Mark Tooley

Mark Tooley is IRD’s president and editor of IRD’s foreign policy and national security journal, Providence. Prior to joining the IRD in 1994, Mark worked eight years for the Central Intelligence Agency. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and is a native of Arlington, Virginia. He is the author of Taking Back The United Methodist Church, published in 2008; Methodism and Politics in the 20th Century, published in 2012; and The Peace That Almost Was: The Forgotten Story of the 1861 Washington Peace Conference and the Final Attempt to Avert the Civil War, published in 2015.

Follow Mark on Twitter: @markdtooley

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New Churchill Movie Is Flop

No historical movie is historically accurate, as movies are always mainly about entertainment not instruction. Some biopics depart from truthful…

Star Wars 40 Years Ago American Renewal Responsibility Patriotism
“Star Wars” 40 Years Ago

The rhapsodic public reception that Star Wars received 40 years ago in America, even as it was originally banned in the Soviet Union, was part of a larger, slowly emerging renewal of American confidence in its democratic principles and in its global responsibilities.

Christians and American Empire
Christians and American Empire

Preoccupation with “empire” by some American Christian elites may be back now that Donald Trump is president.

Burying a Hero & Recalling a Generation

Friday I attended a memorial service at Fort Myer for Nixon-era Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, who died in November at…

America, Lincoln & World

This week I heard William Pederson of Louisiana State University and director of the International Lincoln Center speak on Abraham…

Russia, America & National Self-Criticism
Russia, America, & National Self-Criticism

This week in Moscow there was the usual lavish military parade, bristling with missiles and other weaponry, commemorating victory in…

Pope Francis & Egyptian Christian Nationalism

As Pope Francis entered a stadium in Cairo, Egypt on Saturday to conduct a mass, thousands of Egyptian Catholics waved…

American Permanence?

Walter Russell Mead on Friday eve wonderfully spoke about the influence of eschatology on American foreign policy to our Providence/Davenant…

Vichy France
Marine Le Pen, France, & the Holocaust

Leading French National Front presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has sparked controversy by claiming France bears no responsibility for French police collaboration in the 1942 Vél d’Hiv arrest of 13,000 Jews, who were shipped to their demise at Auschwitz.

Syria & American DNA

It’s been widely noted that the U.S. missile strikes on a Syrian airbase seem at odds with Donald Trump’s electioneering opposition to American intervention. But there should be little surprise.

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