Section: New Republic (USA)
How to Prosecute a War Criminal
In a 1924 article for the Frankfurter Zeitung entitled “Journey through Galicia: People and Place,” Joseph Roth referred to this easternmost region of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire—and his homeland—as a “maltreated, scorned corner of Europe” full of desolate villages and battle-scarred fields. There are some places where everything feels...
Flirting With Humanity
There have been machines that move themselves for millennia. In the first century C.E., the Greek mathematician Hero of Alexandria designed dolls that could be used to act out miniature theatrical scenes. The original treatises he wrote about these automata were lost to history. But a group of Sicilian scholars discovered Arabic translations in...
Clinton and Trump: Visions of America Abroad
Despite the media’s best efforts to keep us guessing, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are now the overwhelming favorites to represent the Democratic and Republican parties in the presidential election in the fall.And as Donald Trump’s speech last week made clear, they represent two very different potential trajectories for...
How to Start a New Life in the French Foreign Legion
Military service is often the chosen path of those with a patriotic calling. But for the men of the French Foreign Legion, the country they’re trained to fight and die for isn’t their own. Volunteers come from all over the world—Panama, Slovakia, the United States—to be sent to some of the most far-flung and dangerous posts occupied...
Vladimir Putin’s Little Helper
Russia has a special, unlikely friend in the European Union. Hungary, like Poland and the Baltic countries, underwent immense suffering at the hands of the Soviets during the Cold War. But Hungary is now willing to lend Moscow a hand, even if it means undermining EU solidarity at a time of acute crisis. A disloyal member state agitating against...
The Many Trials of a Nazi War Criminal
In April 1961, an Israeli court in Jerusalem assembled to determine the responsibility of Adolf Eichmann, a former senior Nazi official, for the transportation of European Jews to concentration camps and death camps in the Third Reich, among other crimes. That the prosecution, 16 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, of a single if prominent...
Vladimir Nabokov, Scientific Genius
In the spring of 1970, a 71-year-old Vladimir Nabokov gave chase to a rare, orange butterfly on the slopes of Mount Etna, sweating and panting, his lips “white rimmed with thirst and excitement.” Tucking the specimen into the inside pocket of his jacket, he told a New York Times reporter, “It is a feeling I usually get at my writing desk.”...
What Donald Trump Doesn’t Get About Alliances
Now that President Obama has returned from Havana, where he worked to reestablish relations with a former adversary, an unexpected foreign policy debate is emerging—not the longstanding hot-button issue of outreach to America’s enemies, but the subtler question of how America should handle its friends. For the first time in several decades,...
Lost in TRUMPLANDIA
Trump victory party, New Hampshire, February 2016. In the crowd: Rich, a former submariner (in camo); a great-grandmother named Diana Ross (Blossom hat); the author (pixie cut, no socks). “THE FED OWNS COWS!” a protester bellowed at me as I moved blindly toward the doors of a Donald Trump rally. It was February 8, the eve of the New Hampshire...
Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy Revolution
It’s easy to dismiss Donald Trump’s foreign policy as simple bluster, especially since he keeps shifting his stance on key issues when challenged by questioners. The idea that Trump is a lightweight when it comes to foreign policy was bolstered earlier this week, when he met The Washington Post’s editorial board and evaded tough...
