PATRICK LAWRENCE: Trump & the Stormy Deep State
We keep coming face-to-face with the wreckage of the Russiagate years, when the 45th president threatened the national security apparatus for, possibly, the first time since Kennedy fired Allen Dulles as C.I.A. director in 1961. We happened upon a video of…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Damage Russiagate Has Done
Authoritarian liberals have unleashed a censorious syndrome peculiar to our national character, dating to 17th century Quaker hangings in Boston. An inhabitant of Twitterland named “Willow Inski” took to the keyboard on Oct. 11, asking why anyone still accepts official…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Mike Pompeo’s Cold-War Fever
As this dreadful year draws near its close, the top U.S. diplomat has put us at far more risk of war than we were at its start. Will we start a war with Iran? Will we invade Venezuela? Will we…
Discerning Vladimir Putin
We have left behind the Russian dolls, one inside the other as if occlusion were their very point. “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” Churchill’s famous mot (invariably quoted out of context) is no longer for us….
Scholar Robert Meister on a new model: Using the financial markets to fuel historical justice
Revolutionary thinker and author of “After Evil” on how the financial markets could be leveraged toward justice Part 1 of my illuminating interview with Robert Meister, the author of “After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights,” explored some of the…
Scholar Robert Meister on America: Saying “the past is evil” doesn’t mean the evil is past
Part 1: A leading critic of “human rights discourse” on how we abandoned any sense of historical justice I first came upon Robert Meister a few years ago, when Peter Dimock, a singularly gifted novelist whose judgment I trust, urged…
A Conversation With Richard Falk, Part 2
On Israel, Palestine, and his work as a UN special rapporteur. When I met Richard Falk shortly before the turn of 2017 into 2018, I found the scholar, lawyer, activist, advocate, adviser, and writer as kinetically thoughtful and plugged-in as…
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…
John Kerry’s last hurrah: With the Syrian cease-fire, the secretary of state takes a parting swipe at Russophobia
The cease-fire ends his successful skirmish with the Pentagon, but the war will grind on long after Kerry is gone Secretary of State John Kerry now gives us another “cessation of hostilities” agreement — a not-quite-cease-fire — as signed with…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The USA’s Soviet-Style President
We are in for 19 months of relentless, insultingly transparent spin by way of which a patently incompetent man will be purveyed as commander in chief for another four years. Joe Biden announces — via a video, not in person…