Early yesterday morning, International Criminal Court Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo announced his decision to begin looking into war crimes allegedly committed by Russian and Georgian troops in South Ossetia.  The announcement, though misguided, was appealingly symmetrical .  After all, if overreaching by one international body was partly responsible for this mess (when the United States and Russia compete to prove how … [Read More]

Suggesting that movie director Woody Allen, who has abandoned the Big Apple and is residing in Europe now, has been transformed from a New York Liberal into a Continental Conservative would certainly sound like a stretch. But after watching his 2005 Match Point, in which the main character is a professional tennis player by the name of Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys … [Read More]

Having sat on a boat for the last five weeks, I’ve had plenty of time to reflect, and reflect I did. Getting old tends to make one look back, nostaligize for that green light of the dock, and, of course,  the great F.Scott Fitzgerald himself. Yes, he was the master of evoking the grand old days, when Gatsby boys wore white … [Read More]

Dan McCarthy addresses one of the several questions I posed in my last post—“Is the conservative movement worth conserving?”–namely, “To what extent would anyone read the authors of the movement conservative canon (Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer et al.) if a conservative movement did not exist to promote their works so relentlessly?” Dan responds that the movement hasn’t in fact promoted its … [Read More]

Since the start of 2008, a new international sport has emerged: Yellow Peril-mongering. International politicians, commentators and activists have competed to see who can issue the shrillest and most spine-tingling warning about the threat posed by the Chinese to the safety, security, and self-esteem of Western civilisation. Inexorably, the Beijing Olympics—which are now in full swing—have been turned into an all-purpose … [Read More]

In a 1955 foreign-policy cabinet meeting, Dwight Eisenhower is reported to have remarked, “Adenauer’s the West’s ace in the hole.” The president was of course referring to the chancellor of the German Federal Republic, Konrad Adenauer, who was at the time rather assiduously pursuing good relations with Washington and taking the lead in the establishment of various international institutions: from the … [Read More]

The American people should be eternally grateful to Old Europe for having spiked the Bush-McCain plan to bring Georgia into NATO. Had Georgia been in NATO when Mikheil Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia, we would be eyeball to eyeball with Russia, facing war in the Caucasus, where Moscow’s superiority is as great as U.S. superiority in the Caribbean during the Cuban missile … [Read More]

For nearly thirteen years between 1979 and 1992, the Central Intelligence Agency managed the U.S. government’s largest-ever covert action program in support of the Afghan mujahedin’s war to rid their country of Soviet occupiers and Afghan communists. The CIA learned many lessons from this experience, the most important also being one of the simplist:  Money is much appreciated by the Afghans … [Read More]

Mikheil Saakashvili’s decision to use the opening of the Olympic Games to cover Georgia’s invasion of its breakaway province of South Ossetia must rank in stupidity with Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s decision to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships. Nasser’s blunder cost him the Sinai in the Six-Day War. Saakashvili’s blunder probably means permanent loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. After … [Read More]

Someday I’d like to meet Monsieur Tourette, and ask him about his syndrome. Because over the years I’ve had close friends, colleagues, mentors, siblings and girlfriends suggest—sometimes quite tactfully—that I must suffer from this condition. Nothing else could explain why I said the things I did, in the contexts where I said them. “I mean,” a childhood friend explained with warm … [Read More]