Ukraine
What Now, Ukraine?
Victor Davis Hanson American Greatness It was supposed to be a clear-cut, unambiguous invasion. Vladimir Putin’s much larger, richer, and more bellicose Russia staged a shock-and-awe attack on a much smaller, poorer Ukraine. He intended to decapitate the government in Kyiv. Then he would annex the eastern half of the country, and quickly consolidate his …
The Cycles of Revolutions in Our Midst
Victor Davis Hanson American Greatness We are witnessing a number of radical military, social, and political revolutions that are changing the United States—and the world—in fundamental ways that we still have not appreciated. The taboo about never mentioning the first-strike use of nuclear weapons in a major conventional war is now apparently over. Vladimir Putin …
Our Spanish Civil War?
Victor Davis Hanson American Greatness From 1936 to 1939, the civil war in Spain became a European laboratory of new tactics, strategies, logistics, wartime morality, and weapons. Right-wing nationalists under General Francisco Franco finally defeated loyal supporters of an evolutionary socialist republic—but only after much of the Western world had variously weighed in. The cost …
The Perils of International Idealism
American foreign policy could use a does of hard-nosed realism. by Bruce S. Thornton // Defining Ideas United States foreign policy has been defined lately by serial failures. Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and appears to be preparing a reprise in eastern Ukraine, and possibly in the Baltic states. Syrian strongman Bashar al Assad is …
Of Pre- and Postmodern Poseurs
Obama’s postmodernism has met its match in premodern Putin. by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media Vladimir Putin thinks he has a winning formula to restore the global clout of the old Soviet Union. Contemporary Russia is a chaotic, shrinking, and petrodollar-fed kleptocracy. It certainly lacks the population, the vast resources, and territory of its former …
The Hitler Model
Why do weak nations like Russia provoke stronger ones like the United States? by Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas An ascendant Vladimir Putin is dismantling the Ukraine and absorbing its eastern territory in the Crimea. President Obama is fighting back against critics that his administration serially projected weakness, and thereby lost the ability to deter …
The Incoherence of Western Foreign Policy
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine The crisis in Ukraine is just the latest in a long series of foreign policy failures brought about by the incoherence in our thinking about foreign relations. On the one hand, we have championed ethnic-national self-determination as the highest international good, while on the other we have assumed that …