Free Republic

Top Republicans in Congress -- including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell -- criticized President Donald Trump over his decision to remove US troops from northern Syria as Turkey plans a military offensive there. McConnell urged Trump to reverse his move, saying "a precipitous withdrawal of US forces from Syria would only benefit Russia, Iran, and the Assad regime."

President Donald Trump has become irritated at an emerging impression his hawkish national security advisers are marching him closer to war with Iran despite his isolationist tendencies, according to people familiar with the matter. Instead, Trump is signaling his intent to speak with the Iranians as tensions rise in the Persian Gulf, and his national security team has taken steps they hope could facilitate a new diplomatic opening. The likelihood of such an opening appears slim. But Trump has raised concern with the heightened rhetoric, believing a large-scale military intervention with Iran would be devastating to him politically, people familiar...

In these summer dog days of the Trump presidency, good news is hard to come by, but in late June it was reported that the successor institution to William Kristol’s Project for a New American Century, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), was shutting its doors for good. FPI was founded in 2009 to give the displaced neocons who had worked for President George W. Bush a platform from which to endlessly criticize the new Democratic administration and push for a continuation of Bush’s disastrous neocon foreign policy. (Some other neocons sheltered in place mostly inside the State Department and the...

This is the 13th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War II. What if President George W. Bush had not invaded Iraq? I suggest this scenario: 1. Saddam Hussein would have become a bigger threat to the region. He had clearly come to the conclusion that the West would not stop him and was acting as such. 2. Iraq would have continued shooting at U.S. and UK planes enforcing UN resolutions. How many times do you allow someone to fire missiles at your aircraft? 3. What about Israel? We do know today that Iraq won't be attacking Israel or...

The left-contrarian arsonist crowd is larger and wider-spread than the cubicled creatures in the Clinton campaign have accounted for. The historic opportunity of the 2016 election is one which Bernie Sanders likely will not have the courage to embrace: The burning to ashes of the corporatist Clintonite neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party. The scenario ideally plays out with Sanders contesting the nomination all the way to the convention and then running as a third party candidate, say on the Green Party ticket, siphoning away the base that Clinton needs to win. This will hand the election to Donald Trump,...

Here’s your shocker for the day: The neoconservatives are lying. Now before I tell you how I figured that out — apart from the fact that their lips are moving — I need to begin by parrying any manifestations of Trump Derangement Syndrome. I do not support or endorse Donald Trump, who is not a libertarian and who appears to have no clear philosophy of any kind. He would no doubt do countless things that I would deplore. Just like all the other candidates, in other words. My point is not to cheer for him. My point is that the...

The betting markets on the American primary elections show an 87% probability that Hillary Clinton will head the Democratic ticket and a 76% probability that Donald Trump will lead the Republicans. Between the two, Trump is the pro-Israel candidate. First, his daughter Ivanka is an observant Orthodox Jew after her conversion and marriage to Jared Kushner, the scion of a prominent family of Jewish philanthropists. Second, and most decisive, Trump feels no obligation to win favor among Muslims, proposing a temporary ban against any Muslim entering the United States. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, surrounded herself with advisers openly hostile to...

Once thought dead and buried on the battlefields of Iraq, a muscular and militaristic "neoconservative" approach to US foreign policy is making a comeback. For most of the last decade, the "neocons" -- personified by former vice president Dick Cheney and ex-Pentagon boss Donald Rumsfeld -- have been out of office and out of fashion. But the 2016 presidential race has seen Republican candidates embrace ideas and advisors once ostracized for the catastrophes and hubris of George W. Bush's "preemptive war" in Iraq. During last week's Republican presidential debates, 17 candidates tripped over themselves to declare President Barack Obama weak...

The conservative Chicago theoretician was the source of Ozzie Guillen's baseball philosophy.

Since October 2014, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has regularly referred to the concept of a "Mastermind" (ust akil, "supra-intellect," in Turkish) that, he says, is plotting against Turkey. This concept has been applauded by the Islamist pro-AKP media. Erdogan's December 12, 2014 speech, which focused on this "mastermind" concept, inspired the production of a two-hour "documentary" by one of the leading Turkish television channels, the pro-AKP A Haber. The film, titled "The Mastermind," first aired on March 15, 2015 and has been broadcast repeatedly since then; in addition, the Turkish Islamist pro-AKP media are circulating the film on their...

The Real Leo Strauss By JENNY STRAUSS CLAY Published: June 7, 2003 Recent news articles have portrayed my father, Leo Strauss, as the mastermind behind the neoconservative ideologues who control United States foreign policy. He reaches out from his 30-year-old grave, we are told, to direct a ''cabal'' (a word with distinct anti-Semitic overtones) of Bush administration figures hoping to subject the American people to rule by a ruthless elite. I do not recognize the Leo Strauss presented in these articles. My father was not a politician. He taught political theory, primarily at the University of Chicago. He was a...

