Free Republic

The first two of 12 Sukhoi Su-30K fighters Angola ordered nearly four years for $1 billion have arrived in the country, giving a country with one of the most formidable air forces in the region some of the best military hardware Russia has to offer. Angola enters the club of African states possessing Su-30s along with Uganda and Algeria. The planes bounced around a lot before they got there. In 2013, Angola inked the purchase with Russia for the fighters, which served with the Indian Air Force from 1998-2005 before returning to Russia in exchange for more modern Su-30MKIs. Via...

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the iconic Cold War thriller "Red Dawn," a film by a Hollywood conservative that showcased patriotism, a love for the American military and warned of the dangers of gun control. Yet, it also taught the man behind the movie a deep lesson about the mentality of liberal Hollywood. Amanda Milius, the daughter of the film’s director, spoke to Fox News Digital about the film’s 40th anniversary, its legacy, and what the movie revealed to her dad. Released in 1984, "Red Dawn" told the story of the Soviet Union invading America and fighting a...

The art in espionage is the ability to hide in plain sight and the greatest of spies are the ones you never learn about. This statement rings true in the case of Anthony Blunt. His life seemed predestined for greatness. A Cambridge graduate with familial ties to the Royal Family, he was the very picture of establishment respectability. His brilliance as a polymath, fluency in multiple languages, and renown as a world-class art historian made him virtually untouchable, and he knew it. Beneath this veneer of aristocratic refinement lurked a secret that would shake Britain to its very foundations. For...

Is anyone surprised that the critics have absolutely savaged the new film, Reagan? I'm not. As a teenager in the 1980s, I came of age during the era when the likes of Dan Rather, Sam Donaldson, and Connie Chung savaged President Reagan on TV every single night. It was then at the pre-dawn of my political awareness that I started asking myself why such a folksy, likeable, patriotic American president like Ronald Reagan was so hated by seemingly everyone on the nightly news. Why did these talking heads despise him so much, while the actual human beings in my life—my...

Professor Jeffrey Sachs is the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is the author of many best selling books, including The End of Poverty and The Ages of Globalization. Here he is with probably the smartest and most accurate assessment of the Ukraine war, and American foreign policy more broadly, ever caught on tape

South Korea said Thursday that it would consider sending arms to Ukraine, a major policy change that was suggested after Russia and North Korea rattled the region and beyond by signing a pact to come to each other's defense in the event of war. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the pact at a summit Wednesday in Pyongyang. Both described it as a major upgrade of bilateral relations, covering security, trade, investment, cultural and humanitarian ties. South Korea, a growing arms exporter with a well-equipped military backed by the United States, has provided humanitarian...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell struck an ominous tone about the state of world affairs Monday while promising that he will serve out the remainder of his current term in the upper chamber. McConnell (R-Ky.) didn’t reveal whether he plans to pursue an eighth term in 2026, but told Louisville’s NewsRadio 840 that his chief mission is pushing back against “isolationists” within the GOP. “I’m not leaving the Senate. And I’m particularly involved in fighting back against the isolationist movement,” the 82-year-old said.

Since Donald Trump’s rise within Republican ranks, conservatives have divided into two competing foreign policy camps. One contends that Trump’s approach suits the world in which we live and supersedes previous GOP national security and foreign affairs outlooks. A smaller contingent contends that Ronald Reagan’s understanding of America and his conduct of diplomacy remain the gold standard for U.S. foreign policy. Atlantic Council colleagues Matthew Kroenig (also a Georgetown professor of government and international relations) and Dan Negrea contend that considerably more agreement about foreign affairs prevails among conservatives than they themselves realize. When fleshed out, a Trump-Reagan fusion represents,...

China and the United States resumed military-to-military contacts with a series of recent meetings, delivering on a decision by their leaders at a November 2023 summit. Michael S. Chase (C, L), U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for China, Taiwan and Mongolia, hosts Chinese delegation led by Maj. Gen. Song Yanchao (C, R), deputy director of the Chinese Central Military Commission Office for International Military Cooperation for meetings at the Pentagon on Jan. 9. Two days of meetings, called the China-U.S. defense policy coordination talks, took place Jan. 8-9 at the Pentagon. It was the first formal in-person encounter between...

A day that changed the course of German history forever: On November 9, 1989 the pressures of revolution brought down the Berlin Wall. This episode of History Stories illustrates how months of protests and mass demonstrations lead up to this fateful day. Archival footage of news coverage of the events as they unfolded is paired with powerful statements from East Berliners as they crossed over to the other side.

A rusted Cold War missile was discovered in a deceased man's garage in Washington state, The Seattle Times reported. What seemed like an ordinary rocket caught the attention of the National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, prompting them to alert the Bellevue Police. The museum was made aware of the missile when someone called to offer to donate the rocket, purchased at an estate sale, said reports A bomb squad identified the relic as a Douglas AIR-2 Genie. The unguided air-to-air rocket was designed to carry a 1.5 kt W25 nuclear warhead. Fortunately, the lack of...

Richard Nixon in 1992, shortyl after the fall of the Soviet Union makes a prediction about the future of the cold war and Russia

In a speech at a Council on Foreign Relations dinner in his honor, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announces that the United States will protect its allies through the “deterrent of massive retaliatory power.” The policy announcement was further evidence of the Eisenhower administration’s decision to rely heavily on the nation’s nuclear arsenal as the primary means of defense against communist aggression. Dulles began his speech by examining communist strategy that, he concluded, had as its goal the “bankruptcy” of the United States through overextension of its military power. Both strategically and economically, the secretary explained, it was unwise...

Synopsis: A panel of Russian commentators on state owned television channel "Russia 1" discussing a recent 'naked party' by Russian elites and their reactions to it. Russia language transcript at the link. Click the 'more' button and you'll see the transcript feature.

The White House has announced it plans to use a cold-war era law to ease supply chain issues that the administration argues are contributing to higher inflation – a key electoral challenge to Joe Biden’s re-election chances next year as polling consistently suggests voters are not buying his Bidenomics pitch. In a statement, the White House said Biden will use the Defense Production Act to improve the domestic manufacturing of medicines deemed crucial for national security and will convene the first meeting of the president’s supply chain resilience council to announce other measures tied to the production and shipment of...

For U.S. special operations personnel, conducting high-altitude parachute jumps are pretty much par for the course. Yet doing so with a nuclear bomb strapped between your legs is on an entirely different level. That’s exactly what can be seen in the top shot above. Here, a U.S. Army Special Forces paratrooper is pictured free-falling during a training exercise with a Special Atomic Demolition Munition, or SADM, harnessed to them. A form of atomic demolition munition (ADM), SADMs were man-portable nuclear weapons, also known as "backpack nukes." These munitions were fitted into specially designed hard/cloth carrying cases for their transportation on...

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...