PATRICK LAWRENCE: Biden’s Taiwan Talk
We are witnessing the gradual dismantling of strategic ambiguity in favor of the clarity urged by Trump’s belligerent secretary of state, Mike Pompeo. Watching President Joe Biden’s stunningly clumsy performance in Tokyo last week, during which he committed the U.S. to…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The New Iron Curtain
The Ukraine crisis proves to be Europe’s crucible and Europe proves a profound disappointment. We have read a great deal about a new Cold War since the U.S. cultivated the coup of February 2014 in Ukraine and the nation was…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: A Nation of ‘Geophobes’
Amid rampant Russophobia and Sinophobia, America’s penchant for Cold-War “national character analysis” will — if left unchecked — lead the U.S. into deepest trouble. Ruminating on the American condition some years ago, I invented a word to describe us as…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Ukraine & the Strength of Nonalignment
Liberals once mocked the Bush–Cheney regime’s with-us-or-against-us routines. Now the trans–Atlantic foreign policy cliques have no capacity to see the world differently. I was interested to read, last December, of the expansive agreements Vladimir Putin and Mahendra Modi signed at the conclusion of…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Great Acquiescence — Glory to Ukraine
Americans don’t merely acquiesce to the imperium’s wars, interventions, collective punishments and assorted other deprivations. They actively embrace them. The other day I ventured forth from my remote village to a lively market town called Great Barrington to shop for…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Imperial Infantilism
Diplomacy is an essential skill in the century swiftly taking shape around us, but we find that hurling playground insults at the leader of another nation has become normal in post-9/11 Washington. It’s getting downright difficult to keep track of all the epithets…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Propaganda and Evidence
The wall of propaganda that towers over us, resting on an insidious culture of irrationality that has come to suffuse the American polity, is weakening. Finally. Finally our mainstream press and broadcasters show signs of waking up to the cynical,…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Russia’s Red Line
It is absolutely necessary that Moscow holds the line for the sake of a new security order in Europe and a sustainably stable world order in our time. “They must understand,” Sergei Lavrov said in one of his many public…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Putin Speaks
As the Russian president’s year-end presser helped underscore, Europe will increasingly understand itself as the western end of Eurasia rather than the eastern shore of the Atlantic. Vladimir Putin was “defiant” during his end-of-year press conference last Thursday. The Russian…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Biden’s Summit of No-Shows
This could prove an historic shift, reversing more than a century of usually coercive influence in Latin America. I tip my cap, as we all should, to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico. And to Presidents Luis Arce of Bolivia, Xiaomara…