Free Republic

Russia is on the verge of political turmoil as its economy teeters on the brink of collapse and its war in Ukraine stumbles, warns a leading nationalist figure. Russian nationalists have been among the staunchest supporters of the Kremlin's war in Ukraine. Figures like Aleksandr Dugin have even argued that Ukraine's destruction is crucial for Russia's survival. In his 1997 book "The Geopolitical Future of Russia", he expressed his views bluntly, writing: "The existence of Ukraine within its current borders, and with its current status as a 'sovereign state,' is tantamount to delivering a monstrous blow to Russia's geopolitical security."...

According to a military and security analyst, Russia's summer offensive in Ukraine has utterly collapsed. Julian Röpcke, a journalist for the German news outlet Bild, has been closely following the war since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. In a recent column, he outlined four primary reasons why he believes Putin's summer campaign in Ukraine has crumbled. One of Russia's main objectives in the east was to capture the city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region - a crucial logistical hub for Ukraine's army. Despite positioning troops at the city's gates since January, Röpcke contends that all attempts to storm it...

Donald Trump has imposed a hefty 50% tariff on Indian goods, a move prompted by India's continued purchase of Russian oil. This action endangers over half of India's exports to its biggest market. According to New Delhi, the tariffs that come into effect today (Wednesday, August 27) will impact £35.8billion ($48.2bn) worth of exports. Initially, the US President announced a 25% tariff on Indian goods. However, earlier this month, he signed an executive order for an additional 25% tariff in response to India's purchases of Russian oil. This brings the total tariffs levied by the United States on its ally...

Moscow has reportedly struck a deal with New Delhi to bring in up to one million Indian workers to help ease manpower problems as the war in Ukraine continues. Russia has been compelled to bring in one million Indian workers to avert a complete breakdown of its workforce. Ever since the launch of the comprehensive war in Ukraine in February 2022, countless working-age Russians have been summoned for military service. The armed forces are facing tremendous strain to locate fresh recruits for deployment to the battlefront as replacements for those who have been killed or wounded. Russia has endured massive...

The Russian-controlled territories of Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine's east are teetering on the brink of a severe humanitarian crisis, with certain locales having been parched for four months straight. The dire water scarcity is attributed to rampant corruption and gross mismanagement by the Kremlin-backed leadership. Donetsk and Makiivka are bearing the brunt of the crisis, inciting residents' fears of potential disease outbreaks. In response, local officials have rolled out emergency water rationing for the nearly 1.3 million inhabitants of both cities. Andrey Chertkov, the interim head honcho of the self-proclaimed DPR government, cautioned citizens about the new tri-weekly water...

Russian President Vladimir Putin is facing a backlash from within the Kremlin over his pro-China policy, with elites fearing that Moscow is becoming a 'colony' of Beijing. Vladimir Putin is facing intense criticism from rival factions within the Kremlin over his China policy, which could worsen Russia's economic crisis, with earlier reports suggesting China is 'bailing' Russia out by buying distressed assets. Since the start of the Ukraine conflict - where Russia have endured huge personnel losses - in February 2022, Putin has strengthened political and economic ties with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, boosting their bilateral trade to a record...

“People who spend a lot of time in front of Fox News or MSNBC,” writes Kevin Williamson in National Review Online (NRO), “are not in the main what you’d call happy and well-adjusted people.” Williamson is one of the bright young writers of NR and NRO, presided over by Rich Lowry (or is it Richard now?) who have made National Review increasingly irrelevant to modern American conservatism. Williamson’s estimation of Fox News viewers resembles Hillary Clinton’s description of populist conservatives as “deplorables” and Barack Obama’s snide remark about those voters who cling to their religion and guns. Bill Buckley (who...

On Wednesday, Cockburn stopped by ‘Sovereignty or Submission: Restoring National Identity in the Spirit of Liberty’, hosted by conservative publications American Greatness and The New Criterion at a private club in Washington. Cockburn heard a wide-ranging discussion about nation states and governance, featuring Spectator columnists Daniel McCarthy and Roger Kimball, as well as the Hoover Institution’s Victor Davis Hanson, the Heritage Foundation’s David Azerrad, American Greatness editor Chris Buskirk, National Review’s John O’Sullivan, and Hillsdale College and Claremont Institute fellow Michael Anton. Over lunch, Tucker Carlson delivered a keynote speech on what he has learned since Trump’s election. The Fox...

Being listed in fourth place for Time magazine's "Person of the Year," as Sarah Palin was for 2008, sounds a little like being awarded the Order of Purity (Fourth Class). But it testifies to something important. Though regularly pronounced sick, dying, dead, cremated and scattered at sea, Mrs. Palin is still amazingly around. She has survived more media assassination attempts than Fidel Castro has survived real ones (Cuban official figure: 638). In her case, one particular method of assassination is especially popular -- namely, the desperate assertion that, in addition to her other handicaps, she is "no Margaret Thatcher." Very...

Conservatism around the world seems to be suffering from some sort of nervous breakdown. This takes different forms in different countries as we would expect from a political disposition that stresses the local, the practical, and the traditional. Still, the breakdown seems to be more acute in the English-speaking world than in continental Europe and elsewhere. It also exhibits certain common features. Let me begin with an acute example: “mainstream” conservative parties in all countries for the last thirty years have shunned nationalist voters and the causes that arouse them from immigration to anti-supra-nationalism. This has resulted in the rise...

