Patrick Lawrence: The Palestinians Won in The Hague: So Did the Rest of Us
The non–West has spoken, it has raised its voice. Half a dozen years ago I sat in the lobby lounge at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan talking at length with Richard Falk, the scholar, lawyer, U.N. rapporteur, and advocate of Palestinian…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Russia’s Turn From the West
Sergei Lavrov’s recent comments are a case of the subtext being vastly larger than the text. Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s steady, able, intellectually quick foreign minister, last week held one of those wide-ranging press conferences he and his boss favor. Lavrov’s…
“Genocide is not a ‘lesser evil.'”
How will Democrats vote in November? On Tuesday of last week, my Senator of many decades, Democrat Patty Murray of Washington State, joined 72 of her colleagues to kill a resolution that would have required the State Department to produce…
Patrick Lawrence: This Is Not Another ‘Phoney War’
It Just Got Very Real. Amid the tit-for-tats along Israel’s border with Lebanon over the past few weeks, the Houthis’ shelling of Red Sea traffic and repeated assertions that the U.S. does not want to widen the Gaza crisis into…
Patrick Lawrence: The End of Global Leadership
The West’s Decline Is Upon Us There are many photographs of President Biden floating around these days. Maybe it is because, even allowing for his physical decline and his mental incompetence, his minders can no longer keep him so thoroughly…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Outsider Among Us
John Pilger, 1939–2023 In the spring of 1983, the late and greatly missed John Pilger began broadcasting a series of interviews called The Outsiders on British television. His subjects ranged widely. Costa–Gavras, Jessica Mitford, Seán MacBride, the Irish political figure and 1974 Nobelist, and Helen Suzman,…
Patrick Lawrence: What Is Said and What Is Done
U.S. Policy as Spectacle Those Israelis: They are too honest sometimes, aren’t they? It is damnably inconvenient when they explain in perfectly plain terms that the Israel Defense Forces’ intent in Gaza is to ethnic-cleanse the territory of Palestinians, or…
“‘Terrorism,’ this insidious word.”
It has many dangers. John V. Whitbeck Reacting to the U.S. response after the events of 11 September 2001, John Whitbeck, an international attorney of long standing, wrote a piece on the use and abuse of the word “terrorism” for Global…
“Birdsong and laughter.”
Remembering what matters most. Over the holidays, a friend paused toward the end of an evening’s talk and jollifications to ask, “Should we be celebrating?” We stood together in front of the decorated Christmas tree and in the course of…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Lost & Fearful in The Middle East
The Biden regime wanders in a funhouse of its own making. Of all the amateurish moments to arise as the Biden regime conducts its foreign policy, the White House’s official statement as B1–B bombers let loose over Iraq and Syria last Friday…