Patrick J. Buchanan

"Fortress Europe is an illusion." So declares the Financial Times in the closing line of its Saturday editorial: "Europe Cannot Ignore Syrian Migrant Crisis." The FT undertakes to instruct the Old Continent on what its duty is and what its future holds: "The EU will face flows of migrants and asylum seekers across the Mediterranean for decades to come." Can Europe not repel this unwanted home invasion from the Global South?

A week ago, the candidacy of Joe Biden was at death's door. On a taping of "The McLaughlin Group," this writer suggested it might be time to "call the rectory" and have the monsignor come render last rites. Today, Biden's candidacy is not only alive. He is first in votes, victories, and delegates, and is favored to win the nomination and, by most polls, to defeat Donald Trump in November.

Not until well into the Democratic debate Tuesday night did the COVID-19 coronavirus come up, and it was Mike Bloomberg, not a CBS moderator, who raised it: "The president fired the pandemic specialist in this country two years ago," the former New York mayor said. "There's nobody here to figure out what the hell we should be doing. And he's defunded the CDC."

Sen. Bernie Sanders may be on the cusp of both capturing the Democratic nomination and transforming his party as dramatically as President Donald Trump captured and remade the Republican Party. After his sweep of the Nevada caucuses, following popular vote victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders has the enthusiasm and the momentum, as the crucial battles loom in South Carolina on Saturday and Super Tuesday on March 3. The next eight days could decide it all.

Wednesday night in Las Vegas, Mayor Mike Bloomberg learned what it is like to be thrown up against a wall and frisked. At the opening of the Democratic debate, his first, Mayor Mike was greeted by his nearest neighbor on stage, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, with this warm welcome: "We're running against ... a billionaire who calls women 'fat broads' and 'horse-faced lesbians.' And, no, I'm not talking about Donald Trump. I'm talking about Mayor Bloomberg."

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has just given us notice he will be terminating the Visiting Forces Agreement that governs U.S. military personnel in the islands. His notification starts the clock running on a six-month deadline. If no new agreement is negotiated, the VFA is dissolved. What triggered the decision?

From the day he entered the race, Joe Biden was the great hope of the Democratic establishment to spare them from the horrifying prospect of a 2020 race between The Donald and Bernie Sanders. Today, that same establishment wants Joe out of the race. Why has Biden suddenly become an albatross?

In a way, Donald Trump might be called The Great Uniter. Bear with me…

By the end of February, the race for the Democratic nomination may have come down to a choice of one of three white men. Two are well into their 70s, and either would be the oldest president ever inaugurated. The third is a 38-year-old gay in a same-sex marriage who would be our youngest president ever. How is it possible, if not probable, that Bernie Sanders, Michael Bloomberg, and Pete Buttigieg will be the last three Democrats standing?

It has been a bad few days for the establishment, really bad.

Can a septuagenarian socialist who just survived a heart attack and would be 80 years old in his first year in office be elected president of the United States? It's hard to believe but not impossible.

In 1868, President Andrew Johnson was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act that had been enacted by Congress over his veto in 1867. Defying the law, Johnson fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, without getting Senate approval, as the act required him to do.In his 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, John F. Kennedy made Edmund Ross one of the Senate's "Profiles in Courage" for his decisive and heroic vote not to convict and remove Johnson.

The directed killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Iran's blood-soaked field marshal in the "forever war" of the Middle East, has begun to roil the politics of both the region and the USA. A stunned and shaken Iran retaliated by firing a dozen missiles at two U.S. bases in Iraq. Yet, before launching the attack, Iran signaled that its retaliation would be strictly proportionate, to avoid an escalation.

Fifteen years after the U.S. invaded Iraq to turn Saddam Hussein's dictatorship into a beacon of democracy, Iraq's Parliament, amid shouts of "Death to America!" voted to expel all U.S. troops from the country. Though nonbinding, the expulsion vote came after mobs trashed the U.S. embassy in an assault that recalled Tehran 1979.

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future," Yogi Berra reminded us. But on "The McLaughlin Group," the TV talk show on which this writer has appeared for four decades, predictions are as mandated as was taking Latin in Jesuit high schools in the 1950s. Looking to 2020, this writer predicted that Donald Trump's great domestic challenge would be to keep the economy firing on all cylinders. His great foreign policy challenge? Avoiding war.

As of Dec. 26, Kim Jong Un's "Christmas gift" to President Donald Trump had not arrived. Most foreign policy analysts predict it will be a missile test more impressive than any Pyongyang has yet carried off. What is Kim's game? What does Kim want? He cannot want war with the United States, as this could result in the annihilation of the Kim family dynasty that has ruled North Korea since World War II. Kim is all about self-preservation.

"We're gonna impeach the (expletive deleted)." Thus did the member from Michigan, Rashida Tlaib, declare last January to be the goal of the 2019 House Democratic Caucus. Wednesday night, Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivered the goods. The House impeached President Donald Trump on a straight party-line vote. Not one Republican signed on to the most partisan impeachment in U.S. history. Yet, as we head for trial in the Senate, Democrats seem to be having nervous second thoughts over what they have done.

"Quid pro quo" was the accusatory Latin phrase most often used to describe President Donald Trump's July 25 phone call asking for a "favor" from the president of Ukraine. New Year's prediction: The Roman poet Horace's Latin depiction: "Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus"—"The mountains went into labor, and brought forth a mouse"—will be used to describe the articles of impeachment drawn up by Nancy Pelosi's House.

"Jaw-jaw is better than war-war," is attributed, wrongly, say some historians, to Winston Churchill. Still, the words lately came to mind. While last week ended with a hopeful U.S.-Iranian prisoner exchange that was hailed by President Donald Trump—"Thank you to Iran for a very fair negotiation. See, we can make a deal together"—a few days earlier, the week produced more ominous news.

The "Our diversity is our strength!" Party is starting to look rather monochromatic in its upper echelons these days. The four leading candidates for its presidential nomination—Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Pete Buttigieg—are all white. The six candidates who have qualified for the Dec. 19 debate—the front four, plus Amy Klobuchar and Tom Steyer—are all white.

At first glance, it would appear that five months of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong had produced a stunning triumph. By September, the proposal of city leader Carrie Lam that ignited the protests—to allow criminal suspects to be extradited to China for trial—had been withdrawn. And though the protesters' demands escalated along with their tactics, from marches to mass civil disobedience, Molotov cocktails, riots and attacks on police, Chinese troops remained confined to their barracks.

Was there linkage between the withholding of U.S. military aid and the U.S. demand for a Ukrainian state investigation of the Bidens? "Was there a quid pro quo?" This question has bedeviled this city for months now. "The answer is yes," said U.S. Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland in sworn testimony on Wednesday.

When the wildfires of California broke out across the Golden State, many were the causes given. So, too, there appears to be a multiplicity of causes igniting and fueling the protests and riots sweeping capital cities across our world.

"Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." These are the offenses designated in the Constitution for which presidents may be impeached and removed from office. Which of these did Trump commit?

What are the roots of our present disorder, of the hostilities and hatreds that so divide us? When did we become this us vs. them nation? Who started the fire?

"Let someone else fight over this long blood-stained sand," said President Donald Trump in an impassioned defense of his decision to cut ties to the Syrian Kurds, withdraw and end these "endless wars." Are our troops in Syria, then, on their way home? Well, not exactly.

What happens when democracy fails to deliver? What happens when people give up on democracy? What happens when a majority or militant minority decide that the constitutional rights of free speech, free elections, peaceful assembly, and petition are inadequate and take to the streets to force democracy to submit to their demands? Our world may be about to find out.

"Russia Assumes Mantle of Supreme Power Broker in the Middle East," proclaimed Britain's Telegraph. The article began: "Russia's status as the undisputed power-broker in the Middle East was cemented as Vladimir Putin continued a triumphant tour of capitals traditionally allied to the US." "Donald Trump Has Handed Putin the Middle East on a Plate" was the title of a Telegraph column. "Putin Seizes on Trump's Syria Retreat to Cement Middle East Role," said…

President Donald Trump could have been more deft and diplomatic in how he engineered that immediate pullout from northeastern Syria. Yet that withdrawal was as inevitable as were its consequences. A thousand U.S. troops and their Kurdish allies were not going to dominate indefinitely the entire northeast quadrant of a country the size of Syria against the will of the Damascus regime and army.

"There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader," is a remark attributed to a French politician during the turbulent times of 1848. Joe Biden's Wednesday declaration that President Donald Trump should be impeached is in that tradition. Joe is scrambling to get out in front of the sentiment for impeachment in the party he professes to lead.

The backstage struggle between the Bush interventionists and the America-firsters who first backed Donald Trump for president just exploded into open warfare, which could sunder the Republican Party. At issue is Trump's decision to let the Turkish army enter Northern Syria, to create a corridor between Syrian Kurds and the Turkish Kurds of the PKK, which the U.S. and Turkey regard as a terrorist organization. "A disaster in the making," says Lindsey Graham.

"Who Lost China?" With the fall of the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, the defeat of his armies and the flight to Formosa, that was the question of the hour in 1949. And no one demanded to know more insistently than the anti-Communist Congressman John F. Kennedy: "Whatever share of the responsibility was Roosevelt's and whatever share was (General George) Marshall's, the vital interest of the United States in the independent integrity of China was sacrificed…

"This is a very sad time for our country. There is no joy in this," said Nancy Pelosi Saturday. "We must be somber. We must be prayerful. ... I'm heartbroken about it." Thus did the speaker profess her anguish—just four days after announcing that her Democratic House would conduct an impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump.

Even before seeing the transcript of the July 25 call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Nancy Pelosi threw the door wide open to the impeachment of Donald Trump by the Democratic House. Though the transcript did not remotely justify the advanced billing of a "quid pro quo," Pelosi set in motion a process that is already producing a sea change in the politics of 2020.

With the revelation by an intel community "whistleblower" that President Donald Trump, in a congratulatory call to the new president of Ukraine, pushed him repeatedly to investigate the Joe Biden family connection to Ukrainian corruption, the cry "Impeach!" is being heard anew in the land.

President Donald Trump does not want war with Iran. America does not want war with Iran. Even the Senate Republicans are advising against military action in response to that attack on Saudi Arabia's oil facilities.

The sudden and bitter departure of John Bolton from the White House was baked in the cake from the day he arrived there.

Thursday, Sept. 14, looks to be a fateful day in the half-century-long political career of Joe Biden. That night, a three-hour debate will be held, a marathon in politics.

Sunday, the 80th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland, Vice President Mike Pence spoke in Warsaw's Pilsudski Square of "five decades of untold suffering and death that followed" the invasion. Five decades! What Pence was saying was that, for Poland, World War II did not end in victory but defeat and occupation by an evil empire ruled by one of the greatest mass murderers of the 20th century, Josef Stalin.

Facing a Parliamentary majority opposed to a hard Brexit–a crashing out of the EU if Britain is not offered a deal she can live with–Boris Johnson took matters into his own hands. He went to the Queen at Balmoral and got Parliament "prorogued," suspended, from Sept. 12 to Oct. 14. That's two weeks before the Oct. 31 deadline Johnson has set for Britain's departure.

President Donald Trump, who canceled a missile strike on Iran, after the shoot-down of a U.S. Predator drone, to avoid killing Iranians, may not want a U.S. war with Iran. But the same cannot be said of Bibi Netanyahu. Saturday, Israel launched a night attack on a village south of Damascus to abort what Israel claims was a plot by Iran's Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force to fly "killer drones" into Israel, an act of war.

To those of us of who learned our U.S. history from texts in the 1940s and '50s, President Donald Trump's brainstorm of acquiring Greenland fits into a venerable tradition of American expansionism. The story begins with colonial officer George Washington's march out toward Fort Duquesne in 1754 and crushing defeat and near death at Fort Necessity, where, according to myth, he fired the first shot of what would become the French and Indian War.

President Donald Trump's reelection hopes hinge on two things: the state of the economy in 2020 and the identity of the Democratic nominee. The further left the Democrats go to select their candidate, the greater the probability Trump wins a second term. Thus Trump got good news this week.

Those who believed America's racial divide would begin to close with the civil rights acts of the 1960s and the election of a black president in this century appear to have been overly optimistic. The race divide seems deeper and wider than at any time in our lifetimes. Most of the aspiring leaders of the Democratic Party have apparently concluded that branding the president a "racist" and "white supremacist" is the strategy to pursue to win the nomination and the White House.

It was two days of contrast that tell us about America 2019. In El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, following the mass murders of Saturday and Sunday morning, the local folks on camera—police, prosecutors, mayors, FBI and city officials—were nonpartisan, patient, polite and dignified in the unity and solemnity of their grief for their dead and wounded. But for the Democratic presidential candidates, the El Paso atrocity was like a loose football in the Super Bowl.

In his opening statement at Wednesday's Democratic debate in Detroit, Joe Biden addressed Donald Trump while pointing proudly to the racial and ethnic diversity of the nine Democrats standing beside him. . . . Whereupon the other nine–three women, two African Americans, one Asian American and one Hispanic–began a multicultural mugging of Biden that at times took on the aspect of a flash mob.

Did President Donald Trump launch his Twitter barrage at Elijah Cummings simply because the Baltimore congressman was black? Was it just a "racist" attack on a member of the Black Caucus?

The Democrats who were looking to cast Robert Mueller as the star in a TV special, "The Impeachment of Donald Trump," can probably tear up the script. They're gonna be needing a new one.

"Send her back! Send her back!" The 13 seconds of that chant at the rally in North Carolina, in response to Donald Trump's recital of the outrages of Somali-born Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, will not soon be forgotten, or forgiven.

In October 1950, as U.S. forces were reeling from hordes of Chinese troops who had intervened massively in the Korean War, a 5,000-man Turkish brigade arrived to halt an onslaught by six Chinese divisions. Said supreme commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur: "The Turks are the hero of heroes. There is no impossibility for the Turkish Brigade." President Harry Truman awarded the brigade a Presidential Unit Citation.

