Free Republic

Forty years ago this week, President Ronald Reagan lit a fuse that would bring down an empire. In a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, Reagan didn’t mince words. He put the blame for the Cold War solely on the shoulders of the Soviet Union, and called it an "evil empire." He rejected our policy of peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union. The U.S. would no longer accept perpetual Cold War with this evil empire, we would take steps to win the Cold War. On our terms. Without firing a shot. For decades American leaders, of both political parties,...

James Cagney is the chief exec of Coca-Cola’s West Berlin plant whose ambitious promotion plans are jeopardized when he becomes temporary guardian of his stateside superior’s wild and vacuous daughter. The girl (Pamela Tiffin) slips across the border, weds violently anti-Yankee Horst Buchholz, and before long there’s a bouncing baby Bolshevik on the way. When the home office head man decides to visit his daughter, Cagney masterminds an elaborate masquerade. The screenplay, based on a one-act play by Ferenc Molnar, is outstanding. It pulls no punches and lands a few political and ideological haymakers on both sides of the...

"No amount of reckless attempts will let the imperialist coalition forces overpower the heroic spirit of the army and people of Russia, distinguished by fiery patriotism, resilience and strong morale," Kim Yo-jong said TOKYO, January 27./TASS/.The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) will always "stand in the same trench" side by side with the Russian army and people, Kim Yo-jong, the Deputy Department Director of the Publicity and Information Department of the Workers Party of Korea, sister of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said on Friday. In a statement released by the KCNA news agency, she vowed that the...

It is folly to believe that the US should engage in a repeat of the Cold War with the rising world power that is China, reflecting the maxim that “Generals always fight the last war.” That implies that the current military strategy focuses too much on what happened before rather than what will happen next. Rather than repeating the Cold War, the US should rethink how it views its place in the world and work to partner with China on high-priority issues that affect both countries, like nuclear weapons, trade policies, natural resources, economics, etc. This necessarily requires that the...

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency on Friday formally declassified an image then-US President Donald Trump tweeted in 2019 of a highly classified satellite photograph depicting the site of a failed Iranian rocket launch. NPR reported that the NGA declassified the image after a “grueling Pentagon-wide review to determine whether the briefing slide it came from could be shared with the public” in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the radio network. Many details on the original image remain redacted – a clear sign that Trump was sharing some of the US government's most prized intelligence on social media,...

President Joe Biden tried to downplay any new tensions with China on Monday, after meeting with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. “I absolutely believe there need not be a new Cold War,” he told reporters during a press conference after the three-and-a-half-hour meeting in Bali, Indonesia. Biden repeated that the United States policy in Taiwan had not changed at all, despite recent comments indicating otherwise. But he also downplayed any fears that China would move to take over the island.

US President Joe Biden’s administration will soon release its National Security Strategy, which is being revised in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The document will no doubt trigger a renewed debate about how the United States should gear up for a new cold war against Russia and China. But before we plunge into a global great-power competition, it’s worth recalling Biden’s promise to create a “foreign policy for the middle class” and take a look at what most concerns Americans.US President Joe Biden’s administration will soon release its National Security Strategy, which is being revised in the wake...

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last ruler of the USSR, has died at 91. On the one hand, that sounds pretty good. A long life, a long career, world fame, a one-time politician, then a popular public speaker and leader of a think tank. He outlived his wife by over 20 years, and stayed active and vocal until the end. In many ways, it sounds like a life that one would envy, doesn't it? However… What kind of a politician was he? And what kind of think tank did he run? What did he stand for in life? What did he advocate...

Gorbachev ended the Cold War like Louis XVI ended the French monarchy WaPo praises USSR's BidenI don't speak ill of the dead not because they cannot argue back but because they cannot hear me. Why waste my breath? Instead, let me take on David Hoffman's fact-challenged obituary of Mikhail Gorbachev, the 8th and final thug in charge of the Soviet Union, a communist dictatorship best known for killing about 50 million people and starving Ukraine into submission in the 1930s. Hoffman wrote, "Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, who embarked on a path of radical reform...

Mikhail Gorbachev, who ended the Cold War without bloodshed but failed to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union, has died at the age of 92, Russian news agencies cited hospital officials as saying on Tuesday.

U2 surveillance aircraft criss-crossed the globe photographing everything from 70,000 feet. The pictures, now on display at the Penn Museum, reveal a wealth of archaeological information...Images taken from on high to observe what may be buried underground have been used by archaeologists for more than a century, and researchers at the Penn Museum have embraced the technology since at least the 1920s.But no one has ever utilized the most famous trove of aerial images from the Cold War, those produced by high-flying U-2 spy planes, first deployed by the CIA to photograph all over the world beginning in 1956, a...

