PATRICK LAWRENCE: Power
Patrick Lawrence asks some pertinent questions of the American people. Are Americans going to sit around indefinitely eating potato chips while the State Department and Treasury starve Venezuelan children? Are Americans going to play video games while Israel fires U.S.–made…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: No Insight After Afghanistan
Remaking the world — all of it — in the U.S. image has been a foundation stone of American foreign policy since the Wilson administration — a century ago. Tragedy, a scholarly friend reminds me, does not mean merely a…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: A Different World Order
A new order among nations does not imply some kind of Orwellian Oceania — a globally homogenized superstate, the grotesque dream of liberal cosmopolitans. You have to applaud — and read carefully into — the events that followed Washington’s latest…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The War Against Us
The nature of the war against Americans in the past, is the nature of the war now. As some readers may have noticed, Antony Blinken has the State Department festooning its embassies around the world with “BLM” banners and the rainbow flag…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Arc of Decline
U.S. leaders would rather accept ever-more extreme isolation as the price of power than surrender any of it. It is remarkable how quickly the Biden administration is acquiring its stamp — the watermark it will leave on our parchment when…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The US-Russia Summit
Two recent moves on Moscow’s side suggest that the encounter in Geneva will mark the start of a long and welcome process. Curious it was to read that the Russian judiciary ruled last Wednesday that Alexei Navalny’s political network is an extremist movement….
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Aimless Empire
Under Biden, the world’s most powerful, most heavily armed, most determinedly righteous nation shows little sign of having any foreign policy at all. Bitter and frightening realities face us four months into Joe Biden’s presidency. On the domestic side it…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: America the Innocent
The American press has been in the business of keeping readers ignorant since the Cold War—its most essential responsibility turned upside-down—and in our time it gets worse, not better. Vladimir Putin’s annual state-of-the-nation speech, delivered before the Federal Assembly in Moscow…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Biden’s Banner Headlines on Afghanistan Obscure US Motives
Exceptionalism and universalism are the third rails in the U.S.: Any public figure who questions either will suffer a kind of political electrocution. “’It is time to end the forever war.’” That is The New York Times quoting Joe Biden in a banner…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Empire’s Last Stand
The origins of the first Cold War have been hopelessly blurred in the histories. We can watch this time. It is occurring before our eyes. In the early months of 1947, President Harry Truman and Dean Acheson, his secretary…