Free Republic

Because of Donald Trump, Vice President Joe Biden thundered during the campaign, the U.S. "is more isolated in the world than we've ever been ... America First has made America alone." Biden promised to repair relations with America's allies. And he appears to have gone some distance to do so in the congratulatory phone call he received from Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga of Japan. According to Suga, during the brief call, Biden said Article V of the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty of 1960 covers the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, islands Japan controls but China claims as its...

Donald Trump may end up losing the 2020 election in the Electoral College, but he won the campaign that ended on Nov. 3. Democrats had been talking of a "sweep," a "blowout," a "blue wave" washing the Republicans out of power, capturing the Senate, and bringing in an enlarged Democratic majority in Nancy Pelosi's House. They visualized the ouster of Trump in a defeat so massive and humiliating that it would serve as an eternal repudiation of the man. And, most intoxicating of all, they believed they would be seen by history as the angels of America's deliverance. It was...

Our aim is to "starve the whole population -- men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound -- into submission," said First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. He was speaking of Germany at the outset of the Great War of 1914-1918. Americans denounced as inhumane this starvation blockade that would eventually take the lives of a million German civilians. Yet when we went to war in 1917, a U.S. admiral told British Prime Minister Lloyd George, "You will find that it will take us only two months to become as great criminals as you are." After the...

Moreover, while Fauci and Redfield are specialists in epidemics, Trump’s portfolio goes far beyond that. He is chief of state, head of government and commander in chief, responsible for the security and defense of the nation. His portfolio is broader and deeper than those of Fauci and Redfield. In the first hours of the Normandy invasion, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower must have been rightly alarmed about the high U.S. casualties on Omaha Beach. But he also had to concern himself with the failure to capture the Port of Caen to bring ashore the armor to stop any German counterattack that might...

TEHRAN (AFP) - An Iranian government-sponsored body set up to probe the veracity of the Holocaust has challenged Europe to hand over documents about the mass slaughter of Jews in World War II. Mohammad Ali Ramin, the head of the "World Holocaust Foundation" created after Iran's controversial Holocaust conference last year, said Austria, Germany and Poland in particular should supply documents. "They should hand over the proof for the dossier on the organized massacre of Jews in Europe during World War II to the independent international fact-finding committee affiliated to this foundation," the IRNA state news agency quoted him as...

After the Great Pandemic has passed and we emerge from Great Depression II, what will be America's mission in the world? What will be America's cause? We have been at such a turning point before. After World War II, Americans wanted to come home. But we put aside our nation-building to face the challenge of a malevolent Stalinist empire dominant from the Elbe river to the Barents Sea. And after persevering for four decades, we prevailed. What, then, did we do with our epochal victory? We alienated Russia by moving our NATO military alliance into the Baltic and Black Seas....

Isn't it time for W to come off the sidelines, forgive the nickname for Jeb! and help Trump manage the politics of the moment, the hatred and vitriol aimed at him by, in some cases former members of his administration? Much like 9/11, this is a moment when the Nation must come together. We already know the left will never relent. Where are you, Mr. President?

It has been a bad few days for the establishment, really bad. In a 51-49 vote, the Senate refused to call witnesses in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump and agreed to end the trial Wednesday, with a near-certain majority vote to acquit the president of all charges. As weekend polls show socialist Bernie Sanders surging into the lead for the nomination in the states of Iowa, New Hampshire and California, the sense of panic among Democratic Party elites is palpable. Former Secretary of State and Joe Biden surrogate John Kerry was overheard Sunday at a Des Moines hotel talking...

Can a septuagenarian socialist who just survived a heart attack and would be 80 years old in his first year in office be elected president of the United States? It's hard to believe but not impossible. As of today, Bernie Sanders looks like one of the better, if not best, bets for the nomination. Polls have him running first or second in the first three contests: Iowa on Monday, and then New Hampshire and Nevada. If Bernie can best main rival Joe Biden in Iowa, he will likely thump Joe in New Hampshire. Biden's campaign, built around "electability," could suffer...

In 1868, President Andrew Johnson was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act that had been enacted by Congress over his veto in 1867. Defying the law, Johnson fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, without getting Senate approval, as the act required him to do. In his 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, John F. Kennedy made Edmund Ross one of the Senate's "Profiles in Courage" for his decisive and heroic vote not to convict and remove Johnson. Repealed in 1887, the Tenure of Office Act was later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. But while the act was the lethal...

