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: Some Cherry Garcia, Please
The apartheid state’s swoon into freak-out mode since Ben & Jerry’s took its stand tells us all we need to know about BDS’s accumulating power. Cherry Garcia, please, two scoops. No make that Chocolate Fudge Brownie. No, I want Coconut…
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: Biden’s Inhumanity on Syria
The U.S. hypocrisy to come will be even greater than anything tried by the Trump administration. For a time after Joe Biden took office not quite three months ago, among the questions raised was how the new administration would address…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Blundering Biden Team
What occurred between Washington and Moscow last week, and at a hotel in Anchorage, bears a significance that we must not miss. “Biden is a national embarrassment on foreign policy,” a colleague wrote in a note over the weekend. This…
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…