Tag: France

Lessons of World War I

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Much of what we think we know is false; what really happened matters desperately to us today.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online 

This summer will mark the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I, and we 800px-Royal_Irish_Rifles_ration_party_Somme_July_1916should reflect on the “lessons” we have been taught so often on how to avoid another such devastating conflict. Chief among them seems to be the canard that the Versailles Treaty of 1919 that officially ended the war caused a far worse one just 20 years later — usually in the sense of an unnecessary harshness accorded a defeated Imperial Germany.

But how true is that common argument of what John Maynard Keynes called a “Carthaginian peace”? Continue reading “Lessons of World War I” →

Let Sleeping Germans Lie

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by Victor Davis Hanson

Tribune Media Services

The newly elected French Socialist president, Francois Hollande, is warning Germany that Mediterranean ideas of “growth,” not Germanic “austerity,” should be the new European creed. Continue reading “Let Sleeping Germans Lie” →

Iranian Threat Heats Up

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by Bruce S. Thornton

FrontPage Magazine

Iran announced Sunday that it was cutting off crude oil sales to France and England, a mostly symbolic act given that Iran provides England less than 1% of its crude, and France claims that it “practically stopped importing Iranian oil,” according to the head of the Union of Petroleum Industries. Continue reading “Iranian Threat Heats Up” →

The End of the Euro?

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Good riddance to a bad idea.

by Bruce S. Thornton

Defining Ideas

The champions of the European Union once touted it as a “bold new experiment in living” and “the best hope in an insecure age.” Continue reading “The End of the Euro?” →

A Teachable Moment on American-European Faultlines

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by Victor Davis Hanson

NRO’s The Corner

The full story is not out on Dominique Strauss-Kahn and he is innocent of forcible sexual battery until proven guilty, but already the case has exposed an ancient abyss between European elite and American popular cultures — accentuated by the differences between New York’s rough-and-tumble media and legal worlds on the one hand and IMF technocracy and French privilege on the other. Continue reading “A Teachable Moment on American-European Faultlines” →

President Obama’s Most Amazing Libyan Achievments

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by Victor Davis Hanson

Tribune Media Services

By bombing Libya, President Obama has accomplished some things once thought absolutely impossible in America: Continue reading “President Obama’s Most Amazing Libyan Achievments” →

Foreign Policy as Wishful Thinking

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by Bruce S. Thornton

Advancing a Free Society

The current military intervention in Libya by the West has been marketed with the claim that its purpose, as French President Sarkozy put it, is “to protect the civilian population from the murderous madness of a regime that has forfeited all claim to legitimacy.” Behind this humanitarian idealism, however, lurk a host of questions and dangers, reflecting wishful thinking rather than a prudent foreign policy. Continue reading “Foreign Policy as Wishful Thinking” →