Opinions

It was previously assumed that the meeting between Putin and Trump could this time lead to tangible results – due to new shared interests in reaching an agreement. But then Trump cancelled the Budapest summit, citing a lack of interest. He also imposed new energy sanctions on Russia and may have lied about his alleged refusal to authorize…
Read More...

Recently I saw a report in the Telegraph headlined Britain and France are at the end stage of ‘centrist dad’ collapse and found the following paragraph about Starmer and Macron especially memorable: “Wrong on almost everything, hated by voters, incapable of truth-telling, driven by a sinister belief in environmentalism and global…
Read More...

The older I get, the more suspiciously I look at the causes of war. This is natural. Most young people – especially young men – are incapable of properly evaluating risk. Though they are rebellious, they also follow orders from authority figures. There is a reason why eighteen-year-olds are sent over embankments to cross open fields on…
Read More...

Read the first part of the article Riots Without Leaders, Narratives Without Rival If the expectation gap defines the structural pathology, the waves of civic unrest that are multiplying across Western cities unmask its operational face. Whether in London, Paris, Amsterdam, or Melbourne, these disturbances signal not episodic…
Read More...

This essay is about the growing threat of civil war in Western societies. It is written as both a warning and a reckoning: an explicit attempt to confront, without denial or sensationalism, the mounting pressures that are pushing advanced democracies toward rupture. These pressures are examined through the framework of strategic analysis:…
Read More...

Donald Trump’s speech at Quantico to the U.S. Army’s general officers was a display of narcissism (not a display of strength). His attempt to emulate the late George C. Scott in his iconic role in Patton was a failure, because instead of delivering a concise and punchy message, Trump spoke in a monotone for more than an hour, repeating…
Read More...

Among the arguments of those who seem to be pushing for expanded war with the Russian Federation, one of the strangest is that Russia is a weak, third-world country and a “paper tiger.” Those who make this argument point to the protracted three-year conflict in Ukraine and scoff at the Russians’ inability to subjugate a much weaker…
Read More...

Are wars inevitable? War crimes? If we really don’t want wars, it behoves us to get serious about understanding their causes, and choose to radically address them. Otherwise, what’s the point? Feeling a “rush” with folks at political actions only perpetuates our addiction to anti-war rallies, which do nothing to stop wars from occurring.…
Read More...

No-one reads anymore. This is something that teachers of literature like me are always saying. “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect,” wrote the scholar of literacy Martha Maxwell in 1979. But more and more, educators are finding that the…
Read More...