PATRICK LAWRENCE: All Unquiet on the Ukrainian Front
The Europeans have run out of postures and gestures in the way of performative statecraft, and the Russians see no point in indulging them any further. Sometimes wars have occasions that can be read — immediately, soon or in time…
WATCH: Premiere of ‘The World This Week’
CN Live! is launching a new series, The World This Week. WATCH THE REPLAY from Saturday’s first episode with guest Patrick Lawrence on Iran, Venezuela, Ukraine and Greenland. Host: Joe Lauria Guest: Patrick Lawrence Producer: Cathy Vogan
PATRICK LAWRENCE: New Year’s Notes on Purported Leaders
It is no use hoping for any alteration in the collective West’s course so long as today’s “purported leaders” remain in office. “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away.” So did Chinese peasants celebrate their distance from the…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: A Nation of Narcissists
Narcissism is the open-and-shut condition of the elites who fashion and execute American foreign policy. And they are utterly incapable of seeing their country as it is. All those malign authoritarians, more than 20 of them, who gathered in Tianjin…
Patrick Lawrence: The Non-West Coalesces
Nations representing more than 80 percent of the global population and a like percentage of global gross domestic product are perfectly capable of seeing the Biden administration’s pointed provocations and do not approve. Something of epochal importance happened in Vienna,…
The Historic Collapse of Journalism
Accuracy no longer matters. Witnessing no longer matters. Conformity matters, writes Patrick Lawrence. I have never gotten over a story The New York Times ran in its Sunday magazine back in May 2016. Maybe you will remember the occasion. It was a lengthy profile of…
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: 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: The Maestro of Messes
Biden apparently dreamed of the presidency for decades. And now as his first year in office draws to a close we must reflect on how perilous it often turns out to be when dreams come true. How fitting that Joe Biden’s first year…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Trump’s War on the Future Has a Past
The Trump-McMahon education edict: You will cooperate as we destroy the tradition of intellectual exploration that has endured for a thousand years — or we will starve you. Last autumn, well into the Trump regime’s full-frontal attacks on American universities…