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…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Europe’s Identity Crisis
As European leaders continue to import a version of U.S. militarism, rearmament will cost the Continent its postwar social contract. It is many years now since the French, bless them, revolted as Disneyland Paris arose near the previously uninvaded village…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Russians in Ukraine
Recent disclosures provide an incomplete inventory of the West’s covert activities in Ukraine. There is more than we have been told, surely. You may have read or heard about the freakout that ensued after Emmanuel Macron convened a summit of…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Macron’s Europe
France’s president has proven himself to be a well-oiled weathervane. What he says on Monday may not match what he says or does on Wednesday. But his remarks while visiting China are interesting in several ways. Emmanuel Macron got poor…
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: 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: 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…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Failed American Experiment
Here comes the front edge of a new era, one in which America finally falls off its horse, its global standing properly diminished. “The American experiment” is a familiar phrase among us. When we reference it, we do so fully…
A Circle in the Darkness: Post-War Europe
Diana Johnstone’s newly-published memoir offers an incisive, gritty, politically alert, and expansive account of post-war Europe, reports Patrick Lawrence in this interview with the author. Diana Johnstone first sojourned in Paris during the early postwar years, as France and the…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: James Baldwin at 100
Things got lost in our remembrances. James Baldwin would have celebrated his 100th birthday on Aug. 2, had he lived so long. He didn’t: He died young. He was but 63 on Dec. 1, 1987, the day he slipped away at…