"We have seen the treacherous use of the 'fifth column' by which persons supposed to be peaceful visitors were actually a part of an enemy unit of occupation ... ... These trouble-breeders have but one purpose. It is to divide our people into hostile groups and to destroy our unity and shatter our will to defend ourselves." - Franklin D. Roosevelt, Fireside Chat, December 29, 1940. Download as PDF ... The term "fifth column” referred to ancient warfare, where two columns of soldiers were in the middle of the battlefield, with two flanks on either side. The fifth column were...

Wary Pacific nations are resisting ‘good brother’ China’s offer to expand its scope Round one does not go to China. It failed to convince a group of Pacific island nations to sign an agreement to keep receiving security and economic cooperation from itself. They could not shed their suspicions that China was attempting to show off its ‘partners’ in the South Pacific to square off with the QUAD’s growing presence in the Indo-Pacific. Some nations were opposed to the Chinese offer, titled ‘China-Pacific Island Countries Common Development Vision’. What raised eyebrows were the Chinese proposals to train local police, help...

Russia threatened a dramatic escalation of its war in Ukraine Thursday when Russia’s Channel One featured a video depicting Russian missiles reaching Berlin, Paris, and London. According to the UK’s Express, Channel One’s 60 Minutes program, one of the most popular TV shows in Russia, featured “the chairman of the nationalist Rodina party, Aleksey Zhuravlyov,” who “suggested Russia could launch a Sarmat missile attack on the UK.” This was not, however, Zhuravlyov’s eccentric view: “Producers then cut to a map of Kaliningrad and seemed to suggest that missiles could be launched from the Russian enclave between Poland, Lithuania and the...

“Those Cuban-CIA men (Bay of Pigs vets) were as tough, dedicated and impetuous a group of soldiers as I’ve ever had the honor of commanding,” wrote legendary anti-communist mercenary “Mad Mike” Hoare, commander of the “Wild Geese,” in his book Congo Mercenary. ''This is the history of a failure,'' said the oddly frank opening lines of Che Guevara’s Congo Dairies. “I stood above Che Guevara, my boots near his head, just as Che had once stood over my dear friend and fellow 2506 Brigade member, Nestor Pino. ‘We're going to kill you all," Che said to Pino.’ Now, the situation...

The end of the Cold War is sometimes dated November 9, 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall. To be sure, there were important events leading up to this date, and others following. And, not everything proceeded peacefully. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, there were nationalist movements and radical Islamic terrorism within some of Russia’s client states. Then, Russia began to meddle in the affairs of what it considered to be its “near republics.” But, until the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, it was thought that these conflicts were departures from an overall trend of...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the state would go through a 'Cold War' if Democrat Stacey Abrams wins Georgia's 2022 governor's race. Speaking at a news conference on Friday, DeSantis, a Republican, likened Abrams' liberal policies to that of communist Cuba, saying Florida would be caught between far-left leaders. 'If Stacey Abrams is elected governor of Georgia, I just want to be honest, that will be a Cold War between Florida and Georgia at that point,' DeSantis said Despite DeSantis' reference to Castro - whether he was referring to Cold War leader Fidel or his brother Raul who took over...

As U.S. intelligence agencies warned that Russia was moving troops close to the Ukrainian border this fall, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Cold War had never ended. President Biden sternly told Russian President Vladimir Putin during a two-hour call that the United States wouldn’t tolerate an invasion, the White House reported. Debate broke out among Washington pundits over how much military equipment the United States could send to Kyiv. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) even suggested that the United States could use nuclear weapons preemptively to keep Russian soldiers from crossing the border. It all feels depressingly, pointlessly...

President Joe Biden is blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin for everything going wrong with his presidency, from the Ukraine war to high gas prices, but he sang a different tune in 2012, when he mocked Mitt Romney’s “Cold War mentality.” Romney criticized then-President Obama and Vice President Biden for a soft approach to Russia, such as pushing a “reset” button, giving up on missile defense agreements with allies, and offering nuclear concessions in the New START treaty.

We are witnessing the remaking of the world order in front of our eyes — and this will impact global supply chains in unforeseen ways. We are about to experience the most dramatic and unpredictable supply chain map we’ve experienced since World War II. If the Russia-Ukraine conflict’s international ramifications keep spreading, we face a real possibility of a bifurcating global economy, in which geopolitical alliances, energy and food flows, currency systems, and trade lanes could split. During the first Cold War, the world was anything but flat. There were two worlds — the East and the West. That world...