Free Republic

GOP backing for former President Donald Trump’s third consecutive White House bid has fallen apart over the past several months, with most Republican voters saying they’d prefer another candidate to carry on his policies in 2024, according to a poll released Tuesday. ​ While 31% of Republican and Republican-leaning independents want Trump, 76, to run again in two years, 61% say they would rather have another GOP standard-bearer, the USA Today/Suffolk University survey found. ​ Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, 44, is their preferred choice. DeSantis, who cruised to re-election Nov. ​8, leads Trump by 23 percentage points — 56% to...

WASHINGTON/CARACAS (Reuters) - The United States on Monday accused Russia of “reckless escalation” of the situation in Venezuela by deploying military planes and personnel to the crisis-stricken South American nation that Washington has hit with crippling sanctions. The Russian planes and military personnel arrived outside the Venezuelan capital Caracas on Saturday, according to local media reports, two months after the Trump administration disavowed President Nicolas Maduro. Washington has recognised opposition leader Juan Guaido as the country’s legitimate president and demands that Maduro leave power, which Russia has described as a U.S.-backed coup against the socialist government.

The Nordstream 2 pipeline represents the last stand of U.S. influence over the internal affairs of Europe. Once finished it will stand as a testament to the fundamental split between the European Union and the United States. Europe will see this as its first successful defense of its newly-declared independence. And the U.S. will have to come to terms with no longer having control overseas. This is a theme repeating itself all around the world right now. Your view of Nordstream 2 depends on who you are. If you are the U.S. it is a massive rebuke of the post-WWII...

Heedless of the consequences, or perhaps welcoming them, America’s Cold Warriors and their media platforms have recently escalated their rhetoric against Russia, especially in March. Anyone who has lived through or studied the preceding 40-year Cold War will recognize the ominous echoes of its most dangerous periods, when actual war was on the horizon or a policy option. Here are only a few random but representative examples: § In a March 8 Washington Post opinion article, two American professors, neither with any apparent substantive knowledge of Russia or Cold War history, warned that the Kremlin is trying “to undermine our...