Free Republic

Since Donald Trump said that if Vladimir Putin praises him, he would return the compliment, Republican outrage has not abated. Arriving on Capitol Hill to repair ties between Trump and party elites, Gov. Mike Pence was taken straight to the woodshed. John McCain told Pence that Putin was a "thug and a butcher," and Trump's embrace of him intolerable. Said Lindsey Graham: "Vladimir Putin is a thug, a dictator...who has his opposition killed in the streets," and Trump's views bring to mind Munich. Putin is an "authoritarian thug," added "Little Marco" Rubio. What causes the Republican Party to lose it...

There was something poetic about the events that bookended the past week of diplomacy. This week began with French President François Hollande’s “peace” conference and ended with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s state visit to Moscow. From the perspective of both substance and style, the contrast between the two events couldn’t have been more striking. France hosted yet another anti-Israel diplomatic pile-on. Hollande had hoped to show that France was stepping into the void left by the US’s abandonment of its position as world leader. But all the confab served to do was show how irrational and self-destructive France – and...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on November 20 during a brief visit to Russia, the Kremlin announced Tuesday. In September, Russia raised a brief alarm in the Middle East after apparently detecting a joint Israel and US missile launch test in the Mediterranean. Israel’s Defense Ministry confirmed that it carried out a successful trial involving a new type of Sparrow target missile, which was meant to test Israel’s missile tracking capabilities. Russia had reported that two ballistic objects had been fired from the central Mediterranean to the eastern coast of the sea...