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…
“A New Year’s note to readers.”
Brief thoughts on the year gone by and the year ahead. 30 DECEMBER—There must be many years at the end of which it is tempting to rank them among the truly awful. Maybe this thought is a comment on our…
Patrick Lawrence: To Retrieve History
It Is Our 2024 Project. I am still reading, at this late date, that Russian soldiers kidnapped thousands of Ukrainian children early in Washington’s proxy war in that perversely cursed country and brought them to Russia to teach them to…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Mess They Made of 2023
Abroad and at home, ideology ruled the U.S. Let us consider together the year gone past and arrive at some conclusions as to where it leaves us as we enter upon another. We can begin with two recent events that,…
Patrick Lawrence: What? Ukraine Is Not Winning the War?
The Narrative Turns. Now What? “Putin’s Russia is closing in on a devastating victory. Europe’s foundations are trembling.” This was the headline atop a Dec.9 commentary in The Telegraph, the farthest right of the major London dailies. The subhead elaborated the theme in…
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…