When Sir Kim Darroch's secret cable to London was leaked to the Daily Mail, wherein he called the Trump administration "dysfunctional ... unpredictable ... faction-riven ... diplomatically clumsy and inept," the odds on his survival as U.K. ambassador plummeted. When President Donald Trump's tweeted retort called Darroch "wacky," a "stupid guy" and "pompous fool" who had been "foisted on the US," the countdown to the end began.

Since the Democratic debates in June, the tide seems to have receded for the party and its presidential hopefuls. In new polls, only Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump comfortably. The other top-tier candidates—Sens. Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg—are running even with Trump, a measurable drop. A Washington Post-ABC poll just found Trump at 47% approval, a new high for his presidency.

Despite all the grousing and griping about his "politicizing" of the Fourth of July and "militarizing" America's birthday, President Donald Trump turned the tables on his antagonists, and pulled it off. As master of ceremonies and keynote speaker at his "Salute to America" Independence Day event, Trump was a manifest success.

"The liberal idea has become obsolete. ... (Liberals) cannot simply dictate anything to anyone as they have been attempting to do over the recent decades." Such was the confident claim of Vladimir Putin to the Financial Times on the eve of a G-20 gathering that appeared to validate his thesis. Consider who commanded all the attention at the Osaka summit.

"For too long our leaders have failed us, taking us into one regime change war after the next, leading us into a new Cold War and arms race, costing us trillions of our hard-earned tax payer dollars and countless lives. This insanity must end." Donald Trump, circa 2016? Nope. That denunciation of John Bolton interventionism came from Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii during Wednesday night's Democratic debate. At 38, she was the youngest candidate on stage.

Visualizing 150 Iranian dead from a missile strike that he had ordered, President Donald Trump recoiled and canceled the strike, a brave decision and defining moment for his presidency. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Vice President Mike Pence had signed off on the strike on Iran as the right response to Tehran's shootdown of a U.S. Global Hawk spy plane over the Gulf of Oman.

"Apologize for what? Cory should apologize. He knows better. There's not a racist bone in my body." Thus did a stung Joe Biden answer rival Cory Booker's demand he apologize for telling contributors, in a southern drawl, "I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland, He never called me 'boy.' He always called me 'son."

President Donald Trump cannot want war with Iran. Such a war, no matter how long, would be fought in and around the Persian Gulf, through which a third of the world's seaborne oil travels. It could trigger a worldwide recession and imperil Trump's reelection. It would widen the "forever war," which Trump said he would end, to a nation of 80 million people, three times as large as Iraq. It would become the defining issue of his presidency . . .

"History is repeating itself, and with a vengeance," John Dean told the judiciary committee, drawing a parallel between Watergate, which brought down Richard Nixon, and "Russiagate" which has bedeviled Donald Trump. But what strikes this veteran of Nixon's White House is not the similarities but the stark differences.

"My religion defines who I am. And I've been a practicing Catholic my whole life," said Vice President Joe Biden in 2012. "I accept my church's position on abortion as ... doctrine. Life begins at conception. ... I just refuse to impose that on others." For four decades, Biden backed the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of the tax dollars of Joe's fellow Catholics to pay for what they view as the killing of the innocent unborn.

In 2018, a record turnout of women, minorities and young added 40 House seats to Democratic ranks and made Nancy Pelosi speaker. This, we were told, is the new diversity coalition — women, people of color, millennials — that will take down The Donald in 2020.

For a president who won his office by denouncing the Middle East wars into which George W. Bush and Barack Obama plunged the nation, Donald Trump has assembled the most unabashedly hawkish conclave of foreign policy advisers in memory.

What is it about special counsel Robert Mueller that he cannot say clearly and concisely what he means?

The left's ultimatum: Lead, follow, or get out of the way. Impeachment is how a democratic republic does regicide, the dethroning and beheading of a sovereign like England's Charles I.

A week from today, Europeans may be able to gauge how high the tide of populism and nationalism has risen within their countries and on their continent. For all the returns will be in from three days of elections in the 28 nations represented in the European Parliament.

Speaking on state TV of the prospect of a war in the Gulf, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei seemed to dismiss the idea. "There won't be any war. . . . We don't seek a war, and (the Americans) don't either. They know it's not in their interests."

Tariffs were the taxes that made America great. They were the taxes relied upon by the first and greatest of our early statesmen, before the coming of the globalists Woodrow Wilson and FDR.

How many quarrels, clashes and conflicts can even a superpower manage at one time? And is it not time for the United States, preoccupied with so many crises, to begin asking, "Why is this our problem?"

After Venezuela's army decided not to rise up and overthrow Nicholas Maduro, by Sunday night, it was Iran that was in our gun sights.

Let the Venezuelans decide their own destiny, as did we.

President Donald Trump has decided to cease cooperating with what he sees, not incorrectly, as a Beltway conspiracy that is out to destroy him.

The release of the Mueller report has left Democrats in a dilemma. For consider what Robert Mueller concluded after two years of investigation.

Is moral truth subjective? Does it change with changing times and changing attitudes? Or is there a higher law, a permanent law, God's law, immutable and eternal, to which man's law should conform?

On Monday, President Donald Trump designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, the first time the United States has designated part of another nation's government as such a threat.

During an Iowa town hall last week, "Beto" O'Rourke, who had pledged to raise the level of national discourse, depicted President Donald Trump's rhetoric as right out of Nazi Germany.

In the new Democratic Party, where women and people of color are to lead, and the white men are to stand back, the presidential field has begun to sort itself out somewhat problematically.

When Donald Trump meets with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg today, the president should give him a direct message: The roster of NATO membership is closed. For good. The United States will not hand out any more war guarantees to fight Russia to secure borders deep in Eastern Europe, when our own southern border is bleeding profusely.

As the Democratic Party quarrels over reparations for slavery, a new and related issue has arisen, raised by the president of Mexico.

"The Special Counsel's investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia . . . to influence the 2016 US presidential campaign." So stated Attorney General William Barr in his Sunday letter to Congress summarizing the principal findings of the Mueller report.

Of 895 slots in the freshman class of Stuyvesant High in New York City, seven were offered this year to black students, down from 10 last year and 13 the year before.

Last Friday, in Christchurch, New Zealand, one of the more civilized places on earth, 28-year-old Brenton Tarrant, an Australian, turned on his cellphone camera and set out to livestream his massacre of as many innocent Muslim worshippers as he could kill.

"Diversity is our greatest strength!" we are ever admonished. But where is the evidence for what appears to be not only an inherently implausible claim but a transparently foolish and false one?

In all but one of the last seven presidential elections, Republicans lost the popular vote. George W. Bush and Donald Trump won only by capturing narrow majorities in the Electoral College.

In its lead editorial Wednesday, The New York Times called upon Congress to amend the National Emergency Act to "erect a wall against any President, not just Mr. Trump, who insists on creating emergencies where none exist."

As President Trump flew home from his Hanoi summit with Kim Jong Un, Mike Pompeo peeled off and flew to Manila. And there the Secretary of State made a startling declaration.

Indulging its hatred of Trump is a preoccupation, an obsession of this capital city. [H]eadlines [this past week] reveal not only the news judgment of the editors but the agenda of the elite who turn to them first every morning.

Having embraced "Medicare-for-all," free college tuition and a Green New Deal that would mandate an early end of all oil, gas and coal-fired power plants, the Democratic Party's lurch to the left rolls on.

In the Venezuelan crisis, said President Donald Trump in Florida, "All options are on the table." And if Venezuela's generals persist in their refusal to break with Nicolas Maduro, they could "lose everything."

"If you look at Trump in America and Bolsonaro in Brazil, you see that people want politicians that do what they promise," said Spanish businessman Juan Carlos Perez Carreno.

Both of America's great national parties are coalitions. But it is the Democratic Party that never ceases to celebrate diversity—racial, religious, ethnic, cultural—as its own and as America's "greatest strength." Understandably so, for the party is home to a multitude of minorities.

After reading an especially radical platform agreed upon by the British Labor Party, one Tory wag described it as "the longest suicide note in history." The phrase comes to mind on reading of the resolution calling for a Green New Deal, advanced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and endorsed by at least five of the major Democratic candidates for president.

If the pollsters at CNN and CBS are correct, Donald Trump may have found the formula for winning a second term in 2020.

"Once that picture with the blackface and the Klansman came out, there is no way you can continue to be the governor of the commonwealth of Virginia." So decreed Terry McAuliffe, insisting on the death penalty with no reprieve for his friend and successor Gov. Ralph Northam. Et tu, Brute?

To manifest his opposition to President Donald Trump's decision to pull all 2,000 U.S. troops out of Syria, and half of the 14,000 in Afghanistan, Gen. James Mattis went public and resigned as secretary of defense. Now Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, in public testimony to Congress, has contradicted Trump about the threats that face the nation.

"Pay the soldiers. The rest do not matter." This was the deathbed counsel given to his sons by Roman Emperor Septimius Severus in A.D. 211. Nicolas Maduro must today appreciate the emperor's insight.

If it was the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that black and white would come together in friendship and peace to do justice, his acolytes in today's Democratic Party appear to have missed that part of his message.

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible ... make violent revolution inevitable," said John F. Kennedy. In 2016, the U.S. and Britain were both witness to peaceful revolutions.

Is Trump looking for a showdown with Iran, which could result in a war that might vault his approval rating, but be a disaster for the Middle East and world economy and do for him what Operation Iraqi Freedom did for George W. Bush?

Mass migration from the global South, not climate change, is the real existential crisis of the West.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi's House has more women, persons of color and LGBT members than any House in history—and fewer white males. And Thursday, the day Rashida Tlaib was sworn in, her hand on a Quran, our first Palestinian-American congresswoman showed us what we may expect.

If there is a more anti-Trump organ in the American establishment than The Washington Post, it does not readily come to mind. Hence, in choosing to send his op-ed attack on President Donald Trump to the Post, Mitt Romney was collaborating with an adversary of his party and his president.

Seven years and 500,000 dead Syrians later, it is Obama, Sarkozy and Cameron who are gone. Assad still rules in Damascus, and the 2,000 Americans in Syria are coming home. Soon, says President Donald Trump.

If Democrats are optimistic as 2019 begins, it is understandable. Their victory on Nov. 6, adding 40 seats and taking control of the House of Representatives, was impressive. And with the party's total vote far exceeding the GOP total, in places it became a rout.

"Deck the halls with boughs of holly," goes the old Christmas carol. "'Tis the season to be jolly." Yet if there were a couplet less befitting the mood of this capital city, I am unaware of it.

"We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there," wrote President Donald Trump, as he ordered the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Syria, stunning the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

Kim Jong Un, angered by the newest U.S. sanctions, is warning that North Korea's commitment to denuclearization could be imperiled and we could be headed for "exchanges of fire."

Is it coincidence or contagion, this malady that seems to have suddenly induced paralysis in the leading nations of the West?

If Donald Trump told Michael Cohen to pay hush money to Stormy Daniels about a one-night stand a decade ago, that, says Jerome Nadler, incoming chair of House Judiciary, would be an "impeachable offense."

George H.W. Bush was America's closer. Called in to pitch the final innings of the Cold War, Bush 41 presided masterfully over the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany, the liberation of 100 million Eastern Europeans and the dissolution of the Soviet Union into 15 independent nations.

Saturday, rage over a fuel tax President Emmanuel Macron has proposed to cut carbon emissions brought mobs into the heart of Paris, where they battled police, burned cars, looted, smashed show windows of elite stores such as Dior and Chanel, and desecrated the Arc de Triomphe. In solidarity with the Paris rioters, protests in other French cities erupted.

On departure for the G-20 gathering in Buenos Aires, President Donald Trump canceled his planned weekend meeting with Vladimir Putin, citing as his reason the Russian military's seizure and holding of three Ukrainian ships and 24 sailors.

Progressives fail to understand that what they describe as greater and ever more desirable diversity, millions of Americans see as the conquest of their country by an endless flood of uninvited strangers.

The 633-word statement of President Donald Trump on the Saudi royals' role in the grisly murder of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi is a remarkable document, not only for its ice-cold candor.

After adding at least 37 seats and taking control of the House by running on change, congressional Democrats appear to be about to elect as their future leaders three of the oldest faces in the party.

CNN says that if Trump succeeds in pulling Acosta's press pass, it could have a "chilling" effect on other White House correspondents. But if it has a chilling effect on journalists who relish confronting the president and reaping the cheers, publicity and benefits that go with being a leader of the adversary press, why is that a problem?

In a rebuke bordering on national insult Sunday, Emmanuel Macron retorted to Donald Trump's calling himself a nationalist. "Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism; nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism."

The war in Washington will not end until the presidency of Donald Trump ends. Everyone seems to sense that now. This is a fight to the finish.

Did former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just take a page out of the playbook of Sen. Ed Muskie from half a century ago?

Among the reasons Donald Trump is president is that his natural political instincts are superior to those of any other current figure.

Saturday, in Pittsburgh, a Sabbath celebration at the Tree of Life synagogue became the site of the largest mass murder of Jews in U.S. history. Eleven worshippers were killed by a racist gunman.

Before we were a democracy, we were a republic. And we were always more than just a polity. We were a people and a nation. Today we seem to be two countries and two peoples.

Was the assassination of JFK by Lee Harvey Oswald still getting as much media coverage three weeks after his death as it did that first week after Nov. 22, 1963? Not as I recall.

[C]ritical to the future of our civilization is the ongoing invasion of the West from the Third World. Consider the impact of the decision by Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2015 to throw open Germany's doors to 1 million refugees from Syria's civil war.

Over the weekend Donald Trump warned of "severe punishment" if an investigation concludes that a Saudi hit team murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul

Was Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and then his body cut up with a bone saw and flown to Riyadh in Gulfstream jets owned by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman?