"Change" is the most protean of political slogans. Everyone claims to favour it - everyone, including all of America's presidential contenders - but it is really a string of empty boxes that the winners get to open and fill. New Hampshire stampede sets Obama up for second victory Iowa's caucus results began to fill the first two boxes with the new themes of post-Bush politics. In the first upset, Barack Obama overtook Hillary Clinton as the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination with a decisive 38-29 per cent victory. He immediately interpreted "change" to mean that America had finally embraced...

Fifty years ago I was a schoolboy in a Liverpool suburb and a strong supporter of Everton like Rhys Jones. My parents were cautious and loving, but they had no qualms about letting me follow the team around the country. That a boy might be killed by a drive-by shooter as he was returning from his local soccer practice would have struck them as an episode in a Latin American coup rather than a possibility in their relatively tranquil lives. Not unreasonably. In 1955, the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer described this tranquillity in his book Exploring English Character: "When we think...

Frontpage Interview's guest today is John O'Sullivan, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former editor-in-chief of National Review, Policy Review, and the National Interest. He was a special advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at Downing Street from 1986 to1988 and he has held senior editorial positions at the London Times, the London Daily Telegraph, the National Post of Canada, the New York Post, and Irish Television and Radio. He has just published The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister.FP: John O'Sullivan, welcome to Frontpage Interview. O'Sullivan: Thanks for inviting me. I read you, so naturally...

Porous borders are partly a result, not just the cause, of failed immigration policy. It happened Wednesday of last week and it was nicely timed. One week later the U.S. Senate was scheduled to reconvene and to discuss an immigration bill. The bill proposes to amnesty most of the 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. and to admit millions more legally as guest workers. It is a controversial measure, strongly promoted by the White House and both party leaderships in the Senate but firmly opposed by most Republican congressmen, an overwhelming majority of Republican voters, and a large majority...

Generals, goes the cliché, are always fighting the last war. It is probably truer today that reporters are always reporting the last war. A Middle East war, in particular, has a familiar narrative: Israel is attacked by its Arab neighbors. It wins easily (sometimes after initial setbacks). It does so by overwhelming its weaker enemy with “disproportionate” firepower. And it then dominates the region for a decade. This recent war was very different. Some of the differences were so acute that even the BBC noticed. But the tone of much coverage was still that of Israel as Goliath versus Hezbollah...

Defeat This MonstrosityWhat Hill conservatives can do on immigration JOHN O’SULLIVAN Now that the U.S. Senate has made a strong argument for unicameral government by passing the “comprehensive” immigration monstrosity, attention turns to the House. It has already passed a sensible “enforcement only” bill. It should stand firm on that legislation, at most making it an “enforcement first” bill by promising to consider some of the Senate’s reasonable proposals in the next Congress, if any can be found. But the Bush-Democrat coalition has an almost mystical attachment to the Senate’s guest-worker and amnesty provisions. It will be faithful unto death...

The Bishops’ Borders - A question of principles and practicalities JOHN O’SULLIVAN Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles recently proposed that Catholics begin the Lenten season by fasting and praying to defeat a bill just passed by the House of Representatives to tighten up the enforcement of immigration control and border security. It sounded like a new sort of progressive penance for recalcitrant pre-Vatican II Catholics — but the cardinal was apparently in earnest. He warned his archdiocese that “hysterical” anti-immigrant sentiment was sweeping the nation, argued that the House bill was tantamount to “punishing people who help immigrants,” suggested...

Patriots for Themselves By John O'Sullivan Published 1/6/2006 12:04:44 AM A Throne in Brussels: Britain, the Saxe-Coburgs and the Belgianization of Europe by Paul Belien (Imprint Academic, 384 pages, $49) IN THE LAST FEW YEARS Belgian politicians have passed a law empowering them to arrest anyone for crimes committed anywhere, threatened to put Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, under its provisions, generously amended the legislation slightly when Donald Rumsfeld said that NATO would have to move from Brussels if it remained on the books, and in general thrown about the weight of a much larger nation. Exactly how did the...

Several Democrats Monday, including the reliable Sen. Edward Kennedy, seemed on the verge of making an even worse tactical error. They suggested that Alito's respect for executive branch prerogatives would make him too ready to approve wiretapping and other surveillance of terrorists. That shows a deep misreading of U.S. opinion. Not only do most polls show that a small plurality of Americans favors wiretapping as a tool against terrorism, but even those against do not consider it a wildly extreme position. When the Democrats campaign against Alito on those grounds, they reinforce the public view of themselves as weak on...

Murtha's got it wrong: We're winning in Iraq December 27, 2005 BY JOHN O'SULLIVAN Five weeks ago a wave of hysteria swept through Washington. Suddenly the Washington establishment became convinced that the war in Iraq was lost. This conviction was sparked off by the speech of Rep. John Murtha, a crusty former Marine usually described as a conservative Democrat, who declared that U.S. policy in Iraq was "a flawed policy wrapped in an illusion" and called for "immediate redeployment" of U.S. troops. The speech was like a match on a bonfire. Murtha was the lead story in newspapers and on...