Alliances

With the Middle East on fire, Europe on edge, Russia on the march, and China on the rise, America’s interlocking system of alliances is more important now than at any time since the beginning of the Cold War.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policy towards Russia depended on a willful disregard for the Moscow regime’s most brutal acts. The problem for the president—and for the American public—was that he seemed to believe the utterly false portrait of Stalin he helped to create.

Trump appeared to revel in chaos on the campaign trail, but chaos theory does not hold when it comes to foreign policy. Consider some of the consequences—and these are the shortest of short-term consequences—of Trump’s early foreign policy decisions and pronouncements.

Given that America is (by far) Canada’s top trading partner, the prospective renegotiation of NAFTA is now by necessity Canada’s top foreign affairs priority.

An Ancient Civilization & Crucial Regional Ally Rises

The visit to Pearl Harbor was, arguably, incomplete. Nevertheless, proves again the extraordinary.

This Christmas Eve, two billion Christians around the world are reveling in the promise of peace on earth and goodwill toward men. What the United States of America just did at the United Nations does nothing for either cause.

As history reminds us, the security payoffs of a “Fortress America” approach are ephemeral and fleeting. Both the national interest and international security suffer when America turns inward.

President Franklin Roosevelt called the Japanese surprise attack on December 7 “a date which will live in infamy.” Perhaps an even greater infamy was the vacuous form of liberalism that denied the existence of radical evil, making it almost incapable of distinguishing between flawed democracies and fascist barbarism.