After a 50-year siege, the great strategic fortress of liberalism has fallen. With the elevation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court seems secure for constitutionalism—perhaps for decades.

The battle over Kavanaugh's nomination, and the disparagement of the Republicans who have stood strongest by the judge, seems to have awakened even the most congenial to the new political reality. We are all deplorables now.

Does America look today like the "band of brethren united to each other" of which Jay wrote, and we seemed to be as late as 1960? Or does not the acrimony attendant to the nomination of Judge Kavanaugh suggest that we have already become a land "split into a number of unsocial, jealous and alien sovereignties." With all our new diversity, whatever became of our unity?

Judge Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court was approved on an 11-10 party-line vote Friday in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Yet his confirmation is not assured.

Thursday is shaping up to be the Trump presidency's "Gunfight at O.K. Corral." That day, the fates of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and much else, may be decided.

By the end of his second term, President Ronald Reagan, who had called the Soviet Union an "evil empire," was strolling through Red Square with Russians slapping him on the back. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.

What is being done here stinks. It is a transparently late hit, a kill shot to assassinate a nominee who, before the weekend, was all but certain to be confirmed and whose elevation to the Supreme Court is a result of victories in free elections by President Trump and the Republican Party.

Our diversity is our greatest strength. After playing clips of Democratic politicians reciting that truth of modern liberalism, Tucker Carlson asked, "How, precisely, is diversity our strength? Since you've made this our new national motto, please be specific."

Is President Donald Trump about to intervene militarily in the Syrian civil war? For that is what he and his advisers seem to be signaling.

The campaign to overturn the 2016 election and bring down President Trump shifted into high gear this week. Inspiration came Saturday morning from the altar of the National Cathedral where our establishment came to pay homage to John McCain.

President Trump has yet to withdraw us from any of the wars he inherited, but he has kept us out of any new wars—a record worth preserving.

This summer, the sex scandal that has bedeviled the Catholic Church went critical.

"McCain's Death Leaves Void" ran the Wall Street Journal headline over a front-page story that began: "The death of John McCain will leave Congress without perhaps its loudest voice in support of the robust internationalism that has defined the country's security relations since World War II."

"If anyone is looking for a good lawyer," said President Donald Trump ruefully, "I would strongly suggest that you don't retain the services of Michael Cohen." Michael Cohen is no Roy Cohn. Tuesday, Trump's ex-lawyer, staring at five years in prison, pled guilty to a campaign violation that may not even be a crime.

In backing John Brennan's right to keep his top-secret security clearance, despite his having charged the president with treason, the U.S. intel community has chosen to fight on indefensible terrain.

If ex-CIA Director John Brennan did to Andrew Jackson what he did to Donald Trump, he would have lost a lot more than his security clearance. He would have been challenged to a duel and shot.

A list of America's adversaries here would contain the Taliban, the Houthis of Yemen, Bashar Assad of Syria, Erdogan's Turkey, Iran, North Korea, Russia and China—a pretty full plate. Are we prepared to see these confrontations through, to assure the capitulation of our adversaries? What do we do if they continue to defy us?

Is it any of Canada's business whether Saudi women have the right to drive? Well, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland just made it her business. Repeatedly denouncing Riyadh's arrest of women's rights advocate Samar Badawi, Freeland has driven the two countries close to a break in diplomatic relations.

As long as Trump is in the White House and the party base is so viscerally behind him and his America First agenda, a renunciation of tariffs or a return to globalism is dead. But what happens after Trump? Who and what comes next?

A war with Iran would define, consume and potentially destroy the Trump presidency, but exhilarate the neocon never-Trumpers who most despise the man. Why, then, is President Donald Trump toying with such an idea?

Today, a large share of the American people loathe who we were from the time of the explorers and settlers, up until the end of segregation in the 1960s. They want to apologize for our past, rewrite our history, erase our memories and eradicate the monuments of those centuries.

"Make America Great Again!" will, given the astonishing victory it produced for Donald Trump, be recorded among the most successful slogans in political history. Yet it raises a question: How did America first become the world's greatest economic power?

"History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce," a saying attributed to Karl Marx, comes to mind in this time of Trump.

"Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." Under the Constitution, these are the offenses for which presidents can be impeached. And to hear our elites, Donald Trump is guilty of them all.

With his remarks in Helsinki and at the NATO summit in Brussels, Trump has signaled an historic shift in U.S. foreign policy that may determine the future of this nation and the fate of his presidency.

Of President Donald Trump's explosion at Angela Merkel's Germany during the NATO summit, it needs to be said: It is long past time we raised our voices.

If Mitch McConnell's Senate can confirm his new nominee for the Supreme Court, President Donald Trump may have completed the capture of all three branches of the U.S. government for the Republican Party.

With never-Trump conservatives bailing on the GOP and crying out for the Party of Pelosi to save us, some painful truths need to be restated.

"No Borders! No Nations! No Deportations!" "Abolish ICE!" Before last week, these were the mindless slogans of an infantile left, seen on signs at rallies to abolish ICE, the agency that arrests and deports criminal aliens who have no right to be in our country.

For Nancy Pelosi, 78, Steny Hoyer, 79, and Joe Biden, 75, the primary results from New York's 14th congressional district are a fire bell in the night. All may be swept away in the coming revolution. That is the message of the crushing defeat of 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley, who had aspired to succeed Pelosi and become speaker of the House.

A cautionary note to progressives: Extremism is how the left lost the future to Nixon and Reagan. But though our media may act like this is 1968, we are not there, yet. That was history; this is still largely farce.

The questions America and the West face might thus be framed: Is there a liberal, progressive, Christian way to seal a 2,000-mile border, halt millions of migrants from crossing it illegally, and send intruders back whence they came? Or does the preservation of Western nations and peoples require measures from which liberal societies today reflexively recoil? Does the survival of the West as a civilization require a ruthlessness the West no longer possess?

[St]riking down the policy will leave America's immigration crisis still unresolved. Consider. Since 2016, some 110,000 children have entered the U.S. illegally and been released, along with 200,000 Central American families caught sneaking across the border.

President Donald Trump appears to belong to what might be called the Benjamin Disraeli school of diplomacy. The British prime minister once counseled, "Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel."

Our elites see America as an "indispensable nation," the premier world power whose ordained duty it is to defend democracy, stand up to dictators and aggressors, and uphold a liberal world order.

In today's clash in liberalism's citadel over which races have too many seats at Brooklyn Tech and Stuyvesant, and which races have too few, we get a glimpse of America's future. It appears to be a future of endless collisions and conflicts over who deserves and who gets what—based upon ethnicity and race.

"There is no Republican Party. There's a Trump party," John Boehner told a Mackinac, Michigan, gathering of the GOP faithful last week. "The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere."

How does ABC's cashiering of Roseanne, or apologies to the two guys at Starbucks, or restrictions on the rights of millionaire NFL players to kneel during our national anthem address the real crisis? Is white America really black America's biggest problem?

Perhaps our mission is to defend and protect what is vital to us, to stay out of foreign wars where our critical interests are not imperiled, and to reunite our divided and disputatious republic—if we are not too far beyond that.

U.S. threats to crush Iran and North Korea may yet work, but as of now neither Tehran nor Pyongyang appears to be intimidated.

The truths being jettisoned built the greatest civilization known to man. Will the invented truths of our new egalitarianism survive the arrival of the new barbarians? It's not looking all that good right now.

After Pyongyang railed this week that the U.S.-South Korean Max Thunder military drills were a rehearsal for an invasion of the North, and imperiled the Singapore summit, the Pentagon dialed them back.

For Bibi Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving prime minister save only founding father David Ben-Gurion, it has been a week of triumph.

Brushing aside the anguished pleas of our NATO allies, President Trump Tuesday contemptuously trashed the Iranian nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions.

This next week may determine whether President Trump extricates us from that cauldron of conflict that is the Middle East, as he promised, or plunges us even deeper into these forever wars.

If Donald Trump does not wish to collaborate in the destruction of his presidency, he will refuse to be questioned by the FBI, or by a grand jury, or by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his malevolent minions.

Saturday's White House Correspondents' Association dinner, billed as a celebration of the First Amendment and a tribute to journalists who "speak truth to power," has to be the worst advertisement in memory for our national press corps.

On the night of Jan. 31, 1968, as tens of thousands of Viet Cong guerrillas attacked the major cities of South Vietnam, in violation of a Lunar New Year truce, Richard Nixon was flying secretly to Boston.

The America of 2018 is coming to see NATO as having evolved into an endless U.S. commitment to go to war with Russia on behalf of a rich Europe that resolutely refuses to provide for its own defense.

Before President Trump trashes the Iran nuclear deal, he might consider: If he could negotiate an identical deal with Kim Jong Un, it would astonish the world and win him the Nobel Peace Prize.Before President Trump trashes the Iran nuclear deal, he might consider: If he could negotiate an identical deal with Kim Jong Un, it would astonish the world and win him the Nobel Peace Prize.

A fortnight ago, Viktor Orban and his Fidesz Party won enough seats in the Hungarian parliament to rewrite his country's constitution. To progressives across the West, this was disturbing news.

How long will we have to stay in the Middle East to assure the permanent hegemony of Sunni over Shiite?

All over this city, and across the Middle East, there are people who wish to conscript U.S. wealth and power to advance their goals and achieve their visions. Having let them succeed so often has diminished us as a superpower from what we were at the end of the Cold War. This should stop, and the nation knows it.

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.

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.

In the last analysis, it is upon three questions that the Trump presidency will be judged: Did he secure America's borders? Did he restore the industrial might of America? Did he take us out of and keep us out of any more neocon wars?

"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.

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."

"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.

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.

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.

This free trade, open borders cult first flowered in 18th-century Britain. The St. Paul of this post-Christian faith was Richard Cobden, who mesmerized elites with the grandeur of his vision and the power of his rhetoric.

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.

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.

America's elites believed that economic engagement and the opening of U.S. markets would cause the People's Republic to coexist benignly with its neighbors and the West. We deluded ourselves. It did not happen.

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.

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.

What do these indictments of Russians tell us? After 18 months, the James Comey-Robert Mueller FBI investigation into the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails has yet to produce evidence of collusion.

"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.

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.

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.

That memo worked up in the Intel Committee of Chairman Devin Nunes may not have sunk the Mueller investigation, but from the sound of the secondary explosions, this torpedo was no dud.

"All the News That's Fit to Print" proclaims the masthead of the New York Times. "Democracy Dies in Darkness," echoes the Washington Post. Explain then this hysteria, this panic in the press over the release of a four-page memo detailing one congressional committee's rendering of how Trump-hate spawned an FBI investigation of Republican candidate and President Donald Trump.

If Turkey is not bluffing, U.S. troops in Manbij, Syria, could be under fire by week's end, and NATO engulfed in the worst crisis in its history.

Asked if he would agree to be interviewed by Robert Mueller's team, President Donald Trump told the White House press corps, "I would love to do it . . . as soon as possible. . . . under oath, absolutely." . . . If the president's legal team lets Trump sit for hours answering Mueller's agents, they should be disbarred for malpractice.

"The Western democratic system is hailed by the developed world as near perfect and the most superior political system to run a country," mocked China's official new agency.

The war for dominance in the Middle East, following the crushing of ISIS, appears about to commence in Syria—with NATO allies America and Turkey on opposing sides.

Mass immigration means an America in 2050 with no core majority, made up of minorities of every race, color, religion and culture on earth, a continent-wide replica of the wonderful diversity we see today in the U.N. General Assembly.

After a year in which he tested a hydrogen bomb and an ICBM, threatened to destroy the United States, and called President Trump "a dotard," Kim Jong Un, at the gracious invitation of the president of South Korea, will be sending a skating team to the "Peace Olympics."

Among the reasons U.S. foreign policy lacks consistency and moral clarity is that we Americans no longer agree on what our vital interests are, who our real adversaries are, what our values are, or what a good and Godly country looks like.

As tens of thousands marched in the streets of Tehran on Wednesday in support of the regime, the head of the Revolutionary Guard Corps assured Iranians the "sedition" had been defeated.

What caused the FBI to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign in July 2016, which evolved into the criminal investigation that is said today to imperil the Trump presidency?

The Korean War finished Truman. Vietnam finished LBJ. Reagan said putting Marines into Lebanon was his worst mistake. Iraq cost Bush II both houses of Congress and his party the presidency in 2008. Should Trump become a war president, he'll likely become a one-term president.

Is history repeating itself—with the designated target of an elite FBI cabal being the President of the United States?

President Trump, every Republican senator, and the GOP majority in Speaker Paul Ryan's House just put the future of their party on the line. By enacting the largest tax cut since the Reagan administration, the heart of which is cutting the corporate rate from 35 to 21 percent, Republicans have boldly bet the farm.

Before we march, with Haley as head cheerleader, Trump should consider the likely consequences for his country, the Middle East, and his presidency. A war in the Persian Gulf would send oil prices soaring, and stock markets plummeting, even as it would split us off from our major allies in Europe and Asia.

On Aug. 9, 1974, Richard Nixon bowed to the inevitability of impeachment and conviction by a Democratic Senate and resigned. The prospect of such an end for Donald Trump has this city drooling. Yet, comparing Russiagate and Watergate, history is not likely to repeat itself.

What we are witnessing in Crimea, across the Middle East, in the South China Sea, on the Korean peninsula, are nations more willing than we to sacrifice and take risks, because their interests there are far greater than ours.

Even interventionists are regretting some of the wars into which they helped plunge the United States in this century.

Why did Gen. Mike Flynn lie to the FBI about his December 2016 conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak? Why did he not tell the FBI the truth?

Why would Christian conservatives in good conscience go to the polls Dec. 12 and vote for Judge Roy Moore, despite the charges of sexual misconduct with teenagers leveled against him?

