Free Republic

An American withdrawal from the defense of Europe is undesirable for any involved nation – unless, of course, their capital city is Moscow – but it is obvious that the current incarnation of the US-Nato relationship cannot continue. The debate over military spending in Europe and in the US shows no sign of resolution, in spite of very recent spending increases from a few European countries. A wide gap persists between the 3.5 per cent of GDP commitment of the US and the below 2 per cent average in Europe. While this disparity has long been an irritant, now there...

Defeated generals are sent home in disgrace, but it is most unusual to dismiss victorious ones. Kosovo: NATO’s war against Serbia ended in victory. Gen. Wesley K. Clark, was very much the victorious general of that war. So why was Clark fired? Officially, he wasn’t fired, but merely asked to step aside early. Clark was caught. The entire structure of the U.S. armed forces is built on: classic war, fought by Army infantry, Marines storming ashore, armored forces, artillery, attack helicopters, fighter-bombers that dive low to attack the enemy, as well as strike aircraft and bombers that operate more safely...

Noted military historian Edward N Luttwak, who has penned numerous volumes on the grand strategies of empires, including that of the former Soviet Union, says that the Ukraine war will result in the political demise of Russian president and strongman Vladimir Putin due to a raft of reasons, including the prospects of an unwieldy occupation and the rising tide of discontent back home. Luttwak, a cold warrior now in his late 70s, had negotiated with Soviet generals and officials in his prime as an American interlocutor in the height of tensions between the United States and the USSR. He avers...

Nothing was more predictable about this most predictable of wars than the certain failure of Putin’s Coup de Main invasion to seize Kyiv and conquer Ukraine in one fell swoop. And yet its success was confidently predicted by Russia’s FSB domestic security service, which, instead of the SVR foreign intelligence, was given the task of sustaining the fiction that Ukraine is Russian. Perhaps it is not strange that Putin, himself a former FSB officer, did not question this reckless optimism. He knew that the CIA fully agreed with the FSB estimate, as did the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BDN) and the French...

No, this isn’t a joke.Edward Luttwak, the distinguished Israeli-American strategist and public intellectual, tweeted the following this morning:11 Chinese universities teach Greek and Latin. Another 20 seek staff to so as well. Back in the US, the Princeton CLASSICS department has just eliminated the Latin or Greek requirement “to address systemic racism”. Truly racist say I. Why not just end it ? Jobs await in 中国The Chinese characters at the end mean “Middle Kingdom.”Princeton created an uproar by ditching the requirement for classics majors to learn Greek or Latin. That shouldn’t be a surprise: In 2017 Harvard eliminated the music...

The received wisdom is that President Bush has been a foreign policy disaster, and that America is threatened by the rise of Asia. Both claims are wrong—Bush has successfully rolled back jihadism, and the US will benefit from Asian growth.

Politicians and officials from two US administrations traded accusations last week over failures to act against terrorism before and after September 11, 2001. Their claims and counter-claims obscured a crucial weakness in the US military's readiness at the very time when al-Qaeda was at its most vulnerable. In 1998, when Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda training camps were identified as a serious threat, plans were drawn up to attack both him and them. At that time Afghanistan had no air defence perimeter, so that any aircraft could fly in and out unmolested, and it had no ground patrols along...

The vicious circle of weakness dominating European thought is countered by the virtuous circle of strength that George W. Bush has expressed. I am not a European. Lee Harris argued, "The world changed on Sunday," March 14, with the Spanish elections, but the real problem is that Europe failed to change. If Europe cannot rouse itself to fight back, after it has been attacked on its own soil, we may conclude that the cowardice we saw after 9-11 was not merely the expression of anti-Americanism and opportunism, but of a deeper paralysis, which is now in its terminal stage. And...

I am not a Spaniard. Somewhere, on March 12, I saw the headline, "We are All Spaniards Now." It was an allusion to the Le Monde headline from 9/12, "We are All Americans Now."As we now know, that initial French (and German) sympathy for America was short-lived. In no time flat, the Old Europe of France and Germany sought to appease Islamism, and while claiming to be our allies, to betray us at every step of the way.Not so, the Spaniards. The 1,300 troops they sent to Iraq were largely a symbolic matter, but the symbolism was powerful.After 911, when...