ARTICLES
“Back from the West Bank.”
Chas Freeman’s question has haunted me since he first articulated it three months ago in a conversation with Aaron Maté and Katie Halper on Useful Idiots podcast: Does Israel have a right to exist [is] a rather strange question because it does…
“In Ukraine, a war for memory.”
To destroy the shared past of a people is to go some way toward destroying a people—the coherence and solidity of their identity, their ability to think and act collectively, their collective confidence in themselves, altogether their place in the…
Patrick Lawrence: Deaf and Blind: The Maladies of American Diplomats
Here is a modest proposal, nothing too radical, just good sense. Turn over Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan to the Iranian authorities on the understanding the two statesmen, very loosely defined, would spend 444 days at the U.S. embassy compound…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: US Endgame in Ukraine — War Without End, Amen
What happens when a powerful nation cannot afford to lose a war it has already lost? It is now two and a half years since Moscow sent two draft treaties, one to Washington, one to NATO in Brussels, as the…
Patrick Lawrence: The Price of Biden’s New China Tariffs
Ilove the photograph The New York Times ran atop Jim Tankersley’s May 18 story analyzing the inadvisable raft of tariffs on Chinese imports President Biden authorized four days earlier. There is the old coot signing the paperwork at a desk in the…
Patrick Lawrence: Putin and Xi in Beijing: Steps into the 21st Century
Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping added another to their count of 40–odd summit meetings when the Russian and Chinese presidents convened in Beijing, later proceeding to Harbin in Northeast China, for two days of talks that ended Friday. At 9:55…
“Report from Donbas.”
‘I am simply bearing witness.’ When I first read Guy Mettan’s report from Donbas I felt as if he had transported me to an antipodean universe of some kind. You can take this, as I do, as a measure of…
Patrick Lawrence: University—An Attack on Intelligence
“Not in my lifetime,” I used to think when contemplating America’s decline and fall—a decline and fall I eagerly anticipate as a prelude to remaking our crumbly republic such that it stands for the ideals it professes to uphold but…
Patrick Lawrence: Of Journalists, Students and Power
The American media are never short of red-letter days when it comes to their wonderful combination of superciliousness and irresponsibility. But last week the mainstream dailies and magazines went all the way to scarlet and alizarin crimson. The brighter the…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Ðiên Biên Phú at 70
How did the Vietnamese prevail at that world-historical moment? The answers shed light on the world we see outside our windows now. I had the most salutary email the other day, a reviving lift amid these, humanity’s darkest days, surely, in…