Free Republic

World leaders either become known for quickly learning life’s lessons–or not. The latter category is largely a product of one’s personal lust for power intertwined with an ideology allowing it to flourish. But membership is at times encouraged by the former’s failure to appropriately discourage the latter’s aggressive behavior early on.Falling into the latter category is Iran’s mullahs. It has taken them nearly a half century to learn an important lesson, coming after testing two U.S. presidents—one weak, one strong—who served in two different centuries. That lesson employs a simple rule of thumb concerning who has a foreign policy backbone:...

When Attorney General William Barr stated "spying did occur" against the 2016 Trump campaign, most attention was focused on the FBI's surveillance of former junior foreign policy aide Carter Page. But the spying Barr was thinking of, and which he said may or may not have been legally authorized, is more likely to be that carried out by Stefan Halper, a former Republican operative and White House aide who became a foreign policy academic with close ties to both American and British intelligence. One could be forgiven for believing Halper was a creation of the spy novelist John Le Carré....