Saudi Arabia, which attacked and invaded Yemen in 2015 after Houthi rebels dumped over a pro-Saudi regime in Sanaa and overran much of the country, has imposed a land, sea and air blockade, after the Houthis fired a missile at Riyadh this month that was shot down.

Since 1962, this nation has dethroned its God and begun debates about which of the flawed but great men who created the nation should be publicly dishonored. Are we really a better country today than we were then, when all the world looked to America as the land of the future?

While China is a great power, she has great problems. She is feared and disliked by her neighbors. She has territorial quarrels with Russia, India, Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan. She has separatists in Tibet and Xinjiang. Christianity is growing while Communism, the state religion, is a dead faith.

If the crown prince of Saudi Arabia has in mind a war with Iran, President Trump should disabuse his royal highness of any notion that America would be doing his fighting for him.

If the nation chooses to turn Congress over to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in 2018, will that be all Trump's fault? Or should perhaps some credit go to Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and venerable political tradition?

The U.S. pre-eminence in the days of Desert Storm is history. Yet, the architects of American decline may still be heard denouncing the "isolationists" who opposed their follies and warned what would befall the republic if it listened to them.

The Peace Cross, in Bladensburg, Maryland, was a 40-feet concrete memorial to the 49 sons of Prince George's County lost in the Great War. Paid for by county families and the American Legion, it had stood since 1925.

If you wish to know why Americans detest politics and hate the "swamp" that has been made of their capital city, follow this story all the way to its inevitable end. It will be months of unfolding.

This is a struggle [in the GOP] about policy, about the future. And Trump is president because he read the party and the country right, while the Bush-McCain Republican establishment had lost touch with both.

As their U.S. allies watched, the Kurdish peshmerga fighters were run out of Kirkuk and all the territory they had captured fighting ISIS alongside the Americans. The Iraqi army that ran them out was trained and armed by the United States.

The congregation worshiping the gods of equality, diversity, and democracy is shrinking. And even Europe seems to be rejecting what America has on offer.

With his declaration Friday that the Iran nuclear deal is not in the national interest, President Donald Trump may have put us on the road to war with Iran. He was not elected to do that. Or so at least some of us thought.

Reagan and Trump both embraced the Eisenhower doctrine of "peace through strength." And, like Ike, both built up the military. Both also believed in cutting tax rates to stimulate the economy and balance the federal budget through rising revenues rather than cutting programs like Medicare and Social Security.

"President Trump has a duty to unite us, not divide us" is the mantra of our elites. Yet, since the '60s, it is these elites who have been imposing the social, moral and cultural revolution the American people never voted for and which has by now divided us irretrievably.

Why did Stephen Paddock, 64, rent rooms at the Mandalay Bay hotel, sneak in an arsenal of guns, a dozen of them converted to fully automatic, and rain down death on a country music concert?

A massacre of Americans like that in Las Vegas may bring us together briefly. But what holds us together when issues of race, religion, ethnicity, culture, history and politics—our cherished diversity itself—appear to be pulling us ever further apart?

Roy Moore's primary win is a fire bell in the night for GOP senators in 2018. And should he defeat his Democratic opponent, the judge will be coming to Capitol Hill, gunning for Mitch McConnell.

The question NFL owners are going to have to answer soon with a definitive "yes" or "no" is this: Do players, before games, have a right, as a form of protest, to dishonor and disrespect the flag of the United States and the republic for which it stands? Or is that intolerable conduct that the NFL will punish?

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 cherish their independence and unique identities.

"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."

Trump's debt-ceiling deal cut the legs out from under the GOP budget hawks. But amnesty would pull the rug out from under all the folks at those rallies who cheered Trump's promise to preserve the country they grew up in from this endless Third World invasion.

As nationalism tore apart Yugoslavia and the USSR in the 1990s, and surged to propel British secession from the EU and Donald Trump's triumph in 2016, that primal force appears on the march again.

If democracy, as Freedom House contends, is in global retreat, one reason may be that, in our new age, legislatures, split into hostile blocs checkmating one another, cannot act with the dispatch impatient peoples now demand of their rulers.

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.

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.

What seems apparent is that the historic opportunity the party had in January, to forge a coalition of conservatives and populists who might find common ground on [various issues], is slipping away. And the battle for the soul and future of the GOP, thought to have been suspended until 2020, is on once again.

[W]hat still unites us? What holds us together into the indefinite future? What makes us one nation and one people? What do we offer mankind, as nations seem to recoil from what we are becoming, and are instead eager to build their futures on the basis of ethnonationalism and fundamentalist faith?

Persuaded by his generals—Mattis at Defense, McMasters on the National Security Council, Kelly as chief of staff—President Trump is sending some 4,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to augment the 8,500 already there.

While easy for Republicans to wash their hands of such odious elements as Nazis in Charlottesville, will they take up the defense of the monuments and statues that have defined our history, or capitulate to the icon-smashers? In this Second American Civil War, whose side are you on?

With Heyer's death, the brawl was elevated to a moral issue. And President Donald Trump's initial failure to denounce the neo-Nazi and Klan presence was declared a moral failure. How did we get here, and where are we going?

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

By colluding, the mainstream media, deep state, and the special prosecutor's button men, with a license to roam, may bring down yet another president.

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

A time for truth. U.S. sanctions on North Korea, like those voted for by Congress last week, are not going to stop Kim from acquiring ICBMs. He is too close to the goal line.

How did we get to this peril point when there is no evidence that Trump or any senior aide colluded in the hacking? As for the June 2016 meeting with the Russians, called by Donald Trump Jr. when told by a friend that Moscow had dirt on Hillary Clinton, even that was no crime. Foolish, yes; criminal, no.

What injury did the Assad regime, in power for half a century and having never attacked us, inflict to justify what we have helped to do to that country? Is this war moral by our own standards?

President Trump is key. If he does the War Party's bidding, that will be his legacy, as the Iraq War is the legacy of George W. Bush.

Who controls the media spotlight controls what people talk about and think about. And mainstream media are determined to keep that spotlight on Trump-Russia, and as far away as possible from their agenda—breaking the Trump presidency and bringing him down.

If America stumbles into a war with Russia that all our Cold War presidents avoided, the Russia baiters and Putin haters will be put in same circle of hell by history as the idiot war hawks of 1914 and the three blind men of Versailles in 1919.

The crisis of the West today, said Trump, is akin to what Poland faced. For it is about the survival of a civilization, rooted in Christianity, that has made the greatest of all contributions to the ascent of man.

President Trump cannot allow this Beltway obsession with Putin to prevent us from closing, if we can, this breach. If we do not bring Russia back into the West, where do we think she will go?

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"?

If the United States did not have a mutual security pact that obligates us to defend South Korea against a nuclear-armed North, would President Trump be seeking to negotiate such a treaty?

Deficits and national debts as a share of GDP are rising. Almost nowhere does one see the old robust growth rates returning. And the infrastructure of the West—roads, bridges, tunnels, ports, airports, subways, train tracks—continues to crumble for lack of investment.

Just as Trump put Bush-Romney Republicanism into the dumpster in the 2016 primaries, Hillary Clinton's defeat, followed by losses in four straight special elections, portend a passing of the guard in the Democratic Party. So where is the party going?

We cannot allow our friends in the Middle East and Persian Gulf to play our hand for us, for it is all too often in their interests to have us come fight their wars, which are not necessarily our wars.

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.

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.

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.

Terrorist attacks in the West grow in number and lethality every year. The new normal. Now, second-generation Muslims within Europe seem to be converting to a violent version of Islam.

Wednesday, a truck bomb exploded near the diplomatic quarter of Kabul, killing 90 and wounding 460. So terrible was the atrocity that the Taliban denied complicity. It is believed to have been the work of the Haqqani network.

The European half of Trump's trip should be taken as a fire-bell-in-the-night warning: Shape up, Europe, or you may find yourselves on your own when it comes to the defense of your continent. For we Americans have had about enough.

Behind this remorseless drive to blast the greatest names from America's past off public buildings, and to tear down their statues and monuments, is an egalitarian extremism rooted in envy and hate.

Upon what authority did the Washington Post reveal code-word intelligence secrets? Where in the Constitution or U.S. law did the Post get the right to reveal state secrets every U.S. citizen is duty bound to protect?

A debilitating and potentially dangerous time for President Trump has now begun, courtesy of his deputy attorney general.

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.

Like the British and French empires, the American imperium is not sustainable. We have issued so many war guarantees it is almost assured that we will be dragged into every future great crisis and conflict on the planet.

For two years, this writer has been consumed by two subjects. First, the presidency of Richard Nixon, in whose White House I served from its first day to its last, covered in my new book. The second has been the astonishing campaign of Donald Trump and his first 100-plus days as president.

That same sense of moral certitude that cannot abide dissent to its dogmatic truths is on display in America today, as it was in Germany in the early 1930s. We are on a familiar slippery slope.

Trump is being hammered as no other president before him, except perhaps Nixon during Watergate. It is hard to reach any other conclusion than that the mainstream media loathe him and intend to oust him, as they relished in helping to oust Nixon.

[B]efore President Trump proceeds along the path laid out for him by his generals, brave and patriotic men that they are, he should discover if any of them opposed any of the idiotic wars of the last 15 years, beginning with that greatest of strategic blunders.

For the French establishment, Sunday's presidential election came close to a near-death experience. As the Duke of Wellington said of Waterloo, it was a "damn near-run thing."

Where liberals see as an ever-more splendid diversity of colors, creeds, ethnicities, ideologies, beliefs and lifestyles, the Right sees the disintegration of a country, a nation, a people, and its replacement with a Tower of Babel.

Before the U.S. launches any pre-emptive strike on North Korea, Congress should be called back into session to authorize any act of war against the North. Perhaps this time, Congress would follow the Constitution.

Today, in lands where Christ lived and taught and beyond where the Christian faith was born and nourished, the words echo. For it is in the birthplace of Christianity that Christians face the greatest of persecutions and martyrdoms since the time of Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin.

In 2013, a great national coalition came together to compel Congress to deny Barack Obama authority to take us to war in Syria. We are back at that barricade.

The Democrats' drive to defeat Neil Gorsuch is the latest battle in a 50-year war for control of the Supreme Court—a war that began with a conspiracy against Richard Nixon by Chief Justice Earl Warren, Justice Abe Fortas and Lyndon Johnson.

The United States is in rising danger of being dragged into wars in half a dozen places, because we have committed ourselves to fight for scores of nations with little or no link to vital U.S. interests.

What has Putin done to rival what our NATO ally President Erdogan has done in Turkey, jailing 40,000 people since last July's coup—or our Philippine ally Rodrigo Duterte, who has presided over the extrajudicial killing of thousands of drug dealers?

Through the last century, Congress has steadily surrendered its powers, with feeble resistance, to presidents, the Supreme Court, the Federal Reserve, the regulatory agencies, even the bureaucracy. The long retreat goes on.

The real scandal, which the media regard as a diversion from the primary target, Trump, is that a Deep State conspiracy to bring down his presidency seems to have been put in place by Obamaites, and perhaps approved by Obama himself.

Vladimir Putin did not steal this election. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama lost it. Donald Trump won it fair and square. He is not an "illegitimate" president.

With the death of Communism, the end of the Cold War, and the collapse of the Bushite New World Order, America needs a new grand strategy, built upon the solid foundation of America First.

Turkey, a powerful and reliable ally of the U.S. through the Cold War, appears to be coming unmoored from Europe and the West, and is becoming increasingly sectarian, autocratic and nationalistic.

Why, a quarter of a century after the Cold War, do we still have 28,000 troops in Korea? Not only does South Korea have twice the population of the North, but an economy 40 times as large, and access to U.S. weapons far superior to any in the North.

Russian hacking of the DNC is a problem, not a scandal. The scandal is this: Who inside the government of the United States is trying to discredit, damage or destroy the President of the United States?

In leading Republicans away from globalism to economic nationalism, Trump is not writing a new gospel. He is leading a lost party away from a modernist heresy—back to the Old-Time Religion.

Reality requires us here in Munich to recognize that, in the new struggle for the world, Russia and the U.S. are natural allies not natural enemies. Though we may quarrel over Crimea and the Donbass, we are in the same boat. Either we sail together, or sink together.

While the bathroom debate is a skirmish in the culture war, Trump's solution—send the issue back to the states and the people there to work it out—may point the way to a truce—assuming Americans still want a truce.

What is the end goal of this bristling Beltway hostility to Putin and Russia, and the U.S.-NATO buildup in the Baltic and Black Sea regions? Is a Cold War II with Russia now an accepted and acceptable reality?

Those in the FBI, Justice Department and intelligence agencies who were complicit in a conspiracy to leak the contents of Flynn's private conversations in order to bring down the national security adviser should be exposed and prosecuted.

Other than despising Trump and his "deplorables," what great cause unites the left today? Even Democrats confess to not knowing Hillary Clinton's presidential agenda.

Whether the rollout of the president's temporary travel ban was ill-prepared or not, and whether one agrees or not about which nations or people should be subjected to extreme vetting, the president's authority in the matter of protecting the borders and keeping out those he sees as potentially dangerous is universally conceded.

Is Donald Trump to be allowed to craft a foreign policy based on the ideas on which he ran and won the presidency in 2016? Our foreign policy elite's answer appears to be a thunderous no.

Is the United States making new demands on Iran not written into the nuclear treaty or international law—to provoke a confrontation?

This ban, went the weekend wail, is the "Muslim ban" of the Trump campaign. But how so, when not one of the six largest Muslim countries—Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Turkey—was on the list?

President Trump's wall is a statement to the world: This is our country. We decide who comes here. And we will defend our borders.

Though bracing, President Trump's inaugural address was rooted in cold truths, as he dispensed with the customary idealism of inaugurals that are forgotten within a fortnight of the president being sworn in.

