“The hardliners return.”
Iran under Raeisi. Iran has a new president, and new leadership altogether. The Islamic Republic’s presidential elections on 18 June brought Sayyed Ebrahim Raeisi, the hardline cleric and judiciary chief, to power. Raeisi had lost the previous presidential contest, in…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Power
Patrick Lawrence asks some pertinent questions of the American people. Are Americans going to sit around indefinitely eating potato chips while the State Department and Treasury starve Venezuelan children? Are Americans going to play video games while Israel fires U.S.–made…
“Inflation and its perils.”
The Fed’s still clueless. The 99 percent will pay for it. Even though this year’s annual gathering of central bankers and scholars didn’t take place near the dramatic backdrop of the Tetons, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s virtually delivered speech…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: No Insight After Afghanistan
Remaking the world — all of it — in the U.S. image has been a foundation stone of American foreign policy since the Wilson administration — a century ago. Tragedy, a scholarly friend reminds me, does not mean merely a…
“With God on his side.”
The Washington Post’s resident theocrat. The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson is at it again. In a recent column, the theocrat and armchair militarist alerts readers that the real danger to the republic lies not in the emerging of among Wall Street,…
“And now?”
Post–Afghanistan truths and lies. Americans are alive with questions now that Kabul has fallen, though “fallen” does not seem quite our word any more than it was in late April 46 years ago: Saigon did not fall; it rose. Vietnam…
“China manufactures things and social cohesion.”
And America manufactures financial instruments and decay. What has been described in the American press as a Chinese crackdown on private enterprise is more in the nature of an existential choice for Beijing. The government has decided to live by producing stuff…
“Pacific dénouements.”
We’re bombing badly in China. You did not read much about Wendy Sherman’s disastrous official visit last week to Tianjin, where the deputy secretary of state held talks with Xie Feng, her counterpart as vice-foreign minister, and met—key distinction here—Wang…
“The long fight simply to know.”
An exchange with Peter Kaufman It is not often a writer comes along who brings the ballast of history to our contemporary predicaments. This requires a certain intellectual depth and a lot of shoulder in contact with the wheel. Peter…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: A Different World Order
A new order among nations does not imply some kind of Orwellian Oceania — a globally homogenized superstate, the grotesque dream of liberal cosmopolitans. You have to applaud — and read carefully into — the events that followed Washington’s latest…