PATRICK LAWRENCE: Breaking Bread with Authoritarians
In his way, India’s prime minister is as bad as some of the old Latin American dictators who got plenty of American support but never an evening meal — and certainly no cardamon-flavored strawberry shortcake for dessert. “For the first…
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: The Rape of Lady Justice
This is an open-and-shut case of the judiciary being misused to keep Trump out of the political process. Unlike during the Russiagate years, liberal authoritarians know they are operating in broad daylight this time. It is getting hard to keep track of the charges…
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: Macron’s Europe
France’s president has proven himself to be a well-oiled weathervane. What he says on Monday may not match what he says or does on Wednesday. But his remarks while visiting China are interesting in several ways. Emmanuel Macron got poor…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Happiness of Others
For Americans, admitting that people in other parts of the world have and want different things from what they have and want can, in its subtle way, be devastating to their view of the world. George Burchett, an excellent painter…
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: Totalized Censorship
Content warning, canceling, de-platforming, denying access: The fate of Sy Hersh’s Democracy Now! interview on YouTube is the latest indication of how much rougher press suppression is in this new media era. When I awoke Sunday morning to the news that YouTube…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: A Yellen in the China Shop
Janet Yellen did an excellent job during her just-completed four-day visit to Beijing, we are now able to read in the corporate press. The Treasury secretary managed not to break any more China in the China shop. This counts as…