ArcaMax

"Ten days ago, President Trump was saying 'the United States should withdraw from Syria.' We convinced him it was necessary to stay."

Thus boasted French President Emmanuel Macron Saturday, adding, "We convinced him it was necessary to stay for the long term."

Is the U.S. indeed in the Syrian civil war "for the long term"?

If so, who made ...Read more

Wednesday morning, President Trump jolted the nation with a tweet that contained both threat and taunt:

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!' You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!"

Trump was ...Read more

With his Sunday tweet that Bashar Assad, "Animal Assad," ordered a gas attack on Syrian civilians, and Vladimir Putin was morally complicit in the atrocity, President Donald Trump just painted himself and us into a corner.

"Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria," tweeted Trump, "President Putin, Russia ...Read more

With ISIS on the run in Syria, President Trump this week declared that he intends to make good on his promise to bring the troops home.

"I want to get out. I want to bring our troops back home," said the president. We've gotten "nothing out of the $7 trillion (spent) in the Middle East in the last 17 years. ... So, it's time."

Not so fast, Mr....Read more

On many issues -- naming Scalia-like judges and backing Reagan-like tax cuts -- President Trump is a conventional Republican.

Where he was exceptional in 2016, where he stood out starkly from his GOP rivals, where he won decisive states like Pennsylvania, was on his uniquely Trumpian agenda to put America and Americans first -- from which the ...Read more

"Pope Declares No Hell?"

So ran the riveting headline on the Drudge Report of Holy Thursday.

Drudge quoted this exchange, published in La Repubblica, between Pope Francis and his atheist friend, journalist Eugenio Scalfari.

Scalfari: "What about bad souls? Where are they punished?"

Bad souls "are not punished," Pope Francis is quoted, "those...Read more

The last man standing between the U.S. and war with Iran may be a four-star general affectionately known to his Marines as "Mad Dog."

Gen. James Mattis, the secretary of defense, appears to be the last man in the Situation Room who believes the Iran nuclear deal may be worth preserving and that war with Iran is a dreadful idea.

Yet, other than...Read more

"It is becoming more obvious with each passing day that the men and the movement that broke Lyndon Johnson's authority in 1968 are out to break Richard Nixon," wrote David Broder on Oct. 8, 1969.

"The likelihood is great that they will succeed again."

A columnist for The Washington Post, Broder was no fan of Nixon.

His prediction, however, ...Read more

Britain has yet to identify the assassin who tried to murder the double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury, England.

But Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson knows who ordered the hit.

"We think it overwhelmingly likely that it was (Russian President Vladimir Putin's) decision to direct the use of a nerve agent on the ...Read more

After the victory of Donald Trump in 2016, the GOP held the Senate and House, two-thirds of the governorships, and 1,000 more state legislators than they had on the day Barack Obama took office.

"The Republican Party has not been this dominant in 90 years," went the exultant claim.

A year later, Republicans lost the governorship of Virginia ...Read more

Robert Bartley, the late editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, was a free trade zealot who for decades championed a five-word amendment to the Constitution: "There shall be open borders."

Bartley accepted what the erasure of America's borders and an endless influx or foreign peoples and goods would mean for his country.

Said ...Read more

Unless there is a late surge for Communist Party candidate Pavel Grudinin, who is running second with 7 percent, Vladimir Putin will be re-elected president of Russia for another six years on March 18.

Then we must decide whether to continue on course into a second Cold War, or engage Russia, as every president sought to do in Cold War I.

For ...Read more

From Lincoln to William McKinley to Theodore Roosevelt, and from Warren Harding through Calvin Coolidge, the Republican Party erected the most awesome manufacturing machine the world had ever seen.

And, as the party of high tariffs through those seven decades, the GOP was rewarded by becoming America's Party.

Thirteen Republican presidents ...Read more

"We got China wrong. Now what?" ran the headline over the column in The Washington Post.

"Remember how American engagement with China was going to make that communist backwater more like the democratic, capitalist West?" asked Charles Lane in his opening sentence.

America's elites believed that economic engagement and the opening of U.S. ...Read more

In a surprise overtime victory in the finals of the Olympic men's hockey tournament, the Russians defeated Germany, 4-3.

But the Russians were not permitted to have their national anthem played or flag raised, due to a past doping scandal. So, the team ignored the prohibition and sang out the Russian national anthem over the sounds of the ...Read more

In days gone by, a massacre of students like the atrocity at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School would have brought us together.

But like so many atrocities before it, this mass murder is tearing us apart.

The perpetrator, the sick and evil 19-year-old who killed 17 innocents with a gun is said to be contrite.

Having confessed, he faces life...Read more

According to the indictment by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Russian trolls, operating out of St. Petersburg, took American identities on social media and became players in our 2016 election.

On divisive racial and religious issues, the trolls took both sides. In the presidential election, the trolls favored Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein and ...Read more

"Enough is enough!" "This can't go on!" "This has to stop!"

These were among the comments that came through the blizzard of commentary after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County. We have heard these words before.

Unfortunately, such atrocities are not going to stop. For the ingredients that produce such ...Read more

Candidate Donald Trump may have promised to extricate us from Middle East wars, once ISIS and al-Qaida were routed, yet events and people seem to be conspiring to keep us endlessly enmeshed.

Friday night, a drone, apparently modeled on a U.S. drone that fell into Iran's hands, intruded briefly into Israeli airspace over the Golan Heights, and ...Read more

President Trump is the leader of America's conservative party.

Yet not even his allies would describe him as a conservative in the tradition of Robert Taft, Russell Kirk or William F. Buckley.

In the primaries of 2016, all his rivals claimed the mantle of Mr. Conservative, Ronald Reagan. Yet Trump captured the party's heart.

Who, then, and ...Read more