The ‘Roosevelt Rule’ is the Way Around America’s Cartoonish Foreign Policy
For the whole of my adult working life, the discussions among the American foreign policy elite have had a cartoonish quality, amounting to highly stylized posturing, not remotely approximating the reality of the country’s actual place in the world. This intellectual flabbiness was mitigated by the fact that, because the U.S. was then far and…
The Last Best Hope: A History of American Realism–Available for pre-order!
Dear All, I am beyond delighted to announce that “The Last Best Hope: A History of American Realism” is now available for pre-order from Amazon in the US (it’s also available for pre-order on Amazon UK). Here is what the inside cover says: “In this brilliant exploration of American history and contemporary conservative politics, foreign…
No amount of wishful thinking will displace the mighty dollar
More mistakes are made in political risk analysis due to the curse of wishful thinking than any other intellectual malady that afflicts the human mind. I was recently watching a documentary about the fall of Richard Nixon, in which one of his lawyers expressed shock that the US Supreme Court had ruled unanimously that he…
China will get old before it gets rich and a waning Beijing is a more direct threat
China faces an ageing population and a western world increasingly alive to the threat it poses; Beijing isn’t dangerous because it will outpace the US, it’s as China falls behind, Xi Jinping is more likely to lash out, writes John Hulsman. For the past generation, China-watchers in the West have not covered themselves with glory…
Republican patience with supporting Ukraine is running out
Robert Bolt’s masterpiece, A Man For All Seasons, tells the story of the doomed, heroic, and very human Sir Thomas More. The moral is that it easy to believe in things when they are popular; far harder, and far more important to do so, when they mean that you will risk something. I’m not going…
Macron’s pathetic pension reform shows why Europe cannot be fixed
Pity poor Emmanuel Macron. It is the French president’s tragedy to be a supremely rational man in a supremely irrational world. This able leader, surely one of the best and the brightest of his generation, is ineffectually stuck yet again in the mire of his stalled domestic program. But this is not a specific French…
Will Europe be mastered by history in 2023?
One of the standard aphorisms in my political risk business — used to describe whether a country is rising or falling — is as brutal as it is profound. Either a country is mastering history, so the shorthand goes, or history is mastering it. There is little doubt that Europe, over the last sleepy generation,…
A story for the next US presidential election
Back in the 2000s, during the month-long book tour for our best-selling “The Godfather Doctrine,” my co-author and great friend Wess Mitchell came upon a hypothesis as to why our book had done so unexpectedly well. Since time began, Wess hypothesized, human beings have primarily learned about life through the telling of stories. For example,…
As winter sets in, both Russia and Ukraine still think they can win this war
The fantastic new German cinematic version of Erich Maria Remarque’s seminal war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, makes a telling, universal point about war itself right off the bat: how a conflict plays out is almost never as you imagine it to be. The young German boys are regaled about the effortless victories…
The midterm map says America will turn right
The pioneering 20th-century Kenyan aviator Beryl Markham put it well in explaining the intellectual usefulness of maps: “A map says to you, ‘Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not … I am the earth in the palm of your hand’.” And for all the fog obscuring the outcome of the 2022 US midterm…
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