ArcaMax

If a U.S. president calls an adversary "Rocket Man ... on a mission to suicide," and warns his nation may be "totally destroyed," other ideas in his speech will tend to get lost.

Which is unfortunate. For buried in Donald Trump's address is a clarion call to reject transnationalism and to re-embrace a world of sovereign nation-states that ...Read more

"The Barbarian cannot make ... he can befog and destroy but ... he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true."

Hilaire Belloc's depiction of the barbarian is recalled to mind as the statues honoring the history and heroes of the Republic and of the West continue to be ...Read more

"Having cut a deal with Democrats for help with the debt ceiling, will Trump seek a deal with Democrats on amnesty for the 'Dreamers' in return for funding for border security?"

The answer to that question, raised in my column a week ago, is in. Last night, President Donald Trump cut a deal with "Chuck and Nancy" for amnesty for 800,000 ...Read more

Recently, a columnist-friend, Matt Kenney, sent me a 25-year-old newspaper with his chiding that my column had been given better play.

Both had run in The Orange County Register on June 30, 1991.

"Is there no room for new nations in the New World Order?" was my title, and the column began:

"In turning a stone face toward embattled Slovenia ...Read more

Donald Trump is president today because he was seen as a doer not a talker. Among the most common compliments paid him in 2016 was, "At least he gets things done!"

And it was exasperation with a dithering GOP Congress, which had failed to enact his or its own agenda, that caused Trump to pull the job of raising the debt ceiling away from ...Read more

By setting off a 100-kiloton bomb, after firing a missile over Japan, Kim Jong Un has gotten the world's attention.

What else does he want?

Almost surely not war with America. For no matter what damage Kim could visit on U.S. troops and bases in South Korea, Okinawa and Guam, his country would be destroyed and the regime his grandfather ...Read more

Like 9/11, Hurricane Harvey brought us together.

In awe at the destruction 50 inches of rain did to East Texas and our fourth-largest city and in admiration as cable television showed countless hours of Texans humanely and heroically rescuing and aiding fellow Texans in the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

On display this week was ...Read more

Wednesday morning, Nov. 9, 2016, Republicans awoke to learn they had won the lottery. Donald Trump had won the presidency by carrying Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. All three states had gone Democratic in the last six presidential elections.

The GOP had won both houses of Congress. Party control of governorships and state legislatures ...Read more

Decades ago, a debate over what kind of nation America is roiled the conservative movement.

Neocons claimed America was an "ideological nation" a "creedal nation," dedicated to the proposition that "all men are created equal."

Expropriating the biblical mandate, "Go forth and teach all nations!" they divinized democracy and made the ...Read more

"I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire," said Winston Churchill to cheers at the Lord Mayor's luncheon in London in November 1942.

True to his word, the great man did not begin the liquidation.

When his countrymen threw him out in July 1945, that role fell to Clement Attlee, ...Read more

"They had found a leader, Robert E. Lee -- and what a leader! ... No military leader since Napoleon has aroused such enthusiastic devotion among troops as did Lee when he reviewed them on his horse Traveller."

So wrote Samuel Eliot Morison in his magisterial "The Oxford History of the American People" in 1965.

First in his class at West ...Read more

When the Dodge Charger of 20-year-old Nazi sympathizer James Alex Fields Jr., plunged into that crowd of protesters Saturday, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer, Fields put Charlottesville on the map of modernity alongside Ferguson.

Before Fields ran down the protesters, and then backed up, running down more, what was happening seemed but a ...Read more

"When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight," Samuel Johnson observed, "it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

And the prospect of a future where Kim Jong Un can put a nuclear weapon on a U.S. city is going to cause this nation to reassess the risks and rewards of the American Imperium.

First, some history.

"Why should Americans be ...Read more

That the Trump presidency is bedeviled is undeniable.

As President Donald Trump flew off for August at his Jersey club, there came word that Special Counsel Robert Mueller III had impaneled a grand jury and subpoenas were going out to Trump family and campaign associates.

The jurors will be drawn from a pool of citizens in a city Hillary ...Read more

In crafting the platform in Cleveland on which Donald Trump would run, America Firsters inflicted a major defeat on the War Party.

The platform committee rejected a plank to pull us deeper into Ukraine, by successfully opposing new U.S. arms transfers to Kiev.

Improved relations with Russia were what candidate Trump had promised, and what ...Read more

Saturday, Kim Jong Un tested an ICBM of sufficient range to hit the U.S. mainland. He is now working on its accuracy, and a nuclear warhead small enough to fit atop that missile that can survive re-entry.

Unless we believe Kim is a suicidal madman, his goal seems clear. He wants what every nuclear power wants -- the ability to strike his enemy'...Read more

Given the bravery he showed in stepping out front as the first senator to endorse Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions deserves better from his boss than the Twitter-trashing he has lately received.

The attorney general has not only been loyal to Trump and his agenda, he has the respect and affection of ex-colleagues in Congress and, more broadly, of ...Read more

"One knowledgeable official estimates that the CIA-backed fighters may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies," writes columnist David Ignatius.

Given that Syria's prewar population was not 10 percent of ours, this is the equivalent of a million dead and wounded Americans. What justifies America's participation in this ...Read more

"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