The imperative of the new era is that the great nuclear powers—China, Russia, the United States—not do to each other what Britain, France and Germany did to each other a century ago over a dead archduke.

The existential question of the Trump era might be framed thus: How long will this divided democracy endure as one nation and one people?

The howls of indignation from Democrats and the media—that Trump's victory and Clinton's defeat were due to Putin's involvement in our election—have begun to limit Trump's freedom of action in dealing with Russia.

Though every Republican in Congress voted against the Iran nuclear deal, "Tearing it up . . . is not going to happen," says Sen. Bob Corker, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Hopefully, the chairman speaks for the president-elect.

Our Founding Fathers believed that democracy represented the degeneration of a republic; they feared and loathed it, and felt that it was the precursor of dictatorship. They may have been right again.

The worst mistake President Trump could make would be to let the Russophobes grab the wheel and steer us into another Cold War that could be as costly as the first, and might not end as peacefully.

Having America publicly reassert herself as Israel's best friend, with "no daylight" between us, could have us ending up as Israel's only friend—and Israel as our only friend in the Middle East.

We have an Israeli leader all but castigating an American president as a backstabber and betrayer, while the White House calls Bibi a liar. This is not an unserious matter.

The never-Trumpers are never going to surrender the myth that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the hacking of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee to defeat Clinton and elect Donald Trump.

The lessons for Trump from the Aleppo disaster? Do not even consider getting into a new Middle East war—unless Congress votes to authorize it, the American people are united behind it, vital U.S. interests are clearly imperiled, and we know how the war ends and when we can come home.

Early in his presidency, if not before, Trump is going to have to impose his foreign policy upon his own party and, indeed, upon his own government. Or his presidency will be broken, as was Lyndon Johnson's.

The wailing and keening over the choice of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the EPA appears to be a lead indicator of a coming revolution far beyond Reagan's.

On the trade front, China is deeply vulnerable. U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods would cause a sudden massive loss of income to factories in China and a stampede out of the country to elsewhere in Asia by companies now producing in the Middle Kingdom.

It is often our own allies, like the Brits, and our own leaders who mislead and lie us into unnecessary wars. And is not meddling in the internal affairs, including the elections, of regimes we do not like, pretty much the job description of the CIA and the National Endowment for Democracy?

Not only is the Cold War over, the post-Cold War is over. We are living in a changed and changing world. Regimes are falling. Old parties are dying, new parties rising. Old allegiances are fraying, and old allies drifting away.

Donald Trump's election triumph is among the more astonishing in history. Yet if he wishes to become the father of a new "America First" majority party, he must make good on his solemn promise.

Donald Trump's presidency will be a besieged presidency, and he would do well to enlist, politically speaking, a war cabinet and White House staff that relishes a fight and does not run.

Less and less do we Americans seem to be one country and one people. More and more do we seem to be separating along religious, racial, cultural, political, ideological, social and economic lines.

However Donald Trump came upon the foreign policy views he espoused, they were as crucial to his election as his views on trade and the border.

The president-elect should ignore his more cautious counselors, and act with the urgency of his declared beliefs.

Whatever happens Tuesday, Trump has made history and has forever changed American politics.

It would seem imperative that FBI Director James Comey, even if it violates protocol and costs him his job, should state publicly whether what Baier's FBI sources are telling him is false or true. The people have a right to know—before Tuesday.

Reporters have unearthed a near-mutiny inside the FBI over the decision to shut down the investigation of the Clinton email scandal and Comey's recommendation of no prosecution.

This election is not over. But if Hillary Clinton wins, a truly hellish presidency could await her, and us.

Would termination of our Mutual Defense Treaty mean severing ties with the Filipino people? By no means.

What explains the hysteria of the establishment? In a word, fear. The establishment is horrified at the Donald's defiance because, deep within its soul, it fears that the people for whom Trump speaks no longer accept its political legitimacy or moral authority.

How did we wind up with an all-powerful judicial tyranny in a nation the Founding Fathers created as a democratic republic?

Will Hillary Clinton clean out the nest of anti-Catholic bigots in her inner circle? Or is anti-Catholicism acceptable in her crowd?

The American people have no stomach for a new war in Syria. Nor does it make sense to expand our enemies list in that bleeding and broken country—from ISIS and the al-Qaida-linked al-Nusra Front—to Syria's armed forces, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah.

But what happens if Hillary Clinton's media acolytes keep the country's focus on trivial pursuits, and she prevails?

For an advanced economy like the United States, large trade deficits are milestones of national decline. We have been running them now for 40 years. But in the era of U.S. economic supremacy from 1870 to 1970, we always ran an annual trade surplus, selling far more abroad than Americans bought from abroad.

Like moths to a flame, TV cameras are attracted to conflict, especially racial conflict. Networks and TV stations reward with airtime the most incendiary of racial charges. Thus, the news going out to homes and bars will continue to polarize us along racial lines.

With only a year in national politics, Trump does not have to show a mastery of foreign and domestic policy details. Rather, he has to do what John F. Kennedy did in 1960, and what Ronald Reagan did in 1980. He has to meet and exceed expectations, which are not terribly high.

Do the major media understand that in their determination, bordering on desperation, to kill Trump, they are killing their credibility? And as they are losing credibility they are losing the country.

Why should Middle America, given what she thinks of us, render a President Hillary Clinton and her regime any more allegiance or loyalty than Colin Kaepernick renders to the America he so abhors?

Other than being the first woman president, what is the great change that Hillary Clinton offers America?

What does conservatism mean in 2016? Upon what ideas and issues, principles and policies, do conservatives still agree?

In accepting the invitation of President Enrique Pena Nieto to fly to Mexico City, the Donald was taking a major risk. Yet it was a bold and decisive move, and it paid off in what was the best day of Donald Trump's campaign.

The debacle that is U.S. Syria policy is today on naked display. NATO ally Turkey and U.S.-backed Arab rebels this weekend attacked our most effective allies against ISIS, the Syrian Kurds.

Prediction: If Hillary Clinton wins, within a year of her inauguration, she will be under investigation by a special prosecutor on charges of political corruption, thereby continuing a family tradition.

To understand John McLaughlin, it was helpful to have been a 13-year-old entering an all-boys Jesuit school in the 1950s.

Trump believes populism and nationalism are the future of America, and wants to keep saying so. Nor is this stance inconsistent with recapturing the ground lost in the weeks since he was running even with Hillary Clinton.

National bankruptcy is among the existential threats to the republic, the prospect that we will find ourselves in the not-too-distant future in the same boat with Greece, Puerto Rico and Illinois.

"I'm afraid the election is going to be rigged," Donald Trump told voters in Ohio and Sean Hannity on Fox News. And that hit a nerve.

It was not "isolationists" who failed America. None came near to power. The guilty parties are the CFR crowd and their neocon collaborators, and liberal interventionists who set off to play empire after the Cold War and create a New World Order with themselves as Masters of the Universe.

At stake in 2016 is the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate and, possibly, control of the House of Representatives. Hence, Republicans have a decision to make.

Behind the war guarantees America has issued to scores of nations in Europe, the Mideast and Asia since 1949, the bedrock of public support that existed during the Cold War has crumbled.

[T]he clash of visions between Cleveland and Philadelphia is stark. We appear to be two separate and hostile peoples, living apart in two separate Americas.

The tale of the thieved emails at the Democratic National Committee is just too good to be true. For a year, 74-year-old Socialist Bernie Sanders has been saying that, under DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the party has been undercutting his campaign and hauling water for Hillary Clinton.

The self-righteousness and smugness of Ted Cruz in refusing to endorse Donald Trump, then walking off stage in Cleveland, smirking amidst the boos, takes the mind back in time.

Who represents the future of the GOP? On trade and immigration, the returns are in. Should the GOP go back to globalism, amnesty or open borders, it will sunder itself and have no future.

"Her mind is shot." That was the crisp diagnosis of Donald Trump on hearing the opinion of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the possibility he might become president.

This weekend, Rudy Giuliani called Black Lives Matter "inherently racist." Does he not have a point? After the death of Eric Garner in a police takedown, Black Lives Matter led mobs onto the streets and highways of Manhattan chanting, "What do we Want? Dead Cops! When do we want them? Now!"

Does Hillary Clinton possess the integrity and honesty to be president of the United States? Or are those quaint and irrelevant considerations in electing a head of state in 21st-century America?

"Creative destruction" is the antiseptic term free traders use to describe what they have done and are doing to the America we grew up in.

In 40 years, the United States have not run a trade surplus. The most self-sufficient republic in all of history now relies for its necessities upon other nations. What might a Trumpian policy of Americanism over globalism entail?

Stripped of its excesses, Donald Trump's Wednesday speech contains all the ingredients of a campaign that can defeat Hillary Clinton this fall. Indeed, after the speech ended Clinton was suddenly defending the Clinton Foundation against the charge that it is a front for a racket for her family's enrichment.

If U.S. bombs and missiles rain down on Damascus, to the cheers of the C-Street Pattons, what do we do if Bashar Assad's allies Iran and Hezbollah retaliate with Benghazi-type attacks on U.S. diplomats across the Middle East?

If the cliches hold—nothing succeeds like success, the past is prologue—this generation will not likely see an end to the jihadist terror that was on display at Pulse in Orlando on Sunday.

Omar Mateen will not lack for emulators. While we see him as a sick and crazed mass murderer, some will see him, as he surely saw himself, as a warrior for Islam and Muslim martyr who earned paradise.

Trump's rebellion is not only against the Republican elite but against the establishment's claim to define what is right and wrong, true and false, acceptable and unacceptable, in this republic.

Before the lynching of The Donald proceeds, what exactly was it he said about that Hispanic judge?

As Donald Trump is splitting off blue-collar Democrats on issues like America's broken borders and Bill Clinton's trade debacles like NAFTA, Hillary Clinton is trying to peel off independents and Republicans by painting Trump as "temperamentally unfit" to be commander in chief.

While Barack Obama, Cameron and Angela Merkel are pulling for Britain to vote to remain in the EU, across Europe, transnationalism is in retreat, and tribalism is rising.

But what explains the social disaster of white Middle America? First, an economy where, though at or near full employment, a huge slice of the labor force has dropped out. Second, the real wages of working Americans have been nearly stagnant for decades.

If China begins to reclaim and militarize Scarborough Shoal, says Philippines President Benigno S. Aquino III, America must fight. Should we back down, says Aquino, the United States will lose "its moral ascendancy, and also the confidence of one of its allies."

In his coquettish refusal to accept the Donald, Paul Ryan says he cannot betray the conservative "principles" of the party of Abraham Lincoln, high among which is a devotion to free trade.

Why is Priebus right when he calls the entry of a third-party conservative in the presidential race a "suicide mission"? Such a candidate would siphon off votes that would otherwise go to Trump, bring down the ticket, and result in Hillary Clinton becoming the 45th president.

Is Paul Ryan's "immigration reform" package as popular inside his party as Trump's tough line? It would seem not. The longer the primaries went on, the closer the other GOP candidates moved toward Trump.

If Ryan holds to his refusal to accept the decision of the Republican majority in the primaries, he should be removed from that role. And if Ryan does not come out of Thursday's meeting with the Donald, endorsing him, the presumptive nominee should turn to Paul Ryan, and, in two words, tell him, "You're fired!"

Trump's triumph is a sweeping repudiation of Bush Republicanism by the same party that nominated them four times for the presidency.

Friday, a Russian SU-27 did a barrel roll over a U.S. RC-135 over the Baltic, the second time in two weeks. Also in April, the U.S. destroyer Donald Cook, off Russia's Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, was twice buzzed by Russian planes.

Whether the establishment likes it or not, and it evidently does not, there is a revolution going on in America. The old order in this capital city is on the way out, America is crossing a great divide, and there is no going back.

A people's religion, their faith, creates their culture, and their culture creates their civilization. And when faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, and the people begin to die.

To remove Andrew Jackson's portrait from the front of the $20 bill, and replace it with Harriet Tubman's, is affirmative action that approaches the absurd. Whatever one's admiration for Tubman and her cause, she is not the figure in history Jackson was.

Trump seems to see repairing, rebuilding and restoring America to greatness as the "large and definite purpose" of the party he would lead. And a new emerging Republican majority seems to agree.

This week, SU-24 fighter-bombers buzzed a U.S. destroyer in the Baltic Sea. The Russian planes carried no missiles or bombs. Message: What are you Americans doing here?

The Democratic Party believes in democracy, up to a point—that point being that Democratic voters will not be permitted to nominate a candidate to whom the party elites object.

After winning only six delegates in Wisconsin, and with Ted Cruz poaching delegates in states he has won, like Louisiana, Donald Trump either wins on the first ballot at Cleveland, or Trump does not win.

Trump's presence in the race has produced the largest turnout ever in the primaries of either party. He has won the most votes, most delegates, most states. Wisconsin aside, he will likely come to Cleveland in that position.

The Wisconsin primary could be an axle-breaking speed bump on Donald Trump's road to the nomination. Ted Cruz, now the last hope to derail Trump of a desperate Beltway elite that lately loathed him, has taken the lead in the Badger State.

Beltway media may be transfixed with Twitter wars over wives and alleged infidelities. But the ideas Trump aired should ignite a national debate over U.S. overseas commitments—especially NATO.

"We are not at war with Islam," said John Kasich after the Brussels massacre, "We're at war with radical Islam." Kasich's point raises a question: Does the Islamic faith in any way sanction or condone what those suicide bombers did?

Whatever one may think of Donald Trump, his campaign has done us a service—exposing the underbelly of a decaying establishment whose repudiation by America's silent majority is long overdue.

The Trump campaign is not a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. It is a rebellion of shareholders who are voting to throw out the corporate officers and board of directors that ran the company into the ground.

America has changed from the land we grew up in. But she is not yet ready to allow ugly mobs screaming obscenities at Trump and his folks inside and outside that hall in Chicago, or their paragons like socialist senator Bernie Sanders, to take over the country.