In 1919, Rudyard Kipling wrote in The Gods of the Copybook Headings, “As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man / That…the Sow returns to her Mire / And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.” Likewise, it appears that conservatives return to their disastrous past policies. In outlining his foreign policy plans for America, Jeb Bush recently stated, “I love my father and my brother…But I am my own man – and my views are shaped by my own thinking and own experiences.” He went on to say, “I...

One of the biggest fallacies in politics today is the claim that we, as conservatives and libertarians, can only be effective if we stay loyal to the Republican Party and work to gain control of it by electing more free-market conservatives every election year. We at AFR believe such thinking to be tragically misguided. To expect the Republican Party to challenge the modern day juggernaut of statism is as foolish as expecting socialist professors to instill Americanism into our youth. It won’t happen anymore than the planets will one day reverse their orbits. This is because the members of the...

Arkansas elected Republican Rep. Tom Cotton to the Senate on Tuesday, sending incumbent Mark Pryor packing. You might not be surprised that a Republican won in Arkansas in a heavily GOP year, but Cotton's victory is a much bigger deal than you probably think. His election is a significant step for the future of GOP foreign policy, and thus perhaps for American foreign policy. Cotton, you see, is the golden child of the Republican party's hawkish establishment. He still calls the 2003 Iraq invasion a "just and noble" war. He's young — just 37 — and fervently backed by some...

The uber-hawks and neocons like Richard Cheney who led America into the disastrous invasion of Iraq are campaigning for a repeat. If only the U.S. will go to war along the Euphrates a second time, they promise, everything will turn out well. Americans should ignore these Sirens of Death. Attempting to forcibly transform Iraq never was Washington’s responsibility. Having botched the job once, U.S. policymakers should not try again. There certainly is no public support for new military adventures in Mesopotamia. There was much to despise about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. He was a murderous thug with outsize ambitions, but he...

In spite of the ease with which the word “conservatism” is thrown about these days, most people who associate with the “conservative” movement are not really conservative at all. In reality, the so-called “conservative” movement is a predominantly (though not exclusively) neoconservative movement. Contrary to what some neoconservatives would have us think, “neoconservatism” is not an insult, much less an “anti-Semitic” slur. The word, rather, refers to a distinct intellectual tradition—a point for which some neoconservatives, like its famed “godfather,” Irving Kristol, have argued at length. In The Neoconservative Persuasion, Kristol argues for another claim: neoconservatism and traditional or classical...

It began with Richard Nixon. He showed Republicans how to win elections and lose their soul, how to capitulate to statism and call it a “new kind of freedom.” Consequently the GOP is now a carbon copy of the Democrat Party. Throughout the seventies and eighties, neoconservative intellectuals eagerly fostered this “new kind of freedom” which gave Republicans an excuse to blank out on the reality of what they were doing. Led by the late Irving Kristol and big government luminaries like Harvard sociologist Patrick Moynihan and Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, these influential former socialists infiltrated the Republican Party like...

Wednesday, John Kerry told the Senate not to worry about the cost of an American war on Syria. The Saudis and Gulf Arabs, cash-fat on the $110-a-barrel oil they sell U.S. consumers, will pick up the tab for the Tomahawk missiles. Has it come to this – U.S. soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen as the mercenaries of sheikhs, sultans and emirs, Hessians of the New World Order, hired out to do the big-time killing for Saudi and Sunni royals? Yesterday, too, came a stunning report in the Washington Post. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations has joined...

Ted Cruz, Bill Lee, and Rand Paul are isolationists, per Jennifer Rubin, the in-house neocon at the Washington Post. Throw in Sarah Palin, too. The senators and former governor want nothing more than two briny oceans to defend the nation from the world's predators and cutthroats. Heck, maybe they don't even want militias. Palin and the three rising conservative stars are secret America Firsters. "Lindbergh" is their password. Shhh! Hands up, guys and gal, Jennifer Rubin's outed you. It's more like Rubin tarred y'all, pinning America First buttons on your lapels all by her lonesome, to the gloating approval of...

DES MOINES, Iowa — Some Republicans are accusing the party’s neoconservative hawks of playing dirty pool in an attempt to smear Sen. Rand Paul as a bigot for having an aide who once expressed admiration for Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth. The aide, Jack Hunter, who quit on Monday, was eased out by Mr. Paul after a neoconservative publication revealed that, as a radio “shock jock” some years ago, Mr. Hunter advocated that the Southern states secede once again from the union. Saying he had become more libertarian and broad-minded since his days as the “Southern Avenger,” Mr. Hunter revealed...