shape events, often for the

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The Real Cost of Virtue

from Bret Stephens at The Wall Street Journal, Farewell to the Era of No Fences: How did this happen? We mistook a holiday from history for the end of it. We built a fenceless world on the wrong set of

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Currency Manipulation

from the editors of the Wall Street Journal, Emerging Market Rip Tide: The destabilizing effect of QE threatens global growth at a moment when none of the major economies is firing on all cylinders. By encouraging overinvestment in developing countries,

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Austerity and Reality in Greece

from The Wall Street Journal, Greece and the Flight From Reality by Bret Stephens excerpt: But maybe rules isn’t quite the right word. The larger issue is reality—and Greece’s flight from it. Greece’s debt-to-GDP ratio is 177%, which sounds like

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Words Matter

In 1941 Senator Harry Truman made a comment in The New York Times, “if we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and that way let them

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Illusions of Grandeur

from The Wall Street Journal, Greece and the Flight From Reality by Bret Stephens excerpt: What’s more remarkable is how Greece’s flight from reality persists. Since Athens defaulted on its IMF loan last week, the Greeks have gotten a taste of what

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Wealth Without Work

from The Wall Street Journal, Greece and the Flight From Reality by Bret Stephens excerpt: These and other details give the lie to the claim that Athens’s woes are somehow the product of powerful and indifferent economic forces beyond its control: the

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A Tin Heart

From Commentary Magazine, If He Only Had a Heart: John Podhoretz comments in Michael Oren’s Book: His dealings with the elite media were likewise unpleasant. He called the New York Times editorial-page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, after the paper published an op-ed by

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