On the heels of the near love fest between French President Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump, the White House hosted a meeting with a rather frigid German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Trump publicly (and appropriately) lambasted Germany for its unwillingness to live up to its NATO commitments. The president also beautifully ripped into Merkel
The American-led Middle East order is collapsing. Rival powers and regional actors now jockey for position in the region, in an attempt to form the next order there. While America’s position as the de facto regional hegemon has imploded, we still retain an immense amount of power—and, through our traditional allies in the Sunni
The War Party in Washington, D.C. is demanding yet another American-led “humanitarian” military intervention, this time in Syria. Yet, for all of their virtue signaling against the evil of Bashar Assad (and he’s certainly not a good guy), there is a shocking degree of silence about the collapsing totalitarian, rogue regime to our south,
Afghanistan has become the poster child for America’s imperial overreach. After 18 years of warfare, it persists. There are currently 15,000 American troops fighting in Afghanistan (far fewer than in recent years, when at the height of our deployments U.S. troops in the region topped 150,000). Yet the Pentagon is considering deploying more
Recent events have dragged the Syrian civil war once again to the center of the world’s attention. The first of these events was the recent meeting in Ankara, Turkey with Turkey’s leader, President Recep Erdogan, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Conspicuously absent from that meeting was any representative from
The recent passage of the omnibus spending bill did serious damage to Donald Trump’s presidency. Politically, it harmed his standing with at least half of his base. Thankfully, political crises present new opportunities to make up for past mistakes. And we are still far enough out from the November midterms that disappointments can
The Charles Koch Institute, in conjunction with RealClearDefense, recently issued a fascinating though unsurprising study of American public opinion about the Iraq War. Almost four in 10 of respondents—36 percent—said the war made America “less safe,” while 47 percent said the war made the Middle East “less stable.” Just 32 percent said they
The political establishment in Washington, D.C. remains angry with President Donald Trump for “coddling” Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. By now, the claims against Trump are well-known: he refuses to respond to Russian meddling in the 2016 election; he isn’t vocal enough about decrying Russia’s apparent chemical weapons attack in England; he hasn’t challenged
Donald Trump is under siege. He is being hounded by a dogged, partisan special counsel intent on leading a witch hunt. Trump’s own party is lukewarm about his presidency (and many are looking for the exits). The Democrats, obviously, are out for his blood. Trump’s staff keeps shifting at light speed. And, of
After watching the results of the recent special election in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District, I came to a sobering conclusion: the Republican Party, as an institution, needs to die. I’ve listened to all of the spin: Conor Lamb ran as a Trump-friendly Democrat. The Democrats had a registration advantage. Rep. Tim Murphy had