New photos have emerged which for the first time show convicted Nazi guard John Demjanjuk at the Sobibor death camp, a Berlin archive confirmed Monday, although he always denied ever being there. Ukrainian-American Demjanjuk was convicted of being an accessory to the murder of nearly 30,000 Jews at Sobibor by a German court in 2011. He died while his appeal was pending. According to the Berlin-based Topography of Terror archive, photos of Demjanjuk are among a newly discovered collection of more than 350 snaps which give "detailed insight" into the camp in German-occupied Poland. The photos surfaced from the estate...

"No voices calling for peace. No voices critical of empire. Just establishment media and current and former Pentagon officials who feed off the trillion dollar war machine." As President Donald Trump spent the early days of 2020 instigating and then backing down from a potentially catastrophic confrontation with Iran, corporate media in the U.S. turned to the very same people who promoted the country's worst foreign policy disaster in a generation to advocate for repeating the mistakes of two decades ago. The decision of networks and cable news outlets like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News to bring on a stream of past advocates for...

Since 1969, "Virginia Is for Lovers" has been the tourism and travel slogan of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Advertising Age called it "one of the most iconic ad campaigns in the past 50 years." But the Virginia of 2020 seems to be another country than the friendly commonwealth to which this writer moved four decades ago.

Former Rep. Ron Paul said he wished President Trump would "flip-flop" his policy on Iran and criticized Trump's loyalty to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia. "I think our country is not doing so well. Our foreign policy is in shambles," the Texas Republican said. "Unfortunately, the one place where I wish he would flip-flop every once in a while or change his policy completely is dealing with Iran. He is steady on it, he said it on the campaign. He's very loyal to Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia." Trump authorized airstrikes that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani and...

On this weekend’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday,” anchor Chris Wallace asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo if the airstrike that killed Qasem Soleimani was a “big step back’ in President Donald Trump’s commitment to stop endless wars. Wallace asked, “Is the president pulling us out of endless wars in the Middle East, or with his action this week, did he take a big step back in?” Pompeo said, “Endless wars are the direct result of weakness, and President Trump will never let that happen. We are going to get our facilities as hardened as we can possibly get them...

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future," Yogi Berra reminded us. But on "The McLaughlin Group," the TV talk show on which this writer has appeared for four decades, predictions are as mandated as was taking Latin in Jesuit high schools in the 1950s. Looking to 2020, this writer predicted that Donald Trump's great domestic challenge would be to keep the economy firing on all cylinders. His great foreign policy challenge? Avoiding war. When one looks at the numbers -- unemployment at or below 4% for two years, an expansion in its 11th year, the stock market regularly...

"Quid pro quo" was the accusatory Latin phrase most often used to describe President Donald Trump's July 25 phone call asking for a "favor" from the president of Ukraine. New Year's prediction: The Roman poet Horace's Latin depiction: "Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus" -- "The mountains went into labor, and brought forth a mouse" -- will be used to describe the articles of impeachment drawn up by Nancy Pelosi's House. Article II is titled "Obstruction of Congress." What does it allege? That Trump "directed the unprecedented, categorical, and indiscriminate defiance of subpoenas issued by the House of Representatives pursuant to...

At first glance, it would appear that five months of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong had produced a stunning triumph. By September, the proposal of city leader Carrie Lam that ignited the protests -- to allow criminal suspects to be extradited to China for trial -- had been withdrawn. And though the protesters' demands escalated along with their tactics, from marches to mass civil disobedience, Molotov cocktails, riots and attacks on police, Chinese troops remained confined to their barracks. Beijing wanted no reenactment of Tiananmen Square, the midnight massacre in the heart of Beijing that drowned in blood the 1989...

A week from now, the 29 member states of "the most successful alliance in history" will meet to celebrate its 70th anniversary. Yet all is not well within NATO. Instead of a "summit," the gathering, on the outskirts of London, has been cut to two days. Why the shortened agenda? Among the reasons, apprehension that President Donald Trump might use the occasion to disrupt alliance comity by again berating the Europeans for freeloading on the U.S. defense budget. French President Emmanuel Macron, on the 100th anniversary of the World War I Armistice, described NATO as having suffered "brain death." Macron...

"Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." These are the offenses designated in the Constitution for which presidents may be impeached and removed from office. Which of these did Trump commit? According to his accusers in this city, his crime is as follows: The president imperiled our "national security" by delaying, for his own reasons, a transfer of lethal aid and Javelin missiles to Ukraine -- the very weapons President Barack Obama refused to send to Ukraine, lest they widen and lengthen the war in the Donbass. Now, if Trump imperiled national security by delaying the transfer of...