Free Republic

The Chinese side knows that wielding the same self-loathing ideas the ruling class teaches in American universities will hurt Americans most.It’s a cliché to claim every setback as the official end of unipolarity, but if there were ever to be a date for historians to mark the televised humiliation and official end of American hegemony, it would be the very public verbal slapping of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan by the Chinese ambassador on U.S. soil.The U.S. and China leveled sharp rebukes of each others’ policies in the first high-level, in-person talks of...

The length, scope, and operational duration of the attack suggests it is a targeted towards regime stability and an internal audience. Whether it leads to further escalation is a political call. Last night, around the time Iranian missiles were dropping on U.S. bases, a friend from the Pentagon texted me saying, “Oh, well, it appears they will do something dumb, and we may go to war.” Any crisis leads to paranoia, hysteria, and essentially all other basest instincts in a human being. What differentiates a realist or a strategist from an ideologue or a cultist is how one thinks in...

"The genius of you Americans," the Arab-nationalist and one-time president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, once explained, "is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them which we are missing." I've long taken patriotic pride in such statements of befuddlement from foreigners. America is a gloriously complicated thing. We often confuse our national creeds for universal principles. We are a Jacksonian people (that's Andrew Jackson, in case you were wondering) in love with Jeffersonian ideals and legalistically committed to Madisonian mechanisms. Like a...