Beyond a Failed Narrative
Americans are living a failed national narrative. Our almost universal belief in our exceptional status as a providentially “chosen people” suspends us in a beguiling myth beyond the reality of history. On September 11, 2001, we reacted with an almost…
Patrick Lawrence: In Ukraine, the Autumn of Oligarchs
The nice thing about being an oligarch is that you are so wealthy it doesn’t matter that you are looked upon as a predatory pariah. The nice thing about being an American oligarch, such as Jeff Bezos, is that America…
Patrick Lawrence: The Trans-Atlantic Rift Grows Wider
What an occasion, President Biden’s first state dinner. Better late than not at all, given it came last Thursday evening, nearly two years after he took office. Apart from guests of honor Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron, monsieur le président et sa…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Zhou Enlai’s Posthumous Triumph
Nations now fashioning a post–Western world order appear to be abiding by the Five Principles espoused by China’s first and long-serving premier. The big news over the Thanksgiving weekend — big such that you could hardly find it in the mainstream…
Patrick Lawrence: Biden Sides With Trump in Killing Obama’s Iran Nuclear Deal
Among our mentally impaired president’s more prominent campaign pledges during the 2020 political campaigns was that his national security people would negotiate America’s return to the multi-sided accord governing Iran’s nuclear programs. Without hesitation, I offered excellent odds that this…
Patrick Lawrence: Why Do Nations Erase the Past?
Arecent report by the German news agency DPA has had me thinking ever since about various small, inconsequential matters: war, nationalism, identity, history, memory. It seems the people who manage the German gravesites of those who fell fighting the German…
“Anatomy of the imperium.”
The Scrum is pleased to have published several extracts, in two successive postings, from Aaron Good’s excellent American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, an outstanding achievement for its history of the national security state from its formative years onward and for the…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: More Futile Pacific Overtures
Nearly halfway through Biden’s term in office he finally met the Chinese president to discuss the single most important relationship between any two nations anywhere in the world. I’ve given up being amazed at how stupidly the Biden administration conducts…
Patrick Lawrence: Why Are the Russians Retreating in Ukraine?
The most opaque war in my lifetime and probably yours, the war we can hardly see because the reporting is so bad, just took an unexpected turn. There must be someone somewhere who anticipated the retreat of Russian forces from…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Germany & the Lies of Empire
With Angela Merkel’s revelations of Berlin’s duplicity in its dealings with Moscow, Cold War II just got colder. “Germany is Hamlet,” Gordon Craig once wrote. The great historian of that nation (1913–2005) was noted for pithy summations of this kind,…