Section: The American Interest (USA)
Patronage and the Pandemic
In her testimony to the House Judiciary Committee last December, Stanford Law Professor Pamela Karlan floated a now-prescient hypothetical: what would we think if Trump conditioned disaster relief on a state’s willingness to go after his political opponents? Today, we are faced with the possibility that the President will use this crisis as...
Beware the Lion in the Kremlin
Attend almost any major global summit and you may spy a lion in sheep’s clothing, pretending to belong to the flock of the civilized nations of the world. When back at home, this same lion, its claws peeking out behind its paws, pads around the halls of the Kremlin, seeking his next prey abroad while also eyeing his compatriots closer to...
Behind Putin’s Power Grab
When Vladimir Putin became President in 2018 for the fourth time, Russians steeled themselves for a long six years of Brezhnev-style sclerosis, knowing that no real political revival could take place until this last term was up. Under the Russian constitution, Putin could not legally assume the presidency in 2024—at least not without rewriting...
Intelligence Failure
In the pre-coronavirus era, President Trump’s attacks on the so-called Deep State seemed focused on one thing: undermining the Intelligence Community’s assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 campaign to help get him elected, and more recently, stopping the IC from raising similar alarms about the 2020 campaign. Trump’s...
The Sino-Semitic Connection
Having sideswiped the memory of Calvin Coolidge in Part III and snookered a twisted Navy Seals motto into service in Parts IV and V of this essay series, we now embark upon the last of three promises made back on December 10: Redeeming the claim that Jewish diaspora history can help us understand Singapore.James Thurber once warned that, “You...
“Totalitarianism as a Mindset Can Be Anywhere”
The American Interest recently convened TAI Chairman Francis Fukuyama and Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Republic of Imagination, for a wide-ranging conversation. They discussed the coronavirus pandemic, news from Iran, identity politics, campus trends, and why imagination and literature are essential to combatting...
Don’t Let Putin Whitewash History
President Vladimir Putin cleared the penultimate barrier to his staying on in power indefinitely by having Russia’s highest court ruled in favor of amending the country’s constitution to remove presidential term limits. His tenure in office already exceeds that of his hero, Josef Stalin, and guarantees the continuing pursuit of...
Wars of Religion
“We are ready to die for our church and that is what we are demonstrating tonight.” This provocative statement was given by Andrija Mandić, the leader of the opposition in the Montenegrin Parliament, on the eve of the recent passage of a controversial law on religious property in the country. This law stipulates that the Serbian Orthodox Church...
An Unorthodox Partnership
Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy: Religion, Politics, and StrategyDmitry AdamskyStanford University Press, 2019, 376 pp., $30 During communist times, Orthodox churches collaborated across their institutional hierarchies with communist intelligence services. The declassification of files over the past three decades has revealed how stunningly close ties...
Russia’s Battle for Memory and Justice
On the last weekend of February, more than 20,000 people marched in downtown Moscow to mark the fifth anniversary of the murder of Boris Nemtsov, Russia’s former deputy prime minister and Vladimir Putin’s most prominent opponent. Chanting “Russia will be free” and “murderer out of the Kremlin,” demonstrators walked down the same path...
