Our World

The traditional way to see a war is to fight in one. This can be a problem if your country is not actually at war

In 2004, the BBC sent me to the Iraqi city of Karbala to report on the gathering of Shia pilgrims for the religious holiday of Ashura. American troops knew to stay well away. They were already fighting a Sunni insurgency and didn’t want trouble with Iraq’s Shiites as well. The insurgency’s leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — the butcher of Iraq — had just threatened to attack “the sects of apostasy,” as he called the Shia, and as we entered Karbala, militiamen searched us for weapons. The air hummed with tension. But at breakfast in the hotel, we ran into a gaggle of backpackers: Brits and Americans. Seeing the look on my face, a blonde woman in the group told me not to worry. “Things are much calmer now in Iraq, aren’t they?”

Signal 2024 as another year of living dangerously.

Last January, the People’s Republic of China sent a massive spy balloon over the United States, including strategic military bases. When the intrusion could not be hidden from Congress and the public, Biden officials claimed they couldn’t shoot down the balloon for fear of damage on the ground. They did not explain why they failed to shoot it down when it passed over water between Alaska and the lower 48. By now the reason should be apparent.

… but There’s a First Step to Fixing It

So 2023 is about to enter the pages of history, or its dustbin. And what can one say about such a year? Momentous as it was to some, as a quick scan of the birth notices or obituaries will confirm, it feels like one of those years of ominous quiet before the storm.

How can you say that, you may ask, when the Middle East exploded in early October? And my answer is that all years see some dramatic events. But while some are clear turning points, like 1942 or 1968, and others seem to be unimportant, like 1926 or 1955, still others give the troubling sense that serious problems are building toward a crisis that is yet to arrive.

Trying to grab a piece of someone else’s land has always been a favorite trick by rulers in domestic difficulty to divert attention from their own incompetence or worse.

It is, therefore, no surprise that as international order begins to break down for lack of an authority to enforce it and with the United Nations an empty shell, old irredentist dreams return to haunt more and more nations.

This back-to-the-future through the past episode started with the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008. Moscow’s argument was that South Ossetia, a Muslim-majority enclave in Georgia was, in fact, a part of Ossetia, which had been annexed by Russia in the 18th century. It mattered little that Russian Ossetia had converted to Orthodox Christianity.

However bad Robert Putnam thought it was, it has become considerably worse

In the Phetasy.com book club, we recently read the famous social science tome, Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam. In it he examines the decline of social capital across various facets of American life. Based on his 1995 essay of the same title, the book was groundbreaking when it appeared in 2000. Putnam had noticed a trend: Americans were spending more and more time alone. His book analyzed the data and contemplated what it meant for our democracy and humanity.

The most serious political question is whether we want our nation to survive

A third world war is not possible in our time. Or at least, it is not possible in the way that any mainstream scholar or pundit thinks about such a thing.

There are many grave evils that threaten the international order and, by extension, the United States. Some of these dangers are quite likely in fact. A global conventional war between the great states like China, Russia, and the United States on the scale of the two previous world wars is not one of them.

Senator JD Vance on December 11 suggested that Ukraine surrender land in order to obtain a peace settlement with Russia.

“It ends the way nearly every single war has ever ended: when people negotiate and each side gives up something that it doesn’t want to give up,” the Ohio Republican said to reporters. “No one can explain to me how this ends without some territorial concessions relative to the 1991 boundaries.”

When someone dies at the age of 100 it is rarely deemed to be premature. In the case of Henry Kissinger, he maintained his unique aptitudes right to the end of his life and his insights on foreign and strategic policy matters were so perceptive and original and his gifts for repartee and aphorisms were undiminished; his demise would have been untimely even if he had lived for another 25 years. He was both one of history’s great foreign ministers and one of the world’s outstanding academic historians of international relations and great power strategy.

