July 21, 2019

Between a Brussels farce and a German demographic disaster

Two events happened last week — one profusely covered in the European and world media, the other hardly at all — that would have long-lasting and, in the second case, profound implications for generations to come.  The first cas...

May 24, 2019

Doomsday elections in Europe?

Next week's elections for European Parliament are likely to be treated as irrelevant by most European voters, with considerably less than 50% expected to turn out at the polls.  Nonetheless, they are watershed elections, even though you...

May 16, 2019

Germany's Energiewende on the ropes

For at least three years, I have been saying German energy policy, known as the Energiewende (Energy Transition), is doomed to fail sooner or later.  Not so the German mainstream press, which, much like that of America, is firmly in the han...

April 15, 2019

In defense of Hungary

A recent copy of that highbrow epigone of German journalism, Die Zeit, carried a piece called "Hungary is lost."  It is as good an example as any of the hopeless left-wing morass that German media have fallen into recent...

March 18, 2019

Trump-blaming media must not have read the Christchurch shooter's 'manifesto'

Reading the "Manifesto" of the Christchurch mass murderer, the first thing that strikes the reader is just how rational he is about what he expects will await him after his ghastly deed.  He hoped to survive, serve a life sentence...

February 27, 2019

Is the World Bank Changing for the Better?

When the World Bank was founded at Bretton Woods in 1944, WWII was still on, though its ultimate outcome was no longer in doubt. From the beginning the bank’s charter was to alleviate poverty through loans and expert advice. More recently, it p...

February 4, 2019

Freezing weather and the left's charlatans

As I started writing this on the balmy, if increasingly socialist, left coast on Jan. 27, the U.S. media were full of dire predictions of a catastrophic cold snap in the Midwest and New England.  That same day, in Brussels, 70,000...

January 20, 2019

Understanding Brexit in 2019

To understand what's going on in the U.K. after the defeat of Theresa May in the Commons, one needs some background not only on what motivated the Brits to vote to leave the European Union, but more importantly what it is about the E.U. that they...

January 15, 2019

China: Dystopia in Power

For many years, geopolitical pundits have debated which way China is likely to go after it pulls large numbers of its population out of poverty.  Following the semi-market reforms undertaken by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 and large-scale developm...

December 16, 2018

The Green Farce at Katowice

It is tempting to dismiss the just-ended environmental circus at Katowice as mere additional demonstration of Charles Mackay’s ‘madness of crowds,’ syndrome, but this would mean missing its intensely political nature as a frontal as...

December 11, 2018

The other Solzhenitsyn

The 100th anniversary of possibly the greatest writer of the tortured 20th century has predictably and justly given rise to numerous encomiums, such as this one from one of the great man's best interpreters.  There is no ...

November 29, 2018

Appeasement of evil returns to Europe

When European 21st-century history is written, the picture below will be considered as emblematic of its times as the one of Chamberlain waving his "peace in our time" piece of paper in 1938.  It may be even more damning, because ...

November 23, 2018

A migration pact to disaster

For the past two years, U.N. bureaucrats have worked diligently, if quietly, on something called the "Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration."  What has now become clear from its publication, and even more by analy...

November 13, 2018

Europe opting for submission to Islam

Two seemingly unrelated events in Europe over the past 20 days point to what cannot be described other than as the slow suicide of  European civilization. On November 9, Chancellor Merkel gave a speech in Berlin commemorating the 80th anniversar...

November 2, 2018

Twilight of the Green Follies

For more than two and a half centuries, human kind has lived under an irreconcilable dichotomy – the benevolent revolution we call the enlightenment, and the inevitable reactionary counter-revolution that followed it – a dichotomy that ha...

September 24, 2018

Fort Trump and the future of Eastern Europe

"Fort Trump," said the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, during a White House press conference last week, would be an appropriate name to call the first American military base in Poland.  Whether this Polish dream comes to pass or n...

August 14, 2018

Erdogan and the wages of Islamism

Except for his nation's economy, by mid-2018, Recep Tayyip ErdoДџan had achieved virtually everything he sat out to achieve when he first came to power in 2003.  Turkey is now in everything but the name an Islamist dictatorship, with Er...

June 26, 2018

Sultan Erdogan: Invincible and Doomed

By far the most interesting thing about Sunday's Turkish elections was the endless speculations by pundits left and right about what would happen if Recep Tayyip ErdoДџan were to lose.  These clueless if numerous pontificators forgot to...

June 18, 2018

Is Trump Pivoting East in Europe?

As Trump haters are having yet another field day on account of his ostensible faux pas at the G-7 meeting in Canada, and leftist pundits fall over each other screaming that Trump has no strategic vision, as others just as self-assuredly accuse him of...

June 5, 2018

Italy and the End of the Euro

At the time Italy joined the European Monetary Union (EMU) in 1999 on its way to full-fledged membership in the eurozone in January 2002, economists debated whether this never-tried-before experiment will succeed or not. One of the mos...

March 3, 2018

Immigration Disaster Looms in Germany

Milton Friedman once said open borders and the welfare state are incompatible.  This is easy to prove in California, where, according to a recent essay by Victor Davis Hanson, half of all immigrant households are on welfare and the state ac...

January 15, 2018

The trouble with Pakistan

President Trump's threat to cut U.S. assistance to Pakistan because of its duplicitous policies has elicited relatively few angry denunciations from the normally unhinged Trump-haters in the foreign policy establishment.  They have been...

December 24, 2017

Democrats in denial as Trump triumphs

With just a few days left in 2017, President Trump has signed the tax legislation that marks his first major legislative victory since becoming president.  It is undoubtedly his biggest achievement to date, but it is by no means the only one. ...

