Patrick Lawrence: The Disinformation Complex: An Anatomy
Sometime in the mid–Russiagate years, when it became clear that America was on a swoon back into the collective neuroses of the 1950s, I began to think we would have to wait for future historians to retrieve the truth buried…
Patrick Lawrence: French Streets and American Sofas
You might be Brazilian or Malian or Singaporean, it is remarkable the world over to watch the French explode into the streets of dozens of cities and towns to protest the imperial president residing in Élysée Palace. It is altogether…
Patrick Lawrence: China and Russia Deepen Ties To Oppose US’s Destabilizing Actions
The recent accord between Saudi Arabia and Iran, facilitated by China, signifies a seismic shift in geopolitical dynamics. This was followed by a three-day summit between the presidents of China and Russia in Moscow where they signed agreements that deepen…
Patrick Lawrence: What Just Happened in Moscow Is Big
Now that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have concluded their summit in Moscow– an unusually long series of meetings over three days–are those purporting to lead the United States prepared to drop their wishful thinking, their miscalculations, and their illusions…
Patrick Lawrence: Biden and the ICC: ‘A New Level of Farce’
There are many things to say about the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin on charges that the Russian president directed the abduction and deportation of thousands of children from eastern Ukraine in the…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Trump & the Stormy Deep State
We keep coming face-to-face with the wreckage of the Russiagate years, when the 45th president threatened the national security apparatus for, possibly, the first time since Kennedy fired Allen Dulles as C.I.A. director in 1961. We happened upon a video of…
Patrick Lawrence: China’s Great Leap in the Middle East
What Beijing just sponsored and got done, putting two millennia of diplomatic craft to work, is an exquisite example of what can be accomplished once this imperative is fully realized. History’s wheel turned last Friday, when Iranian and Saudi Arabian…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: What Dan Ellsberg Means
The term “Fourth Estate” had taken on the dust of a neglected antique before the release of the Pentagon Papers. Afterwards it seemed possible to think again of the press as the independent pole of power required by a working democracy. …
Patrick Lawrence: The Return of Non-Alignment
The Ukraine conflict as catalyst: I wonder how many people who pay attention understood a year ago that Russia’s intervention and the West’s extravagant support for the Kyiv regime would prompt fundamental shifts in the global order such that the…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Happiness of Others
For Americans, admitting that people in other parts of the world have and want different things from what they have and want can, in its subtle way, be devastating to their view of the world. George Burchett, an excellent painter…