PATRICK LAWRENCE: Blinded to Syria
I do not know anyone who was not shocked by the lightning speed with which Damascus fell to expensively armed jihadist militias last weekend. I know very few people who do not understand that another domino has just fallen in the…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Dialectic of the Draft
Americans will understand themselves less fantastically if they consider the extent to which the end of the Selective Service System a half century ago gave them permission to put their public selves to sleep. It is 50 years ago now…
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 Aimless Empire
Under Biden, the world’s most powerful, most heavily armed, most determinedly righteous nation shows little sign of having any foreign policy at all. Bitter and frightening realities face us four months into Joe Biden’s presidency. On the domestic side it…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: America the Innocent
The American press has been in the business of keeping readers ignorant since the Cold War—its most essential responsibility turned upside-down—and in our time it gets worse, not better. Vladimir Putin’s annual state-of-the-nation speech, delivered before the Federal Assembly in Moscow…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Biden’s Inhumanity on Syria
The U.S. hypocrisy to come will be even greater than anything tried by the Trump administration. For a time after Joe Biden took office not quite three months ago, among the questions raised was how the new administration would address…
THE REVELATIONS OF WIKILEAKS: No. 8—Busting the Myth WikiLeaks Published Nothing on Israel & Syria
One myth about WikiLeaks is that it favors U.S. enemies and declines to publish documents against them, while another legend is that WikiLeaks, for obscure reasons, is soft on Israel, reports Patrick Lawrence. As WikiLeaks continued its document releases, and as major news organizations continued…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Moscow’s Difficult Decision on Idlib
Turkey’s leader, who nurses dreams of some kind of neo–Ottoman restoration across the Middle East, is now on a reckless tear. As Recip Tayyip Erdogan prosecutes his latest military intrusion southward into Syria, all the old mythologies about the Turkish president and…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: A Sudden-Seeming Power Shift in the Middle East
Despite the high-speed impression created by events in the past few weeks, the shifting trends of Russian and U.S. influence on the region have been underway for years. Rarely do world events move at the velocity they now assume in the…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Lost & Fearful in The Middle East
The Biden regime wanders in a funhouse of its own making. Of all the amateurish moments to arise as the Biden regime conducts its foreign policy, the White House’s official statement as B1–B bombers let loose over Iraq and Syria last Friday…