Carl Bildt, William Hague, Karel Schwarzenberg, Radoslaw Sikorski, and Guido Westerwelle — the Foreign Ministers of Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Germany, respectively — took to the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times on March 4 to denounce another nation for putting its former Prime Minister on trial for failing to perform state duties correctly, for costing the country untold | Read More »
The entire world is always going to Hell. There’s always a crisis, always an epoch-shattering catastrophe in the offing. There’s usually a potential genocide, frequently a flashpoint in danger of becoming a shooting war, and invariably the fall of a friendly or unfriendly regime that will have immediate effects and more subtle, far-reaching ones. There is nothing new under the sun. But there’s very rarely | Read More »
When the epitaph of the Obama administration is written, it could well be “He was a former Senator who understood neither the House nor the Senate, and suffered for it.” Most of President Obama’s failures come from this critical shortcoming. Even those things Obama claims as victories (Obamacare being the best example), and that now threaten to end his presidency, come from misunderstanding the branch | Read More »
The Western political classes of the last fifty years have been, with a few notable exceptions, abject failures. Reagan, Thatcher, Kohl — these are the exception to the rule. Nowhere has this been more on display than in Europe for the last twelve months, as a series of internal and external crises have demonstrated again and again that most of Europe’s leaders are not capable | Read More »
Robert Kaplan has made a tidy niche career out of traveling through and documenting places Americans — and sadly American diplomats — continue to see as exotic and mysterious, and to which we consistently apply horrible policy because of those shortcomings. His travelogues of Eastern Europe and the Balkans especially can be summarized, not unfairly, as “Americans don’t understand people for whom history is not | Read More »
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