Author: nick

[ad_1] “Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were critically important weapons in the free world’s competition with Soviet totalitarianism—and without them the Soviet bloc might even have not disintegrated.” This was the assessment of Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter and one of the most influential foreign policy strategists of the Cold War era. Brzezinski’s description is notable not only because of who said it, but because of how he described the organization. He did not characterize Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty as merely a U.S.-funded news organization but instead, referred to it as a “weapon” in…

[ad_1] The New York Times posted a long editorial last week to make the case against choosing Bill Pulte as the acting director of national intelligence.  That was not a difficult case to make, but it didn’t question whether we should even have an Office of National Intelligence.  The answer to that particular issue requires an understanding of why the intelligence failure of 9/11 took place and why the many investigations of the failure came up with the wrong answers. There have been two major strategic intelligence failures over the past 85 years—Pearl Harbor and 9/11.  In each case, nearly…

[ad_1] Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who wrote the great Madame Bovary novel, among other lesser ones. A close friend of his once wrote to him asking for advice on happiness, and Gustave wrote back offering his fail-proof method to achieving joyfulness: “One needs good health, and also good luck. And of course stupidity, but if the last one’s missing, all’s lost.” Good old Gustave, he certainly knew things. If he were around today, he’d be finding some very happy people in America, and I mean very happy people. Especially among the young glued to their contraptions. Aristotle insisted…

[ad_1] Adam Hochschild’s masterpiece King Leopold’s Ghost reconstructs one of the largest and least remembered mass atrocities of the modern era and exposes how Belgium’s liberal monarchy built a slave state in the Congo, which killed millions. First published in 1999 and updated in a revised 2006 edition, Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost serves as a stark historical warning at a time when Western politicians and commentators habitually frame global politics as an epic struggle between virtuous democracies and barbarous autocracies. The book shows in forensic detail how one of Europe’s most constitutional monarchies oversaw a regime of forced labor, mutilation,…

[ad_1] On September 15, 1970, Richard Nixon ordered the CIA to “make the economy [of Chile] scream” (CIA Director Richard Helms’s actual note of the conversation can be seen here). But it wasn’t the economy that screamed: it was people. “The economy” is an abstraction. The concrete reality of sanctions and embargos is people who are starving. Driving people to starvation has become the foreign policy of the United States. America has always struggled for its soul. In his book The True Flag, Stephen Kinzer pins the date the struggle began as 1898. That year, America confronted the choice between…

[ad_1] We’ve never seen a president like Donald J. Trump. Heck, I’ve never seen a human being like Trump. When Henry David Thoreau wrote about the man who steps to the music of a different drummer, he was probably imagining a religious seeker or political dissenter—not a billionaire businessman who dated European supermodels and erected golden towers before ascending to the heights of global power. But has anyone danced so wildly through life as the current POTUS? Trump’s latest two-step: waging a brutal war against Iran—to the delight of America’s most fanatical Iran hawks—and then, this weekend, announcing a momentous…

[ad_1] Reconnecting with voters is going to be extremely difficult for the Brahmin Left. [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] Trump understood something the consultant class never did: Americans do not want timid caretakers of decline. They want leaders and fighters. [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] Trump, G7 Leaders Convene in France Amid Divergences [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] Congress accidentally protected the American people’s liberty this week when it failed to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Section 702 authorizes warrantless surveillance of foreign citizens. However, it has been “interpreted” by the FISA court to allow US intelligence agencies to wiretap conversations between a US citizen and a foreign […] [ad_2] Source link