PATRICK LAWRENCE: Trump Dead-Ends Putin
For a good long time what’s been happening in Ukraine is nothing more than postwar gore. If you have lost a war but cannot admit it, you are playing the old game of pretend. Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Diplomatic Chess, Ukraine the Pawn
In Istanbul, a door was pried open after a soap opera’s worth of chicanery in London, Paris, Berlin and Kiev. Now the question is what Trump can do to address Russia’s concerns. As was universally expected, little came out of Istanbul…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Late–Imperial Maladies
The worst part of living this distance from reality — or maybe the best part — is the knowledge, even if it is only subliminal, that we cannot go on like this. I am sick of reading that the Israelis’ genocidal…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Chihuahuas, Not Dobermans
Trump’s determination to end the Ukraine war has forced the Europeans, at last, to go their own way. And they charge in precisely the wrong direction. I have never been much for schadenfreude: It is always best to occupy one’s mind with worthier…
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: US Still Nowhere with the Chinese
The bitter truth is that the leaders of Biden’s foreign policy are too paralyzed by the ideology of American primacy to come up with a single, solitary new thought as to how to address other great powers as we enter…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Deaf, but Not Blind to US Decline
In Fiona Hill’s recent speech it’s possible to detect the very faint signals of Washington’s policy elite responding to the immense global power shift that is underway. I count the advance among non–Western nations toward what we now call a new…
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…
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: How to Read the Durham Appendix
The method of those who built Russiagate’s tower of lies and disinformation grows clearer and the list of their names longer. Not that we needed more evidence to dismantle the extravagant tower of lies and disinformation known as Russiagate: This was…