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…
Patrick Lawrence: Will Biden Provoke War with China?
Host Robert Scheer speaks with veteran foreign correspondent Patrick Lawrence on his criticisms of provocative US and NATO policies — and his subsequent ban by Twitter. “We are the provocateurs” — offered as a condemnation of current US foreign policy…
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: 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…
Who will Biden bomb first?
The President-elect’s ‘global leadership’ is a return to the failed policies of Obama and Clinton This article first appeared on Unherd on December 4, 2020. “America is back.” So President-elect Biden declared after announcing his cabinet nominations last week, and after…
Let’s Not Fall Into the Cold-War Arms-Control Trap
For our national security, we need self-control more than we need arms-control talks. Let us think together about the letter four United States senators sent recently to the now departed secretary of state Rex Tillerson, urging him to start arms-control…
Cold War Illusions: Losing Friends
Just before the November 2016 elections, I was invited to share lunch at a place called Packer’s Corner, a tiny hamlet in southeastern Vermont. I was instantly intrigued. If “faded glory” fairly describes the place now, Packer’s Corner et ses…
How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers
Joel Whitney talks about his book Finks, which exposes the agency’s corruption of American culture during the Cold War. “The past is a foreign country,” L.P. Hartley famously wrote as he opened The Go–Between. There is a pretty tristesse in…
The US Press, Spooks & the Church Committee
Nineteen fifty-three was a peculiar year for The Washington Post to question the C.I.A.’s drift into activist intrigues, writes Patrick Lawrence in this excerpt from his forthcoming book, Journalists and Their Shadows. On Jan. 9, 1953, The Washington Post published an editorial we can read all…