Free Republic

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has sent millions of dollars to law firms that are intimately involved in an “unprecedented lawfare” campaign against former President Donald Trump, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records reviewed by the Daily Caller. The DNC has paid close to $2 million since August of 2021 to Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP for “legal services,” according to the DNC’s FEC filings. Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP founding partner Roberta A. Kaplan represented E. Jean Carroll in her sexual assault and defamation suits against Trump. The New York Times previously reported that Reid Hoffman, the billionaire...

Proposals to curb immigration will weigh on economic growth in the United States where the existing workforce is growing more slowly as the population ages, Dallas Federal Reserve president Robert Kaplan said on Thursday. "If you think you are actually going to cut the number of immigrants and grow GDP, those two things do not go together ... You need to grow the workforce," Kaplan said. He suggested the United States consider reforms that would allow more immigration based on surveys of needed skills. "Trade and immigration loom very large as opportunities for the U.S. to grow faster as opposed...

For better or worse, phrases such "the Cold War" and "the clash of civilizations" matter. In a similar way, so do maps. The right map can stimulate foresight by providing a spatial view of critical trends in world politics. Understanding the map of Europe was essential to understanding the twentieth century. Although recent technological advances and economic integration have encouraged global thinking, some places continue to count more than others. And in some of those, such as Iraq and Pakistan, two countries with inherently artificial contours, politics is still at the mercy of geography.So in what quarter of the earth...

The abbreviation for North Korea used by American military officers says it all: KFR, the Kim Family Regime. It is a regime whose demonization by the American media and policy makers has obscured some vital facts. North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, was not merely a dreary Stalinist tyrant. As defectors from his country will tell you, he was also a popular anti-Japanese guerrilla leader in the mold of Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist tyrant of Albania who led his countrymen in a successful insurgency against the Nazis. Nor is his son Kim Jong Il anything like the childish psychopath parodied...

Michael Rubin The U.S. is losing in Iraq because American politicians and the general public have not decided they want or need to win. Many congressmen look at Iraq through the lens of the 2006 election: They care neither how their words embolden the enemy nor how their grandstanding impacts Iraq. Meanwhile, many commentators have cast accuracy aside to cater to, and cash in on, public ennui. Iraqis are now as pessimistic as they have ever been. Corruption and organized crime run rampant. True, some metrics are positive: Oil production is on the rebound, shops are opening, agricultural production is...

...We have United Arab Emirates Special Forces in Afghanistan. It's called SOTF, a combined joint Special Operations Force in Afghanistan when I was there. The word combined was there, because there were other countries other than our own, including Laxia and the United Arab Emirates...MP3 of Robert Kaplan interview.

Live with TAE: Robert Kaplan Born in Brooklyn 53 years ago, Robert Kaplan was raised in a working-class section of Queens where his father was a truck driver and his mother a homemaker. Recruited as a swimmer, he attended the University of Connecticut, where he took not a single history, economics, or political science course, but learned to write. He started in journalism at the Daily Herald of Rutland, Vermont, and commenced to energetically educate himself in world affairs. A vagabond investigator of some of the world’s most troubled regions, he has written a host of books on places like...

Born in Brooklyn 53 years ago, Robert Kaplan was raised in a working-class section of Queens where his father was a truck driver and his mother a homemaker. Recruited as a swimmer, he attended the University of Connecticut, where he took not a single history, economics, or political science course, but learned to write. He started in journalism at the Daily Herald of Rutland, Vermont, and commenced to energetically educate himself in world affairs. A vagabond investigator of some of the world’s most troubled regions, he has written a host of books on places like the Balkans, the Middle East,...

The Good Key lessons from midlevel U.S. officers about how to address global threats. The Bad The author's assertions about a United States empire are misconceived. The Bottom Line Dispatches from far-flung places offer hope for the long run. At the turn of the 21st century, Army Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Parker Wilhelm turned down a plum Pentagon posting for a job in the boondocks. The fluent Russian speaker had decided that he could make more of a difference as a military attaché in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar than on the Potomac -- and he was probably right. When Wilhelm...

