Patrick Lawrence: The Pentagon’s Balloon Floats On
It is just as well that Antony “Guardrails” Blinken has called off his long-scheduled visit to Beijing, which was due to begin Tuesday. It would have been his first since taking over at State and the first by a secretary of…
Patrick Lawrence: The Pathology of Ukrainian Nationalism
What kind of people are these? I asked as I considered, in my previous commentary, the bottomless corruption and cynical theft that have lately bubbled to the surface in Ukraine. What kind of polity is this? What kind of country is…
Patrick Lawrence: The Shadows Descend in Ukraine
Two of my favorite New York Times words are “shadowy” and “murky.” They are brilliantly suited to the Manichean version of our world the Times inflicts daily upon its unsuspecting readers. When The Times terms someone or some society or…
Patrick Lawrence: Investigate This, Jim Jordan
Somewhere between the first and second times I heard someone say “weaponize,” this term and its derivatives—“weaponizing,” “weaponization,” and so on—began to repel me. It was the crudity of it, or the way it served as an accusatory dismissal, like…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Biden’s Secret Stash
If this president didn’t know he was in possession of classified documents, in some cases for more than a decade, he simply is not qualified to hold any public office allowing him such access. There are two things I love about the…
Patrick Lawrence: Japan Reenlists as Washington’s Spear-Carrier
It is always the same when Japanese premiers travel to Washington to summit at the White House. Nothing seems to happen and nobody pays much attention even when important things happen, when we should all pay attention, and, when we…
“Between myth and history.”
Our 21st century passage. In mid-December, on a cold, rainy evening in Washington, I spoke to the Committee for the Republic, an interesting group of constitutionalists dedicated in large measure to restoring the rule of law to our institutions of…
Patrick Lawrence: ‘Pessimism of the Mind, Optimism of the Will’
Some years ago now, while researching a book that eventually came out as Somebody Else’s Century, I spent time in Ahmedabad, a city in the northwest Indian state of Gujarat. Ahmedabad has a long and interesting history as a place where…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Dimming the Lights
Two U.S. universities have recently taken the cultivation of ignorance to new lows, although at this point one hesitates to make any assumption as to where the bottom lies. Somewhere along the line, the thought seems to have taken hold among…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Press Reckoning on Russiagate
Jeff Gerth’s investigation for The Columbia Journalism Review exposes the dark heart of the news media’s coverage of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. In the autumn of 1973, Jack Anderson, the wonderful iconoclast of the Washington press corps, published…