Thought it best to add an opposing viewpoint…

The two faces of Henry Kissinger – This nice Jewish boy was a natural liar

In the coming days, many will lavish praise and blame on Henry Kissinger for what he did and did not do. A prime example is the coup in Chile that removed Salvador Allende in 1973, which Kissinger welcomed but did not cause. With thousands of US academics teaching the falsehood of his guilt as truth, Kissinger just had to live with the calumny.

The Irish-American officers of the New York Police Department Pipes and Drums band had never heard of The Pogues on the night that they featured in the band’s most famous and beloved music video.

Fairytale of New York was filmed in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park in November 1987 on one of the coldest days of the year, recounts drummer and bagpipe player Kevin P McCarthy.

McCarthy, a now-retired NYPD detective, says the group arrived for their second gig of the night and were surprised to discover that they would not need to play their instruments during the frigid two-hour film shoot.

It’s no secret that for years, the Drudge Report drove conservative (and often mainstream) media news cycles. If Drudge was talking about it, you could bet everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News to PJ Media was also discussing it. In fact, there was a symbiotic relationship between Drudge’s aggregated links and the pages of most conservative media outlets. Pretty much everyone was either getting story prompts from Drudge or sending him stories (often via AOL Instant Messenger) hoping he’d link them.

Never had a Drudge link. My first big link way back when came from Little Green Footballs to a story on a meetup held by local Islamists and Liberal-Left types.

I was fortunate to receive several from Instapundit over the years, the first being a story on the TDSB teaching that only white people could be racist. This was long before anyone mentioned CRT or DEI. Heady times indeed.

Axis and Allies in the Eurasian rimland

With the Middle East primed for a conflagration, American policy-makers must recognize two realities. First, the United States is embroiled in a major Eurasian rimland war, one that must be fought and won to preserve American power. Second, the benefits of fighting forward — and fighting limited small wars rather than purely focusing on “the biggest threat” in Asia — are on full display in the Middle East today. The U.S. must stay the course in Europe and the Middle East to win the struggle for Eurasian mastery.

As the series marks its 50th anniversary, another conflict is breaking out

In one of the opening scenes of Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms, the central character Guy Crouchback vacates his Italian castle in 1939 once the approaching conflagration can no longer be ignored. “He expected his country to go to war in a panic, for the wrong reasons or for no reason at all, with the wrong allies, in pitiful weakness,” Waugh writes of his honourable, fallible stand-in. “But now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.” The looming catastrophe was, in all its awful novelty, the birth pangs of our own age.

In a famous lecture delivered in 1939 at the University of St. Andrews, On Fairy-Stories, J.R.R. Tolkien stated one of his profound convictions: “The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-story.” Tolkien’s idea anticipates Northrop Frye’s theory from The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, which states that all universal literary “archetypes” are contained within the Holy Scriptures. This thesis prompts us to reflect on the possible influence of the Bible in general, and the Gospels in particular, on Tolkien’s literary creations.

History is rearing its ugly head, and it would best not to look away. Time to put away our foolish utopian dreams and face the harsher, more divided world, predicted in Samuel Huntington’s 2011 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order .

In the heady days following the collapse of the Soviet Union, many public intellectuals, as well as presidents like George W. Bush and Barack Obama, embraced the notion of an ever expanding, liberal and democratic world order. Some, like political scientist Francis Fukuyama, even preached the “end of history,” prophesizing “the good news” of democracy’s inevitable spread and insisting that tech growth favours “a universal evolution in the direction of capitalism.”

Thirteen powerful families allegedly determine our collective destiny

Many years ago a friend of mine insisted we go to a bookstore so I could purchase a copy of a book that had her howling with laughter. The title of the book itself suggests the source of her amusement, “Nothing in this book is true, but it’s exactly how things are.” Published in 1994, the book is an audacious farrago into everything from massive alien intervention to pop metaphysics. One of the book’s premises, if one is to assign that much coherence to it, is that not one, but dozens of extraterrestrial races currently intervene in the affairs of humanity. It is now a cult classic.