If Assad is permitted to continue employing chemical weapons with impunity, he will successfully normalize them. US forces, our allies, and civilians in the region and around the world will be in great danger of becoming victims of the same.

The French Ministry of the Armed Forces plans to increase defense spending from about 40.8 billion euros in 2017 to 42.8 billion euros in 2018, with increases projected to continue through 2025.

French National Party politico Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, 28 year old granddaughter of party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, spoke at the annual conservative jamboree CPAC. Marion Le Pen is beautiful and compelling, but wariness is in order.

Almost all nations field armies; fewer, even in 1943, retained a warrior caste who dominated nearly every facet of political and cultural life. In this incisive article, originally published in Christianity and Crisis on March 8, 1943, Robert E. Fitch argues that winning the War and achieving peace stems from breaking the feudal martial classes of Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Tojo’s Imperial Japan.

The much-maligned League of Nations experienced difficulties and shortcomings, which are visible in the functioning of the modern UN – and to a lesser extent, the International Criminal Court. George Stewart provides no less than thirteen reasons for the League’s failure, foremost among them the United States’ refusal to join, despite President Wilson’s labors as the prime architect. Stewart’s criticism of the League’s weaknesses, in its simultaneous impotence and incompetence, serves as a reminder for the need of robust, yet practical, international structures.

In nearly every war both sides point to the offenses and wickedness of their enemies, hoping to solidify that they are on the side of morality and godliness and to justify their decision to fight. The Axis Powers of World War II undoubtedly had perverse and wicked aims, but in this article Eduard Heimann argues that the democracies, and particularly the Christians living within them, deserve blame for the war as well.

Surrounded by the reality of war and death during WWI in France, Sergeant Alvin York finally made up his mind about Christianity and the morality of war.

This article about the history and future of Christian moral truth was originally published in Christianity and Crisis on December 28th, 1942. Contributor Barbara Ward details the history of Christian moral law, originally developed in the philosophical depths of the natural law tradition, all the way to its fracturing, resulting in the contemporaneous “will to power” found in Nazism. She councils Christians globally to recover this tradition and bring it to bear on the world in her day.

The historic event grounding Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk involved a military crisis that was, in its beginning, as dark, desperate, and seemingly hopeless as it was extraordinary, full of heroism, and even miraculous in its conclusion. Whether his film captures any of that sufficiently is an open question.