God-Fearing Spartans A look at America's "imperial grunts." "Forget the crap about it ain't being a culture war," says an American sergeant in Zamboanga, trying to explain why he regards the local Muslims as hostile. In "Imperial Grunts," Robert Kaplan surveys the U.S. military presence around the world. He finds brighter spots than this southern Philippine island but never a more succinct statement of the problem: In "Injun country," as the sergeant notes, you can't afford to be nonjudgmental. It is Mr. Kaplan's conceit that the U.S. now governs the world and, for efficiency, has carved it into six territories...

This past summer, I observed a U.S. Army Special Forces exercise in Africa that represented the quintessence of imperialism as it has been practiced throughout history and yet which no modern liberal could oppose. Almost 200 Green Berets fanned out across the Sahara to train with soldiers from nine North and West African countries. It was part of a broad effort to professionalize the troops of fledgling democracies, assist them in hunting down Islamic terrorists in unruly borderlands, and deal with future humanitarian catastrophes like Darfur.... For a relatively small outlay in men and expenditures, the U.S. military has begun...

To the extent that the left is still vibrant, I am suggesting that it has mutated into something else. If what used to be known as the Communist International has any rough contemporary equivalent, it is the global media. The global media’s demand for peace and justice, which flows subliminally like an intravenous solution through its reporting, is — much like the Communist International’s rousing demand for workers’ rights — moralistic rather than moral. Peace and justice are such general and self-evident principles that it is enough merely to invoke them. Any and all toxic substances can flourish within them,...

What really happened in Fallujah was a great deal different from what was portrayed in the news media, said Robert Kaplan of The Atlantic Monthly, the only reporter embedded with the Marine company (Bravo, 1st Battalion of the 5th Regiment) that led the advance into the heart of the city in the pre-dawn darkness of April 6. The Marines won the battle in the streets, only to lose it in the news accounts, Kaplan said in an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal May 27. "Whenever the Marines with whom I was attached crossed the path of a mosque,...

What really happened in Fallujah was a great deal different from what was portrayed in the news media, said Robert Kaplan of The Atlantic Monthly, the only reporter embedded with the Marine company (Bravo, 1st Battalion of the 5th Regiment) that led the advance into the heart of the city in the pre-dawn darkness of April 6. The Marines won the battle in the streets, only to lose it in the news accounts, Kaplan said in an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal May 27. "Whenever the Marines with whom I was attached crossed the path of a mosque,...

What really happened in Fallujah was a great deal different from what was portrayed in the news media, said Robert Kaplan of The Atlantic Monthly, the only reporter embedded with the Marine company (Bravo, 1st Battalion of the 5th Regiment) that led the advance into the heart of the city in the pre-dawn darkness of April 6. The Marines won the battle in the streets, only to lose it in the news accounts, Kaplan said in an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal May 27. "Whenever the Marines with whom I was attached crossed the path of a mosque,...

When Bravo Company of the 1st Battalion of the 5th Marine Regiment led U.S. forces into the heart of Fallujah in the pre-dawn hours of April 6, I was the only journalist present. It had been Bravo Company of the "1st of the 5th" that had been first inside the citadel of Hue in Vietnam in February 1968. Hue City, the sight of one of the most glorious chapters in Marine history — in which the Marines killed 5,113 enemy troops while suffering 147 dead and 857 wounded — was foremost in the minds of the Marine commanders at Fallujah....

What really happened in Fallujah was a great deal different from what was portrayed in the news media, said Robert Kaplan of The Atlantic Monthly, the only reporter embedded with the Marine company (Bravo, 1st Battalion of the 5th Regiment) that led the advance into the heart of the city in the pre-dawn darkness of April 6. The Marines won the battle in the streets, only to lose it in the news accounts, Kaplan said in an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal May 27. "I was in the city for the first days of the battle. The overwhelming...