Free Republic

Russian President Vladimir Putin might be losing on the battlefield, at least for the moment, but it’s a mistake to count out the master of the Kremlin. Instead, quietly, Putin is succeeding in assembling a coalition of the autocratic. Who is in Putin’s “axis of evil,” as President George W. Bush famously called a similar collection? An unlikely but utterly pernicious group straddling continents and political systems. All are worried to varying degrees about the trajectory the war in Ukraine is setting for their economy and their role in the geopolitical landscape, but they are still fully prepared to profit...

Quick, before the conventional wisdom hardens, it needs to be said: The Iraqi elections were not the second coming of the Constitutional Convention. The media have made it sound like last Sunday was a combination of 1776, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Prague Spring, the Ukraine's Orange Revolution, Filipino "People Power," Tiananmen Square and Super Bowl Sunday — all rolled into one. It's impossible not to be moved by the stories coming out of Iraq: voters braving bombings and mortar blasts to cast ballots; multiethnic crowds singing and dancing outside polling places; election workers, undeterred by power outages, counting...