Not in memory has the leadership of a party been so out of touch. The Republican rank and file are in revolt, not only against the failures of their fathers but the policies of their present rulers.

A new "New Majority" has been marching to the polls and voting Republican, a majority unlike any seen since the 49-state landslides of the Nixon and Reagan eras.

The crowds that continue to come out for Donald Trump's appearances and the vast audiences he has attracted to GOP debates testify to his drawing power.

In a Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump race—which, the Beltway keening aside, seems the probable outcome of the primaries—what are the odds the GOP can take the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court?

As the returns came in from South Carolina Saturday night, showing Donald Trump winning a decisive victory, a note of nervous desperation crept into the commentary.

Workers know what our politicians refuse to discuss. They are being sold out for the benefit of corporate elites who pay off those politicians with the big cash contributions that keep the parties flush.

It is a measure of the stature and the significance of Justice Antonin Scalia that, upon the news of his death at a hunting lodge in Texas, Washington was instantly caught up in an unseemly quarrel over who would succeed him.

If you believed America's longest war, in Afghanistan, was coming to an end, be advised: It is not.

The morning of the New Hampshire primary, Donald Trump, being interviewed on "Morning Joe," said that he would welcome his "friend" Michael Bloomberg into the presidential race.

Cruz, Trump, Carson—the outsiders—won over 60 percent of all caucus votes. Their anti-Washington messages, Trump and Cruz's especially, grew the GOP turnout to its largest in history, 186,000, half again as many as participated in the record turnout of 2012.

Whoever wins the nominations, the most successful campaigns of 2016 provide us with a clear picture of where the center of gravity is today in both parties and, hence, where America is going.

It will be difficult for populists to unite with Beltway conservatives in 2016, when the former see the latter as part of the problem, not the solution.

Taken together, the candidacies of Trump, Sanders, Ben Carson and Ted Cruz represent a rejection of the establishment. And, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, other Republican campaigns are now channeling Trump's.

The political and economic elites of Davos have grow rich, fat and powerful by setting aside patriotism and sacrificing their countries on the altars of globalization and a New World Order.

Is the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, a RINO—a revolutionary in name only?

To awaken Thursday to front-page photos of U.S. sailors kneeling on the deck of their patrol boat, hands on their heads in postures of surrender, on Iran's Farsi Island, brought back old and bad memories.

Three weeks out from the Iowa caucuses, and clarity emerges. Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, is in trouble.

If Beijing refuses to cooperate to de-nuclearize North Korea, she could find herself, a decade hence, surrounded by nuclear weapons states, from Russia to India and from Pakistan to Japan.

In the Middle East, where the crucial Western interest is oil, and every nation—Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Libya—has to sell it to survive—no nation should be able drag us into a war not of our own choosing.

Each year, The McLaughlin Group, the longest-running panel show on national TV, which began in 1982, announces its awards for the winners and losers and the best and the worst of the year. Rereading my list of 39 awardees suggests something about how our world is changing.

Are our own political and racial divisions disappearing, or do they, too, seem to be deepening?

This is today's crucial distinction: Islam is not simply a religion of 1.6 billion people, it is also a political ideology for ruling nations and, one day, the world.

If we do not want Syria in 2016 to become what Sarajevo became in 1914, the powder keg that explodes into a world war, the War Party Republicans, who have learned nothing from the past, should be relegated to the past.

What the Republican collectivity has to realize is that it is they and the policies they produced that are the reason Trump, Carson and Cruz currently hold an overwhelming majority of Republican votes.

Calling for a moratorium on Muslim immigration "until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on," Donald Trump this week ignited a firestorm of historic proportions.

The rightward shift in French politics is being replicated across Europe, as nations tighten borders and erect new checkpoints against the tsunami of migrants and refugees from Africa and the Middle East.

Today the press decides what words are permissible and what thoughts are acceptable. The press conducts the inquisitions where heretics are blacklisted and excommunicated from the company of decent men, while others are forgiven if they recant their heresies.

In this war against "radical Islamic terrorism," who is the real ally: Erdogan, who has been aiding and abetting Islamic jihadists in Syria, or Putin, who has been bombing them?

"A stab in the back by the accomplices of terrorists," said Vladimir Putin of the first downing of a Russian warplane by a NATO nation in half a century. Putin has a point, as the Russians are bombing rebels in northwest Syria, some of which are linked to al-Qaida.

If the purpose of terrorism is to terrify, the Islamic State had an extraordinary week. Brussels, capital of the EU and command post of mighty NATO, is still in panic and lockdown.

In denouncing Republicans as "scared of widows and orphans," and castigating those who prefer Christian refugees to Muslims coming to America, Barack Obama has come off as petulant and unpresidential.

Among the presidential candidates of the Republican Party and their foreign policy leaders on Capitol Hill the cry is almost universal: Barack Obama has no strategy for winning the war on ISIS.

Rand Paul had his best debate moment Tuesday when he challenged Marco Rubio on his plans to increase defense spending by $1 trillion.

Will Europe remain Europe if she is repopulated by Arabs, Muslims, Asians and Africans? What will hold Europe together? Free trade?

"Dalton Trumbo was a socialist, but he loved being rich." So says Bryan Cranston, who stars in "Trumbo", out this week, and plays the screenwriter who went to prison with the Hollywood Ten in the time of Harry Truman.

Despite repeated pledges not to put "boots on the ground" in Syria, President Obama is inserting 50 U.S. special ops troops into that country, with more to follow.

Beijing's claim to the Spratlys is being contested by Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines and Taiwan. While Hanoi and Manila have occupied islets and built structures to back their claims, the Chinese have been more aggressive.

If Catholic truths about the indissolubility of marriage and intrinsic immorality of homosexual unions can be changed, then, either the Church has been in grave error in the past, or the Church is toying with heresy today.

Three months ago, this writer sent out a column entitled, "Could Trump Win?" meaning the Republican nomination. Today even the Trump deniers concede the possibility.

In analyzing the presidential race, the one conclusion upon which all agree is that the anti-Washington, anti-incumbent sentiment is far deeper and wider than most had imagined.

The honor of it all aside, Rep. Paul Ryan would do well to decline the speakership of the House. For it is a poisoned chalice that is being offered to him.

Prediction: We are going to have more of these massacres. Why? Because we rewarded Harper-Mercer for his barbarity in the currency he craved, the only currency he cared about: fame and immortality in this world.

Having established a base on the Syrian coast, Vladimir Putin last week began air strikes on ISIS and other rebel forces seeking to overthrow Bashar Assad.

If America's elites continue to assert their right to intervene in the internal affairs of nations, to make them conform to a U.S. ideal of what is a good society and legitimate government, then we are headed for endless conflict.

America's "red lines" should be set down clearly in front of our vital interests. Then, we should inform our friends and allies that their defense is, first and foremost, their own responsibility.

Beliefs matter. "Ideas Have Consequences," as conservative scholar Richard Weaver wrote in his classic of that title in 1948. Yet, for so believing, and so saying, Dr. Ben Carson has been subjected to a Rodney King-style night-sticking by the P.C. police.

When Pope Francis arrives in Washington on Tuesday afternoon, the country he enters will be a very different one from Eisenhower's America or Reagan's America. And Catholics will be welcoming a new kind of pope.

What Vladimir Putin is up to in Syria makes far more sense than what Barack Obama and John Kerry appear to be up to in Syria.

With that kumbayah moment at the Capitol in South Carolina, when the Battle Flag of the Confederacy was lowered forever to the cheers and tears of all, a purgation of the detestable relics of evil that permeate American public life began.

The Court has lately been declaring to be constitutional rights that used to regarded as shameful crimes. This is judicial tyranny. And Kim Davis' defiance is as old as the republic.

If Europe does not seal its borders, what is to stop the Islamic world and Third World from coming and repopulating the continent with their own kind, as the shrinking native populations of Europe die out?

Barack Obama, as chief law enforcement officer of the United States, is going to have to stop acting like a conscientious objector in this war on cops.

This month, a Republican Congress will vote to reject the Iranian nuclear deal that Europe, Russia, China and the Gulf Arabs regard as done. While the GOP may muster the votes to reject it, they lack the votes to override an Obama veto of their rejection.

The Wednesday morning murders of 24-year-old Roanoke TV reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward, 27, were a racist atrocity, a hate crime. Were they not white, they would be alive today.

On issues from mass migrations from the Third World, to deeper political integration of Europe, to the EU's paltry contributions to a U.S.-led NATO that defends the continent, nationalistic resistance is rising.

While perhaps too early for Democratic elites to panic and begin bailing out on Hillary Clinton's campaign as a doomed vessel, they would be well advised not to miss any of the lifeboat drills.

Either Western nations take tough measures to secure their borders, or the Western nations will be swamped. The character of their countries will be altered forever, and smaller countries will become unrecognizable.

In the Cleveland debate, Donald Trump refused to commit to support whomever the Republican Party nominates in 2016. Trump would be wise to maintain his freedom of action.

If his Republican opponents will not take down Donald Trump, Fox News will not only show them how it is done. Fox News will do the job for them.

In his desperation to sink the Iran nuclear deal, Bibi Netanyahu is taking a hellish gamble.

In his new biography "Being Nixon: A Man Divided", Evan Thomas concedes a point. Richard Nixon, he writes, "was not paranoid; the press and the 'Georgetown set' really were out to get him."

Early this century, under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey seemed to be emerging as a major power, a land bridge between Europe and the Islamic world, a friend to its neighbors, and future member of the EU.

The American political class has failed the country, and should be fired. That is the clearest message from the summer surge of Bernie Sanders and the remarkable rise of Donald Trump.

Planned Parenthood's image—a progressive organization that provides free birth control to women who seek to space pregnancies as they plan their families—will not easily survive these tapes.

As President Obama's nuclear deal with Iran is compared to Richard Nixon's opening to China, Bibi Netanyahu must know how Chiang Kai-shek felt as he watched his old friend Nixon toasting Mao in Peking. The Iran nuclear deal is not on the same geostrategic level. Yet both moves, seen as betrayals by old U.S. allies, were born of a cold assessment in Washington of a need to shift policy to reflect new threats and new opportunities.

From first reactions, it appears that Hill Republicans will be near unanimous in voting a resolution of rejection of the Iran nuclear deal.

Today we have a pope for whom free-market capitalism is the "unacceptable ideological commitment."

If a family disagreed as broadly as we Americans do on issues so fundamental as right and wrong, good and evil, the family would fall apart, the couple would divorce, and the children would go their separate ways.

In the 2016 race, June belonged to two outsiders who could not be more dissimilar. Bernie Sanders is a socialist senator from Vermont and Donald Trump a celebrity capitalist and legendary entrepreneur and builder.

However the Greek crisis ends, whether with Athens leaving the eurozone, or submitting and accepting austerity at the dictates of its creditors, the European Union appears headed for an existential crisis.

Same-sex marriage is the law of the land, as the right of gays and lesbians to marry is right there in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1868. We just didn't see it.

As Dylan Roof had filmed himself flaunting a Confederate battle flag, the cry went out to tear that flag down from the war memorial in Columbia, South Carolina, and remove its vile presence everywhere in America.

The Pentagon's message received a reply June 16. Russian Gen. Yuri Yakubov called the U.S. move "the most aggressive step by the Pentagon and NATO since the Cold War."

At the declaration by Donald Trump that he is a candidate for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, media elites of left and right reacted with amusement, anger and disgust.

Over three decades, that border has been a causeway into the USA for millions of illegal immigrants who are changing the face of America—to the delight of those who think the country we grew up in was ugly.

We are in the 7th year of the presidency of a black American who has named the first two black U.S. attorneys general. Yet race relations seem more poisonous now than then, when the good will of America's majority was driving legislation.

Toward the end of the presidency of George H.W. Bush, America stood alone at the top of the world—the sole superpower. After five weeks of "shock and awe" and 100 hours of combat, Saddam's army had fled Kuwait back up the road to Basra and Bagdad.

Who rises if Assad falls? That question, which has bedeviled U.S. experts on the Middle East, may need updating to read: Who rises when Assad falls?

The culture war against Christianity is picking up speed. Last week came word Saint Louis University will remove a heroic-sized statue of Fr. Pierre-Jean De Smet S.J. from the front of Fusz Hall, where it has stood for 60 years.

Why did the Iraqi army run? And what motivated the fighters of ISIS to attack a city whose defenders so vastly outnumbered them?

"America was born a Christian nation," echoed Woodrow Wilson. Harry Truman affirmed it: "This is a Christian nation." But in 2009, Barack Hussein Obama begged to differ: "We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation."

The fall of Ramadi, capital of Anbar, largest province in Iraq, after a rout of the Iraqi army by a few hundred ISIS fighters using bomb-laden trucks, represents a stunning setback for U.S. policy.

As Middle America rises in rage against "fast track" and the mammoth Obamatrade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, The Wall Street Journal has located the source of the malady.

Jeb Bush has spent the week debating with himself over whether he would have started the war his brother launched on Iraq.

David Cameron is the most successful Tory Party leader since Margaret Thatcher. Yet history may also record that his success led to the crackup of his country, and Great Britain's secession from the European Union.

In the first quarter of 2015, in the sixth year of the historic Obama recovery, the U.S. economy grew by two-tenths of 1 percent. And that probably sugarcoats it.

In our deepening political divide, the left invokes the narrative that black males are all too often terribly treated by brutal cops, while the right sees tough policing as having cut crime to more tolerable levels and cops as the thin blue line between them and anarchy.

Had Freddie Gray been robbed, beaten and left to die in the streets of his Baltimore neighborhood, no one would be mourning him today. It was the manner of his death, suffering a fractured spine in police custody, that makes Freddie matter.

Almost all of the declared and undeclared Republican candidates for 2016 could be found this weekend at one of two events, or both.

