Patrick Lawrence: The Centrists Cannot Hold
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…” Alot of us are familiar with these lines from Yeats’s thoroughly anthologized and…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Tampering With History
History tells us where we are in the human story and what we, alive now, must do to advance this story. To tamper with history is among the gravest of sins against the human cause. The first sign of trouble…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Germany & the Lies of Empire
With Angela Merkel’s revelations of Berlin’s duplicity in its dealings with Moscow, Cold War II just got colder. “Germany is Hamlet,” Gordon Craig once wrote. The great historian of that nation (1913–2005) was noted for pithy summations of this kind,…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Who Should Control Foreign Policy?
Proposing that foreign policy be subjected to democratic processes is a call, essentially, to revolution. I had a letter in the mail the other week from someone named Barry Klein, who resides in Houston. I filed it knowing I would write…
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: A United State of Delusion
Americans are caught in a kind of national psychosis, wherein little of what is said about foreign conduct — from Germany to the South China Sea — can be taken at face value. Let’s face it: The Trump regime has from the…
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…
Trump’s Blunders on NATO and Russia Make Our European Allies Cringe
If you thought Donald Trump’s foreign policy positions were politically calculated toss-offs, think again. The interview he gave The Times of London last week put the world on notice: The views Trump expressed as he campaigned last year—notably on NATO,…
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…