ArcaMax

"Iran must be free. The dictatorship must be destroyed. Containment is appeasement and appeasement is surrender."

Thus does our Churchill, Newt Gingrich, dismiss, in dealing with Iran, the policy of containment crafted by George Kennan and pursued by nine U.S. presidents to bloodless victory in the Cold War.

Why is containment surrender? "...Read more

For a year, the big question of Russiagate has boiled down to this: Did Donald Trump's campaign collude with the Russians in hacking the DNC?

And until last week, the answer was "no."

As ex-CIA director Mike Morell said in March, "On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians ... there is smoke, but there is no fire, at ...Read more

"Is Russia an enemy of the United States?" NBC's Kasie Hunt demanded of Ted Cruz. Replied the runner-up for the GOP nomination, "Russia is a significant adversary. Putin is a KGB thug."

To Hillary Clinton running mate Tim Kaine, the revelation that Donald Trump Jr., entertained an offer from the Russians for dirt on Clinton could be considered ...Read more

At the G-20 in Hamburg, it is said, President Trump was isolated, without support from the other G-20 members, especially on climate change and trade.

Perhaps so. But the crucial question is not whether Trump is alone, but whether he is right. Has Trump read the crisis of the West correctly? Are his warnings valid? Is not the Obama-Merkel ...Read more

President Donald Trump flew off for his first meeting with Vladimir Putin -- with instructions from our foreign policy elite that he get into the Russian president's face over his hacking in the election of 2016.

Hopefully, Trump will ignore these people. For their record of failure is among the reasons Americans elected him to office.

What ...Read more

In the first line of the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson speaks of "one people." The Constitution, agreed upon by the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia in 1789, begins, "We the people..."

And who were these "people"?

In Federalist No. 2, John Jay writes of them as "one united people ... descended from the same ...Read more

"The North Korean regime is causing tremendous problems and is something that has to be dealt with, and probably dealt with rapidly."

So President Trump told reporters in the Rose Garden this week.

But how this is to be done "rapidly" is not so easy to see.

North Korea has just returned to us Otto Warmbier, a student sentenced to 15 years ...Read more

If Gov. Bruce Rauner and his legislature in Springfield do not put a budget together by Friday, the Land of Lincoln will be the first state in the Union to see its debt plunge into junk-bond status.

Illinois has $14.5 billion in overdue bills, $130 billion in unfunded pension obligations, and no budget. "We can't manage our money," says Rauner....Read more

In the first round of the special election for the House seat in Georgia's Sixth District, 30-year-old Jon Ossoff swept 48 percent. He more than doubled the vote of his closest GOP rival, Karen Handel.

A Peach State pickup for the Democrats and a huge humiliation for President Trump seemed at hand.

But in Tuesday's final round, Ossoff, after ...Read more

Sunday, a Navy F-18 Hornet shot down a Syrian air force jet, an act of war against a nation with which Congress has never declared or authorized a war.

Washington says the Syrian plane was bombing U.S.-backed rebels. Damascus says its plane was attacking ISIS.

Vladimir Putin's defense ministry was direct and blunt:

"Repeated combat actions by...Read more

James T. Hodgkinson of Belleville, Illinois, who aspired to end his life as a mass murderer of Republican Congressmen, was a Donald Trump hater and a Bernie Sanders backer.

Like many before him, Hodgkinson was a malevolent man of the hating and hard left.

His planned atrocity failed because two Capitol Hill cops were at that Alexandria ...Read more

President Trump may be chief of state, head of government and commander in chief, but his administration is shot through with disloyalists plotting to bring him down.

We are approaching something of a civil war where the capital city seeks the overthrow of the sovereign and its own restoration.

Thus far, it is a nonviolent struggle, though ...Read more

Pressed by Megyn Kelly on his ties to President Trump, an exasperated Vladimir Putin blurted out, "We had no relationship at all. ... I never met him. ... Have you all lost your senses over there?"

Yes, Vlad, we have.

Consider the questions that have convulsed this city since the Trump triumph, and raised talk of impeachment.

Did Trump ...Read more

On May 22, Salman Abedi, 22, waiting at the entrance of the Arianna Grande pop concert in Manchester, blew himself up, killing almost two dozen people, among them parents waiting to pick up their children.

Saturday, three Islamic terrorists committed "suicide-by-cop," using a van to run down pedestrians on London Bridge, and then slashing and...Read more

"We are there and we are committed" was the regular retort of Secretary of State Dean Rusk during the war in Vietnam.

Whatever you may think of our decision to go in, Rusk was saying, if we walk away, the United States loses the first war in its history, with all that means for Southeast Asia and America's position in the world.

We face a ...Read more

By the time Air Force One started down the runaway at Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily, to bring President Trump home, the Atlantic had grown markedly wider than it was when he flew to Riyadh.

In a Munich beer hall Sunday, Angela Merkel confirmed it.

Europe must begin to look out for itself, she said, "take our fate into our own hands. ...Read more

On Sept. 1, 1864, Union forces under Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, victorious at Jonesborough, burned Atlanta and began the March to the Sea where Sherman's troops looted and pillaged farms and towns all along the 300-mile road to Savannah.

Captured in the Confederate defeat at Jonesborough was William Martin Buchanan of Okolona, Mississippi, ...Read more

Who is the real threat to the national security?

Is it President Trump who shared with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov the intelligence that ISIS was developing laptop bombs to put aboard airliners?

Or is it The Washington Post that ferreted out and published this code-word intelligence, and splashed the details on its front page, alerting the ...Read more

"With the stroke of a pen, Rod Rosenstein redeemed his reputation," writes Dana Milbank of The Washington Post.

What had Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein done to be welcomed home by the Post like the prodigal son?

Without consulting the White House, he sandbagged President Trump, naming a special counsel to take over the investigation of the...Read more

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, said Marx.

On publication day of my memoir of Richard Nixon's White House, President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. Instantly, the media cried "Nixonian," comparing it to the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre.

Yet, the differences are stark.

The resignations of Attorney General Elliot...Read more