For a month now, the Saudi air force has been bombing Yemen to reverse a takeover of that nation of 25 million by Houthi rebels, and reinstall a president who fled his country and is residing in Riyadh.

The GOP swept to victory in November by declaring that this imperial presidency must be brought to heel, and President Obama's illicit seizures of Congressional power must end.

"Could a U.S. response to Russia's action in Ukraine provoke a confrontation that leads to a U.S.-Russia War?" This jolting question is raised by Graham Allison and Dimitri Simes in the cover article of The National Interest.

Uninhibited by old friendships, untethered to old allies, Barack Obama is grounding his Middle East policy on what he sees as the new realities.

Faced with a corporate-secularist firestorm, Gov. Mike Pence said Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act would not protect Christian bakers or florists who refuse their services to same-sex weddings.

"Pat, sometimes it seems like our friends want me to go over the cliff with flags flying," President Reagan once told me. Today, it is "Bibi" Netanyahu and the neocons howling "kill the deal" and "bomb Iran" who are shoving the Republican Party toward the cliff.

A voracious and eclectic reader, President Nixon instructed me to send him every few weeks 10 articles he would not normally see that were on interesting or important issues.

Indiana just enacted a law, as have 19 other states, to protect the rights of religious people to practice their beliefs in how they live their lives and conduct their businesses. And the reaction? Nearly hysterical.

The forces that do not want a U.S. nuclear deal with Iran, nor any U.S. detente with Iran, are impressive. Among them are the Israelis and their powerful lobby AIPAC, the Saudis and their Sunni allies on the Persian Gulf, a near unanimity of Republicans and a plurality of Democrats in Congress.

Though "Bibi" Netanyahu won re-election last week, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will still look into whether the State Department financed a clandestine effort to defeat him.

In November 1956, President Eisenhower, enraged he had not been forewarned of their invasion of Egypt, ordered the British, French and Israelis to get out of Suez and Sinai. They did as told.

With President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry seemingly about to conclude a deal to freeze Iran's nuclear program, House Speaker John Boehner invited Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu to use the State of the Union podium to call Obama and Kerry naive and trash their deal as paving the ayatollah's way to an atomic bomb.

As the European Coal and Steel Community of Jean Monnet evolved into the EU, we were told a "United States of Europe" was at hand, modeled on the USA. And other countries and continents will inevitably follow Europe's example.

America, we have a problem. In the blood-soaked chaotic Middle East, with few exceptions like the Kurds, our friends either can't or won't fight.

Eric Holder's Justice Department has completed its investigation into whether Ferguson cop Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown in cold blood for racist reasons when he shot the black teenager last August.

Despite jihadi violence across the Middle East and ISIS terror in Iraq and Syria, John Kerry told Congress, we live in "a period of less daily threat to Americans and to people in the world than normally—less deaths, less violent deaths today than through the last century."

If the sadists of ISIS are seeking—with their mass executions, child rapes, immolations, and beheadings of Christians—to stampede us into a new war in the Middle East, they are succeeding.

Back in 1987, this writer was invited by friends to advise them on a press conference they had called to oppose President Reagan's signing of an INF treaty to remove all nuclear missiles from Europe.

"Free trade results in giving our money, our manufactures, and our markets to other nations," warned the Republican Senator from Ohio and future President William McKinley in 1892.

Hopefully, the shaky truce between Vladimir Putin and Ukraine's Petro Poroshenko, brokered in Minsk by Angela Merkel, will hold.

The president's request for the authorization to use military force against the Islamic State has landed in a Congress as divided as the country.

After listing the horrors of ISIS, al-Qaida and Boko Haram, the president decided his recital of crimes committed in the name of Islam would be unbalanced, if he did not backhand those smug Christians sitting right in front of him.

Seeing clips of that 22-minute video of the immolation of the Jordanian pilot, one wonders: Who would be drawn to the cause of these barbarians who perpetrated such an atrocity?

Among Cold War presidents, from Truman to Bush I, there was an unwritten rule: Do not challenge Moscow in its Central and Eastern Europe sphere of influence.

Last November, Republicans grew their strength in Congress to levels unseen since 1946. What united the party and rallied the nation was the GOP's declared resolve to stand up to an imperious president.

So alarmed is Speaker Boehner, he invited Bibi Netanyahu to come and challenge U.S. policy toward Iran from the same podium where the president delivered his State of the Union address.

Following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that France "is at war with terrorism, jihadism and radical Islamism." This tells us what France is fighting against.

Selma, a film focused on the police clubbing of civil rights marchers led by Dr. King at Selma bridge in March of 1965, is being denounced by Democrats as a cinematic slander against the president who passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

"I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it." That maxim of Voltaire was among those most invoked by the marching millions in Sunday's mammoth "Je Suis Charlie" rally in Paris.

Western media are declaring the million-man march in Paris, where world leaders paraded down Boulevard Voltaire in solidarity with France, a victory over terrorism. Isn't it pretty to think so.

Detestation of de Blasio among the NYPD and the cops who came from across the country to stand in solidarity with their slain brothers is broad and deep.

Among the dispositions shared by the two conservatives was a determination to stay out of other people's wars. Peering into 2015, there are wars into which our interventionists are eager to plunge that represent no immediate or grave threat to us.

Words matter. And if a picture is worth a thousand words, how much greater impact can a motion picture have? We are finding out.

The marchers got their wish Saturday in Bedford-Stuyvesant when Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28, firing into a patrol car, murdered NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.

The celebrations in Havana and the sullen silence in Miami tell you all you need to know about who won this round with Castro's Cuba. In JFK's metaphor, Obama traded a horse for a rabbit.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is the most nationalistic leader of postwar Japan. He is rebooting nuclear power, building up Japan's military, asserting her rights in territorial disputes with China and Korea.

Brought before a House inquisition, MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber burbled a recantation of his beliefs about how that triumph of liberalism had been achieved.

Hopefully, Russians realize that our House of Representatives often passes thunderous resolutions to pander to special interests, which have no bearing on the thinking or actions of the U.S. government.

We have found the new normal in America. If you are truly outraged by some action of police, prosecutors, grand juries, or courts, you can shut down the heart of a great city.

Among the primary causes of the ruin of FDR's great coalition, and the rise of Nixon's New Majority, was the belief in Middle America that liberals were so morally paralyzed by racial guilt they could not cope with minority racism, riots and crime.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam war veteran and the lone Republican on Obama's national security team, has been fired. And John McCain's assessment is dead on.

Asserting a legal and constitutional authority he himself said he did not have, President Obama is going rogue, issuing an executive amnesty to 4 to 5 million illegal aliens.

Due to the substitution of natural gas for oil in heating homes and buildings, horizontal drilling, and hydraulic fracking, which enables us to bring oil and gas out of shale rock in places like North Dakota, U.S. production has exploded.

Nov. 4 was a national vote of no confidence in Barack Obama. Had a British prime minister received a vote like this, he would have resigned by now.

After billions in attack ads that turned the approval ratings of almost every candidate, in both parties, upside down, Republicans appear primed to take control of Congress.

As it stands today, Republicans will add seats in the House and recapture the Senate on Tuesday.

Normally a synod of Catholic bishops does not provide fireworks rivaling the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley's boys in blue ran up the score on the radicals in Grant Park.

In 1492, "Columbus sailed the ocean blue" and discovered the New World. And Oct. 12 was once a celebrated holiday in America.

Do the states have the right to outlaw same-sex marriage? Not long ago the question would have been seen as absurd. For every state regarded homosexual acts as crimes.

Walter Jones is calling for a debate and decision on whether America should go to war in Syria and Iraq, when Congress reconvenes after Nov. 4.

Americans are caught up with the Ebola crisis and the Secret Service lapses in protecting the White House and the president's family.

In his U.N. address, President Obama listed a parade of horrors afflicting our world: "Russian aggression in Europe," "terrorism in Syria and Iraq," rapes and beheadings by ISIL, al-Qaida, Boko Haram. And, of course, the Ferguson Police Department.

"Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."

"Congress must now vote to support the first steps of what will be a long march toward victory," said Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

No matter how the vote turns out on Thursday in Scotland, either for independence or continued union with Britain, the disintegration of the Old Continent appears almost inevitable.

By releasing the grisly videos of the beheadings of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, ISIS has altered the political landscape here and across the Middle East.

The decisions that determined the fate of the great nations and empires that failed to survive the 20th century are well known.

Among the demands of the "protesters" in Ferguson is that the investigation and prosecution of police officer Darren Wilson be taken away from St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch.

What we are witnessing in Ferguson today, and nationally, is not only a collision of reported facts, but also a clash of visions about America.

U.S. air strikes since Friday have opened a corridor through which tens of thousands of Yazidis, trapped and starving on a mountain in Iraq, have escaped to safety in Kurdistan.

At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama famously wrote that our world may be at the "end of history" where "Western liberal democracy" becomes "the final form of human government."

The centennial of the Great War that began with the Guns of August 1914. The 75th anniversary of the Danzig crisis that led to Hitler's invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. The 70th anniversary of D-Day.

With the party united, the odds are now at least even that the GOP will not only hold the House but also capture the Senate in November.

To observe the decades-long paralysis of America's political elite in controlling her borders calls to mind the insight of James Burnham in 1964 -- "Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide."

Barack Obama has asked Congress for $500 million to train and arm rebels of the Free Syrian Army who seek to overthrow the government.

With the Islamic warriors of ISIS having captured all the border posts between Iraq, Syria and Jordan, we may be witnessing the end of Sykes-Picot. That was the secret 1916 treaty by which the British and French carved up the Ottoman Empire, with the Brits taking Transjordan and Iraq, and the French Syria and Lebanon.

The panic that engulfed this capital after the fall of Mosul, when it appeared that the Islamist fanatics of ISIS would overrun Baghdad, has passed. And the second thoughts have begun.

President Obama handed the Taliban a victory, critics contend, and imperiled U.S. troops in Afghanistan when the five return to the battlefield. Moreover, he has inspired the Haqqani network and other Islamists to capture more Americans to trade.

The trade of Bowe Bergdahl speaks well of America's 's resolve to leave no soldier behind. But this secret swap, as well as the circumstances of Bergdahl's capture and captivity, are likely to further polarize our people and poison our politics.

When Brown v. Board of Education, the 9-0 Warren Court ruling came down 60 years ago, desegregating America's public schools, this writer was a sophomore at Gonzaga in Washington, D.C.

The GOP Beltway establishment is celebrating the victory of Thom Tillis, Speaker of the North Carolina House, over his Tea Party and Evangelical rivals in Tuesday's primary for the U.S. Senate.

Richard Engel of NBC, reporting from Maidan Square in Kiev, described what he witnessed as the Feb. 19 truce collapsed.

At the Cold War's end, the late Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick talked hopefully of America becoming again "a normal country in a normal time." Seems as though the normal times are never coming back.

In July, Graham told a cheering conference of Christians United for Israel: "If nothing changes in Iran, come September, October, I will present a resolution that will authorize the use of military force to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb."

The American people do not want war on Syria, and such a war makes no sense. Who is trying to stampede Congress into war on Syria, and then on Iran—and why? Therein lies the real question.

Teenagers who can shoot and kill a man out of summertime boredom are moral barbarians, dead souls. But who created these monsters? Where did they come from? Surely one explanation lies in the fact that the old conscience-forming and character-forming institutions—home, church, school, and a moral and healthy culture fortifying basic truths—have collapsed. And the community hardest hit is Black America.

In the near term, bet on the men with the guns.

"There have been times when they slip back into Cold War thinking," said President Obama in his tutorial with Jay Leno. And to show the Russians that such Cold War thinking is antiquated, Obama canceled his September summit with Vladimir Putin. The reason: Putin's grant of asylum to Edward Snowden, who showed up at the Moscow airport, his computers full of secrets that our National Security Agency has been thieving from every country on earth, including Russia.

Apparently, the threat is both serious and specific. The United States ordered 22 diplomatic missions closed and issued a worldwide travel alert for U.S. citizens. The threat comes from Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP, the most lethal branch of the terrorist organization.

Obama's second-term scandals—IRS, Benghazi, wiretapping The Associated Press and Fox—are in the low-kiloton range compared to the resignation of Nixon or the impeachment of Clinton.

"The First Black President . . . Spoke First as a Black American," ran the banner headline of Sunday's Washington Post. But why, when the fires of anger over the Zimmerman verdict were dying down, did he go into that pressroom and stir them up?

"They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Ben Franklin is much quoted in today's debate on the trade-off between freedom and security, as we learn about the National Security Agency's easy access to our phone records and emails. Yet we Americans have often sacrificed liberty for safety.

On U.S. military intervention in Syria's civil war, where "both sides are slaughtering each other as they scream over an arbitrary red line 'Allahu akbar' ... I say let Allah sort it out." So said Sarah Palin to the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference.

Barack Obama has just taken his first baby steps into a war in Syria that may define and destroy his presidency. Thursday, while he was ringing in Gay Pride Month with LGBT revelers, a staffer, Ben Rhodes, informed the White House press that U.S. weapons will be going to the Syrian rebels. For two years Obama has stayed out of this sectarian-civil war that has consumed 90,000 lives. Why is he going in now?

While U.S.-funded democracy promotion is portrayed as benign, the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, DNI and Freedom House have been linked to revolutions that brought down regimes in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and nearly succeeded in Belarus.

Never before has America been held in lower esteem by the Arab peoples or the Islamic world. As for the reputation of the U.S. military, how many years will it be before our armed forces are no longer automatically associated with such terms as Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, renditions and waterboarding?

To see these new Republicans standing by Rand Paul presented the image of a band of brothers standing up for principle. Rarely has this Republican Party looked better than it did last Wednesday.

Pope Benedict XVI restored some of the ancient beauty and majesty to the liturgy. He brought back to the fold separated Anglican brethren. The Church is making converts in sub-Saharan Africa. And in America, new traditionalist colleges and seminaries have begun to flourish.

