“Latin America’s turning tide.”
It is pink again. It is difficult to overstate the significance of last Sunday’s elections in Colombia, which will shortly send Gustavo Petro to the presidential palace. Petro proposes fundamentally to alter the direction of Latin America’s fourth-largest economy and…
Why Did Twitter Cancel This Veteran Journalist?
Social media censorship is threatening our press freedoms, the First Amendment, and at the horizon what remains of our democratic polity. I was leafing through the overnight Twitter feed over breakfast a couple of months ago when the screen on…
Can the U.S. handle a multi-polar world?
“We are the provocateurs” — offered as a condemnation of current US foreign policy — might seem the sort of untutored comment attributed by establishment pundits to the “fake news” environment of the internet. Indeed, recent columns written by veteran…
Patrick Lawrence: Will Biden Provoke War with China?
Host Robert Scheer speaks with veteran foreign correspondent Patrick Lawrence on his criticisms of provocative US and NATO policies — and his subsequent ban by Twitter. “We are the provocateurs” — offered as a condemnation of current US foreign policy…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Biden’s Taiwan Talk
We are witnessing the gradual dismantling of strategic ambiguity in favor of the clarity urged by Trump’s belligerent secretary of state, Mike Pompeo. Watching President Joe Biden’s stunningly clumsy performance in Tokyo last week, during which he committed the U.S. to…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The New Iron Curtain
The Ukraine crisis proves to be Europe’s crucible and Europe proves a profound disappointment. We have read a great deal about a new Cold War since the U.S. cultivated the coup of February 2014 in Ukraine and the nation was…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: A Nation of ‘Geophobes’
Amid rampant Russophobia and Sinophobia, America’s penchant for Cold-War “national character analysis” will — if left unchecked — lead the U.S. into deepest trouble. Ruminating on the American condition some years ago, I invented a word to describe us as…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Ukraine & the Strength of Nonalignment
Liberals once mocked the Bush–Cheney regime’s with-us-or-against-us routines. Now the trans–Atlantic foreign policy cliques have no capacity to see the world differently. I was interested to read, last December, of the expansive agreements Vladimir Putin and Mahendra Modi signed at the conclusion of…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Great Acquiescence — Glory to Ukraine
Americans don’t merely acquiesce to the imperium’s wars, interventions, collective punishments and assorted other deprivations. They actively embrace them. The other day I ventured forth from my remote village to a lively market town called Great Barrington to shop for…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Biden’s Summit of No-Shows
This could prove an historic shift, reversing more than a century of usually coercive influence in Latin America. I tip my cap, as we all should, to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico. And to Presidents Luis Arce of Bolivia, Xiaomara…