Journal Entry #21
Something for Memorial Day. NEW YORK, 29 MAY—This past week, in anticipation of a couple of weeks’ travel, I finished work on the transcript of an excellent interview I conducted early in the spring. Readers of my column will know…
Journal Entry #20
Tipping Over. NORFOLK, CONN., 17 MAY—To begin, a couple of quotations. No. 1: “We are seeing in the U.S. a developing schizophrenia. There is no other way I can explain the accusations against the acting [sitting] U.S. president that he…
How China Is Building the Post-Western World
Beijing’s Belt and Road project may be the largest single infrastructure program in human history. Not infrequently, I bang on in this space and elsewhere about “parity between West and non-West.” I consider achieving this the single most pressing necessity…
Letters From the May 22/29, 2017, Issue
Schlesinger and Navasky on McCarthyism… Pollitt, Navasky, Grandin, and Lawrence on ‘Russiagate’… By Our Readers, Victor Navasky, Patrick Lawrence, Greg Grandin and Katha Pollitt McCarthyism, Past and Present In Victor Navasky’s piece “McCarthyism & Trump” [April 24/May 1], the author quotes from a New York Post…
The Military Now Runs US Foreign Policy
And as Trump’s recent turnabout shows, the establishment will brook no dissent from the reigning orthodoxy. You would expect, amid all the tiresome comment written and broadcast on Donald Trump’s “first 100 days,” something worth thinking about might have appeared…
Journal Entry #19
NORFOLK, Conn., April 28—The pimping of ordinary human emotions in the name of the tragedies others suffer is often nearly as infradig as the events the pimp attempts to score against. I wish, in the context I’ll now describe, more…
How Our Foreign-Policy Elites Manufactured the Korea Crisis
The attack on the Syrian airfield was a message to North Korea and China—and a demonstration of Trump’s capitulation to the imperial clique. The crisis over North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs now builds to a perilous pitch with no…
Journal Entry #18
LAKE WARAMAUG, CONN., APRIL 18—I recently finished a pair of pieces for The Nation concerning the modestly ambitious topic of the liberal order, as the global system within which we live is known. They were not marked as a two-part…
Journal Entry #17
NORFOLK, Conn., April 9—The evening of March 19, 2003, a Wednesday, was cold, winter-dark, and snowy where I live in the Litchfield Hills. How well I recall it. I was at the home of close friends, Sara and the late…
The Crisis of the Liberal Order and Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Age of Anger’
Fundamental reformation is required, if we are to do better than the world he describes. When we speak or write about “the liberal order,” what do we mean? Most people use this phrase as if its definition and validity are…
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