December 1, 2017

For Eastern Europe, Germany Is the Trouble

The inability of Angela Merkel and her putative partners to form a government has given rise to persistent calls, including from the chancellor herself, that what Europe needs now is a strong Germany. In fact, it is Germany’s unquestioned stren...

November 25, 2017

Angela Merkel's Coming Demise

The failure of German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to form a coalition government in her fourth term of office has, for the first time, given rise to speculations as to her possible demise as the long-time and seemingly indispensable fixture of German ...

November 17, 2017

A Game-Changer in the House of Saud?

The dramatic events in Saudi Arabia of the past few days portend a game change in the Middle East not seen in decades. Predictably, the mainstream media, desperate as they are to find something, anything to blame on President Trump, have completely m...

October 23, 2017

Sultan Erdogan and the New Janissaries

Though Western Europe and Washington are reluctant to fess up to this unfortunate fact, Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan has long ago given up even the pretence of being a democratic polity and is openly pursuing policies detrimental to democracy, t...

September 25, 2017

Angela Merkel's Pyrrhic Victory

As expected, Angela Merkel has convincingly won her fourth term as chancellor of Germany and unofficial, but no less real, leader of the European Union.  The mainstream media will again erupt into an orgy of adulation for the new leader of the f...

September 18, 2017

Juncker's State of the Union, or How Not to Move Europe Forward

Commenting on Jean-Claude Juncker’s state of the European Union speech last week, the usually restrained German economic weekly Wirtschafts Woche said the following: “Today the chief of the European Commission gave a great speech… ...

August 29, 2017

Ostpolitik Redivivus? Germany Throws Its Sympathy East

The election of Donald Trump as the 45th American president in Novembeer 2016 resulted in a predictable wave of barely concealed anti-American sentiment in the European media and officialdom alike. The reasons are not difficult to understand. The Eur...

July 14, 2017

After Hamburg: Global warming is on life support

The Hamburg G-20 is over, and the fascist thugs who provided its violent backdrop can now take a well deserved rest.  Not so their numerous sympathizers on the left, who must spin the post-confab narrative in the proper direction....

July 6, 2017

Frau Merkel on the Warpath against Trump

Next week’s G-20 meeting in Hamburg promises to be more interesting than usual. The expected unhinged leftist crowds are already much in evidence and could be counted on for a dose of violence and turmoil. More seriously, this time the fir...

June 12, 2017

After Paris: A Green Disaster in the Making in Germany

What Trump repeatedly promised to do during the election campaign has been done, and America is no longer part of the Paris Agreement.  Predictably, the mainstream media here and across the Atlantic have again gone totally unhinged with prophesi...

April 16, 2017

Who lost Turkey?

On April 17, the Western world would may wake up having to answer the urgent question: "Who lost Turkey?"  The day before that, Turkey will have completed its shocking transition from a long-term NATO ally and an imperfect democracy in...

March 23, 2017

The Real Lessons of the Dutch Elections

The Dutch elections of March 15 were billed around Europe and beyond as a battle royal between the forces of populist evil, as represented by Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party (PVV), and virtually everybody else in the motley crew of Dutch electora...

November 2, 2016

Russia in Decline

On October 20, The Jamestown Foundation held a workshop in Washington D.C. titled “Russia in Decline,” with the participation of a veritable Who’s Who of senior American experts on Russia. It was the concluding exercise of an extens...

August 17, 2016

The Real Weak Link in Europe

With some weeks now past since the event, the Brexit doom and gloom-mongers have taken a well deserved break from conjuring up the imminent demise of the U.K., the EU, and perhaps the world itself.  This may be an appropriate opportunity to cons...

May 29, 2016

Turkey on the Road to the Precipice

A few days ago, Turkey hosted something called the World Humanitarian Summit, shortly after its parliament passed a bill that would allow its government to  lift parliamentary immunity and throw in jail members of parliament whose opinions do no...

May 10, 2016

Underestimating Missile Defense

A few days ago the U.S. Navy declared operational its new ballistic missile defense site at Deveselu, Romania, as the first such base in Eastern Europe and the first land-based (Aegis ashore) site in its Aegis program. The very next day the redoubtab...

March 28, 2016

Brussels, Molenbeek, and the Way Out for Europe

The terrorist mayhem in Brussels has again produced the predictable hand-wringing about its causes. And again, as in France after last November’s attacks, the focus has been largely misplaced. Most of the attention has been directed to the role...

February 24, 2016

Islamist Turkey is Imploding

In the past two weeks a number of events have taken place in Turkey that, taken together, indicate that this erstwhile U.S. ally is spinning dangerously out of control with neither Ankara nor Washington and its European allies having the slightest cl...

November 25, 2015

Paris, ISIS, and the Externalization of Evil

Only a few days have passed since the terrorist bloodbath in Paris, but it is already clear that the conclusions France and the West have drawn from the carnage are not only wrong, but likely to guarantee more of the same. In short, they seem to beli...

October 26, 2015

GOP is Missing a Key Campaign Issue: Turkey

It is a striking feature of the presidential race so far that the word Turkey has seldom been mentioned to date on either side in the foreign policy debate. This is understandable for the Democratic Party under president Barack Obama, whose policies ...

July 29, 2015

Trumping the GOP Immigration Conundrum

When it’s all said and done a year from now and regardless of who comes on top, the GOP ought to be grateful to Donald Trump for making them aware of the tremendous pitfalls awaiting the party on immigration. It’s still early in the game,...

March 9, 2015

ISIS is the Syndrome, Sharia the Real Malignancy

As the US-led kinetic war against ISIS continues with indifferent success and less than certain prospects to date, answering the obvious question of what motivates that murderous organization becomes more pressing by the day. Remarkably, there have b...