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: 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: Russia Takes Another Step Back From the West
News that Russia will suspend its participation in the New START nuclear arms pact, which arrived Tuesday via Vladimir Putin’s annual address to the Federal Assembly, had to land hard. This suspension is not a withdrawal, as various Western media…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Totalized Censorship
Content warning, canceling, de-platforming, denying access: The fate of Sy Hersh’s Democracy Now! interview on YouTube is the latest indication of how much rougher press suppression is in this new media era. When I awoke Sunday morning to the news that YouTube…
Patrick Lawrence: Munich as Propaganda Fest
I love Wang Yi’s response when The New York Times’s Michael Crowley caught him in a hallway at the Munich Security Conference Saturday and asked the Chinese foreign minister if he planned to meet Secretary of State Antony Blinken on…
Patrick Lawrence: Objectivity and Its Discontents
Look, it is one thing for reporters and line editors to abandon the fundamental principle of objectivity as they hurl their hatchets at those who provoke their prejudices—Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, this, that or the other governor or senator, this,…
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…