Section: The American Conservative (USA)
What is America Fighting For?
After being sworn in for a fourth term, Vladimir Putin departed the Kremlin for Annunciation Cathedral to receive the televised blessing of Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church. The patriarch and his priests in sacred vestments surrounded Putin, who, standing alone, made the sign of the cross. Meanwhile, sacred vestments from the...
Europe’s Counterpunch to America Over the Iran Deal
Donald Trump may have inadvertently done Europe a favor. By unilaterally and definitively violating the Iran nuclear deal, the Trump administration is galvanizing Europeans in unprecedented ways to challenge the capricious use of U.S. secondary sanctions and American dominance of the global financial system. These sanctions—which threaten to...
The Dogs Of War Are Back
“As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.” — Proverbs 26:11 Peter Beinart writes in detail about how he, a supporter of the Iraq War, fell for the arguments for war last time, and how we are now going through a repeat of the same thing with Iran. Excerpt: How is this possible? How is it possible that Trump—who during the...
‘What’s The Matter With Orthodox Countries?’
Speaking of Orthodoxy, I’ve been thinking about this column for a couple of weeks: Eastern Orthodox Christianity has done more to shape certain ex-Communist countries than communism. It also, some say, made their people relatively unhappy and anti-capitalist. This theory got a lot of play in 1990s Russia but has now resurfaced in a fresh...
Profaning The Sacred At The Met Gala
In the autumn of 1989, or maybe 1990, I was looking for a Halloween costume. I had it in my head to costume as a cleric for some reason. I was nominally Christian, and curious about Roman Catholicism, but not religious in any real sense. I decided to go to a rectory at an older inner city parish, to see if they had any old cassocks they...
Social Science Fails to Prove Racists Elected Trump
The field of “Trump studies” is vast—but disappointingly homogenous. One way to understand its paradoxical scope and uniformity is through co-occurrence searches on Google Scholar. A query for “Donald Trump” and “racism,” for instance, would net you more than 8,000 articles published since 2016 in journals or textbooks or cited in academic...
Conservatism in Crisis
When members of Young Americans for Freedom gathered at their convention on September 11, 1964, to hear an address by William F. Buckley Jr., they expected flights of eloquence hailing the looming glorious victory of Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. But Buckley had other ideas. Goldwater’s nomination, he said, “when we...
Macron: The Last Multilateralist
“Together,” President Macron instructed President Trump, “we can resist the rise of aggressive nationalisms that deny our history and divide the world.” In an address before Congress on Wednesday, France’s Macron denounced “extreme nationalism,” invoked the UN, NATO, WTO, and Paris climate accord, and implored Trump’s America to come...
Too Many Foreign Policy Double Standards Hurt U.S. Credibility
American leaders like to portray the United States as an exemplar of ethical conduct in the international system. The reality is far different, and it has been for decades. Throughout the Cold War, the United States embraced extremely repressive rulers, including the Shah of Iran, Nicaragua’s Somoza family, Taiwan’s Chiang Kai-shek,...
Marxists Look Back on the Russian Revolution
October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, China Míeville, Verso, 384 pages. The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution, Tariq Ali, Verso, 384 pages. On October 25, 1917, across the city of Petrograd, the Bolshevik party was preparing to take power from the Provisional Government that had overthrown the autocratic Tsarist...
