Section: New Republic (USA)
California Dreaming
What, in the age of Donald J. Trump, should a Democrat be? It didn’t take long, after Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, for Democratic officials to descend into a desperate and often acrimonious argument about the future of the party. Did it still rest with white working-class voters in the Rust Belt—those factory...
Armenia Is Breaking the Post-Soviet Mold
As the sun set over the Armenian capital of Yerevan on May 2nd, opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan made his way into the city’s central Republic Square to address a crowd of some 150,000 people. For almost three weeks, many of them had served alongside Pashinyan in a unprecedented and peaceful campaign of civil disobedience against the...
No Direction Home
For centuries, Europeans saw the bear as an intermediary between the human and animal worlds, promising superhuman might but also threatening descent into the inhuman. Medieval warriors venerated the animal in frenetic rituals, hoping to take on its fearsome power; male bears were said to kidnap and rape young women. Over time, the European bear...
A Cold War Without Guard Rails
For more than a year, President Donald Trump’s advisors and party leaders have been trying, with no success, to change his friendly attitude towards Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now thanks to a chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria, launched by Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad, Trump is finally starting to sour on the Kremlin, tweeting...
At What Point Can We Say Trump Is Sabotaging Russia Policy?
Self-help books often instruct their supplicants to consider the people with whom they surround themselves, as they provide support and guidance at the most critical moments in life. Britain, which understandably objects to having its sovereignty violated for an assassination attempt with a flashy Soviet-era nerve agent, would appear to be in...
The Dangerous Incoherence of Trump’s Russia Policy
In 2014, the Republican Congress passed the loftily named Ukrainian Freedom Support Act, which permitted the sale of lethal weapons to Ukraine. President Barack Obama signed the bill into law, but as The Washington Post reported, he “never authorized large commercial or government sales, a move widely seen as a de facto decision not to provide...
The Open Secret About Trump’s Collusion With Russia
Donald Trump made countless startling statements during last year’s presidential campaign, but one—in Doral, Florida—may be coming back to haunt him. At a televised news conference on July 27, 2016, Trump delivered a direct message to Moscow. Not content with the fact that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee, the candidate...
Sucking Up to the Boss Baby
The key to survival in Donald Trump’s orbit is knowing that you’re really only ever performing for an audience of one. Lose his approval and trust and you’re out. When Kellyanne Conway says that “a lot of people in the mainstream media interfered with our election by trying to help Hillary Clinton win” or Stephen Miller shouts...
How a Democracy Dies
We tend to think of democracies dying at the hands of men with guns. During the Cold War, coups d’etat accounted for nearly three out of every four democratic breakdowns. Military coups toppled Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi in 2013 and Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra in 2014. In cases like these, democracy dissolves in...
Why Stalin Starved Ukraine
History is a battleground, perennially fought over, endlessly contested. Nowhere does this aphorism hold true more than in Russia. A majority of Russians recently voted Joseph Stalin the “most outstanding person” in world history (followed, naturally, by current President Vladimir Putin). No longer the monster of the gulags and purges that killed...