The Republican capacity for self-delusion is truly awesome.

President Obama and Vice President Biden seem intent on appearing before the nation on Election Day as the sole peace party. This fact leaps out of a close read of Biden's debate transcript.

Mitt was like a contender so keyed up by his title shot that, between rounds, he could not sit on his stool, but stood in his corner to rush out and re-engage the champ the instant the bell sounded for the next round.

If the Islamic world is so suffused with rage and hatred of us—for our wars, occupations, drone attacks, support of Israel, decadent culture, and tolerance of insults to Islam and the Prophet—why should we call for free elections, when the people will use those elections to vote into power rulers hostile to the United States?

The Democratic convention will witness one sustained slander of Romney and Ryan as Randian agents of a plutocracy hell-bent on seeing its taxes reduced and the tax cuts paid for by eviscerating programs on which America's poor and the working and middle class depend for survival.

In 2012, sectarianism, tribalism and nationalism are all resurgent, reshaping a world where U.S. power and influence are visibly receding.

With the Islamic awakening and Arab Spring toppling regimes, the natural map of the Middle East seems now to be asserting itself.

"If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." Mitt Romney fell on this Obama quote like an NFL lineman on an end zone fumble during the Super Bowl.

The first criterion in choosing a vice president, it is said, is that he or she must be qualified to be president.

Roberts desperately does not want to seen by history as merely a competent but colorless member of the conservative bloc on the Supreme Court, another reliable vote in the Scalia camp. He does not want Anthony Kennedy, the swing justice, to be making history, while he is seen as a predictable conservative vote.

Wilson—not Harding, Coolidge or Hoover, all of whom tried to ease the vindictive terms imposed on a defeated but democratic Germany—set the table for Nazism. Adolf Hitler was born at Versailles.

Sixteen months after the United States abandoned its loyal satrap of 30 years, President Hosni Mubarak, to champion democracy in Egypt, the returns are in.

What do these mammoth and mounting deficits mean? A deepening dependence on foreign nations for the necessities of our national life. A steady erosion of our manufacturing base. A continued stagnation in the real wages of the middle class. And an unending redistribution of America's wealth to foreign lands.

With their union dues no longer taken out of their paychecks, tens of thousands of Wisconsin public employees refused to pony up those dues and quit their union, instead. What does this tell us?

Would a President Romney and Republican Congress roll back benefits for scores of millions of seniors, raise the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare, reduce funds for Medicaid, Head Start, Pell grants, student loans, primary and secondary education, and shed federal employees by the tens of thousands?

Bill Kristol's point: Refuse to toe the neocon line on Israel, and you have no future in the Republican Party.

The public mind has been so poisoned that an acquittal of George Zimmerman could ignite a reaction similar to that, 20 years ago, when the Simi Valley jury acquitted the LAPD cops in the Rodney King beating case.

White America is a dying tribe. What do these statistics mean politically? Almost surely the end of the Republican Party as a national governing institution.

Here is a major cause of the economic malaise of the 21st century, a condition over which a president has little control. A shrinking share of our population is carrying an ever-expanding army of dependents.

Obama needs one more justice. If elected, he will get it, and same-sex marriage will be forced on all of America.

As the Secret Service travel and work in close contact with the White House Advance Office and White House Communications Agency, was the Obama staff oblivious to this misconduct? If they were aware of it, did no one report it to the White House chief of staff?

Netanyahu believes Israel's security and survival mandate the nuclear castration of Iran.

If the Sanford police believe they have no case for murder or manslaughter or any felony, what do they charge him with, after they arrest him?

Japan's fertility rate, the number of births per woman, has been below zero population growth for 40 years and has plunged to where Japanese woman are having only two-thirds of the children needed to replace the present population.

Have the Republican uber-hawks learned nothing from the war for which they beat the drums 10 years ago?

The prime minister of Israel is angry with Barack Obama and is coming here to force a hardening of U.S. policy toward Iran.

The savage sanctions we imposed on a defeated Iraq and the planting of U.S. bases on Saudi soil that is home to Mecca was a casus belli for Osama bin Laden. Ten years after the triumph of Bush I, he brought down the twin towers.

My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end. After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous.

Yes, Virginia, there is a religious war going on. It is for the soul of America. And traditional Christianity is besieged.

In the United States, all religions—Santeria, Wicca, Islam, Christianity—are to be treated equally and all kept out of the public square and the pubic schools. In a Muslim world that contains a fifth of mankind, Islam is the one true faith. Rival faiths have few or no rights. Are we going to push the Islamic world to treat all religions equally?

Should Mitt Romney be nominated, he will need to make a national address defending his career at Bain Capital with the same conviction and passion with which he defended his faith in the campaign of 2008.

Resolving our fiscal crisis seems today beyond the capacity of the U.S. government, as currently constituted. We appear to be in a crisis of the regime rooted in an irreconcilable ideological conflict between two parties of relatively equal strength.

The question for Christians is a simple one: Do they have what it takes to take America back?

For the Army and Marines who lost 4,500 dead and more than 30,000 wounded, many of them amputees, the second-longest war in U.S. history is over. America is coming home from Iraq.

Prime Minister David Cameron's decision to veto Germany's demand for a new European fiscal union will define his premiership. More than that, Cameron has raised a banner for patriots everywhere fighting to retain their national independence.

On Dec. 8, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt took the rostrum before a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war on Japan. A day earlier, at dawn, carrier-based Japanese aircraft had launched a sneak attack devastating the U.S. battle fleet at Pearl Harbor.

Is a vote for the Republican Party in 2012 a vote for war?

Ethnic nationalism, what Albert Einstein dismissed as "the measles of mankind," and religious fanaticism are making headlines and history. Welcome to the new world disorder.

Has America become what Klemens von Metternich called Italy: "a mere geographical expression"?

When the cutting comes, as it shall, the Pentagon will be first to ascend the scaffold. America approaches her moment of truth.

Of George W. Bush, it will be said that, after 9/11, he led his country on a utopian crusade for democracy in the Muslim world—and all but ignored the rise of a rival with a potential that Stalin never had to surpass and eclipse the United States as first power on earth.

"You've damaged your own race," said Mayor Michael Nutter to the black youths of Philadelphia whose flash mobs have been beating and robbing shoppers in the fashionable district of downtown.

This downgrade is deeply deserved. For no one really believes the United States is going to pay its creditors back the $14 trillion it owes them, or the $21 trillion it will owe them at decade's end, with dollars of the same value as those that the United States is borrowing today.

The Republican Party is a stool that stands on three legs: social conservatives, economic conservatives and foreign policy conservatives. Yet since Ronald Reagan departed and George W. Bush arrived, that coalition has been under a growing strain that may yet pull it apart and redefine what conservatism means in 21st century America.

That massacre in Oslo, where a terrorist detonated a fertilizer bomb to decapitate the government and proceeded to a youth camp to kill 68 children of Norway's ruling elite, is a fire bell in the night for Europe. For Anders Behring Breivik is no Islamic terrorist.

Because of Tea Party intransigence and threats against their own leader John Boehner, the speaker had to reject Obama's "grand bargain," the "big deal" of $3 trillion in budget cuts for $1 trillion in "revenue enhancement."

By refusing to accept tax increases in a deal to raise the debt ceiling, Republicans are behaving like "fanatics," writes David Brooks of The New York Times. Anti-tax Republicans "have no sense of moral decency," he adds.

"The opponents (of same-sex marriage) have no case other than ignorance and misconception and prejudice." So writes Richard Cohen in his celebratory column about Gov. Andrew Cuomo's role in legalizing gay marriage in New York state.

Centuries before William James coined the phrase, men have sought a "moral equivalent of war," some human endeavor to satisfy the jingoistic lust of man, without the carnage of war.

In deciding to pull all of the 30,000 troops from the surge out of Afghanistan, six weeks before Election Day 2012, but only 10,000 by year's end, President Obama has satisfied neither the generals nor the doves.

Michele Bachmann, who emerged as the star of the debate and favorite for the backing of the social conservative and Tea Party right, called Libya a strategic mistake. No vital U.S. interests were imperiled. That debate was a fire bell in the night for the neoconservatives. The days when Republicans stood up and saluted a commander in chief as soon as he starting bombing a country appear to be over.

Late last month, when U.S. air strikes caused civilian casualties in Afghanistan, an angry Hamid Karzai issued an ultimatum. If future U.S. strikes are not restricted, we will take "unilateral action" and America may be treated like an "occupying power."

Not since Nikita Khrushchev berated Dwight Eisenhower over Gary Powers' U-2 spy flight over Russia only weeks earlier has an American president been subjected to a dressing down like the one Barack Obama received from Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday.

Given the coordination of the Palestinian actions, we may be on the verge either of a Facebook revolution or a "third intifada," an uprising by Palestinians in Israel, the occupied territories, and Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt, where hundreds of thousands of descendants of the original exiles still live.

The critical evidence that put John Demjanjuk at Sobibor came—from the KGB.

With his order to effect the execution of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALs, 40 miles from Islamabad, without asking permission of the government, Barack Obama made a bold and courageous decision. Its success, and the accolades he has received, have given him a credibility as commander in chief that he never had before.

After Donald Trump called on Obama to release his original birth certificate and produce the academic records and test scores that put him on a bullet train from being a "terrible student" at Occidental College to Columbia, Harvard Law and Harvard Law Review editor, charges of "racism" have saturated the airwaves.

One month before the invasion of Iraq, Riah Abu el-Assal, a Palestinian and the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem at the time, warned Tony Blair, "You will be responsible for emptying Iraq, the homeland of Abraham, of Christians." The bishop proved a prophet.

Of our Libyan intervention, one thing may be safely said, and another safely predicted. When he launched his strikes on the Libyan army and regime, Barack Obama did not think it through. And this nation is now likely to be drawn even deeper into that war.

On March 20, Pastor Terry Jones, who heads a congregation of 30 at his Dove World Outreach Center church in Gainesville, Fla., conducted a mock trial of the Quran "for crimes against humanity." Pronouncing Islam's sacred book guilty, Jones soaked a Quran in kerosene and set it ablaze in a portable fire pit. Few noticed. But Hamid Karzai did.

When Greek patriots sought America's assistance, Daniel Webster took up their cause but was admonished by John Randolph. Intervention would breach every "bulwark and barrier of the Constitution."

"This will not stand!" declared George H.W. Bush. He was speaking of Saddam Hussein's invasion, occupation and annexation of the emirate of Kuwait as his "19th province." Seven months later, the Iraqi army was fleeing up the "Highway of Death" back into a country devastated by five weeks of U.S. bombing. When Bush spoke, the world sat up and listened.

We can thank Providence that the earthquake was not 150 miles closer to Tokyo, else Japan's dead might number in the millions.

the "neo-isolationists" who opposed invading Iraq and a "long war" in Afghanistan were right, in Gates' eyes. Quite an admission from a defense secretary who presided over the surge in Iraq and the surge in Afghanistan.

George W. Bush must have been the despair of the history department of every school his daddy managed to get him into. Consider his latest excursion into the history of the republic, at Southern Methodist, where the Great Man's papers are to be housed.

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, especially today in the Maghreb and Middle East. For the ouster of Tunisia's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has sent shock waves from Rabat to Riyadh. Autocrats, emirs and kings have to be asking themselves: If rioters can bring down Ben Ali with his ruthless security forces, what prevents this from happening here?

"Conservative Tycoon ... Dies at 95," said the New York Times headline on New Year's Eve about the death of Roger Milliken. Clearly, the headline writer did not know the man.

With Christmas shoppers out in force and the stock market surging to a two-year high, talk is spreading that the long-awaited recovery is at hand. Perhaps. But gleaning the news from Europe and Asia as U.S. cities, states and the federal government sink into debt, it is difficult to believe a worldwide financial crisis that hammers governments, banks and bondholders alike can be long averted.

A Democratic Congress, discharged by the voters on Nov. 2, has as one of its last official acts, imposed its San Francisco values on the armed forces of the United States. "Don't ask, don't tell" is to be repealed. Open homosexuals are to be welcomed with open arms in all branches of the armed services. Let us hope this works out better for the Marine Corps than it did for the Catholic Church.

What in the name of Gilbert Stuart is going on at the National Portrait Gallery?

Economic nationalism is now resurgent across Europe. And it is hard to see how a transnational institution like the European Union, run by faceless bureaucrats, and the 16-nation eurozone it created long survive.

Before Republican senators vote down the strategic arms reduction treaty negotiated by the Obama administration, they should think long and hard about the consequences.

Missiles fired from the Chinese mainland could destroy five of the six major U.S. air bases in the Far East.

Sunday, on the eve of All Saints' Day, Nov. 1, 2010, the faithful gathered at the Assyrian Catholic Church of Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad. As Father Wassim Sabih finished the mass, eight al-Qaida stormed in, began shooting and forced him to the floor. As the priest pleaded that his parishioners be spared, they executed him and began their mission of mass murder.

Barack Obama's dream of being a transformational president who alters the course of his country died 48 hours ago. The message America sent Obama and the men and women America sent to Congress to replace his allies impel one to ask: Why would he want a second term?

Before the Tea Party philosophy is ever even tested in America, it will have succeeded, or it will have failed, in Great Britain. For in David Cameron the Brits have a prime minister who can fairly be described as a Tea Party Tory.

Is Europe's adventure in international living about to end? At Potsdam, Germany, this weekend, Chancellor Angela Merkel told the young conservatives of her Christian Democratic Union that Germany's attempt to create a multicultural society where people "live side by side and enjoy each other" has "failed, utterly failed."

What we have accepted today is a vast permanent underclass of scores of millions who cannot cope and must be carried by the rest of society—fed, clothed, housed, tutored, medicated at taxpayer's expense for their entire lives. We have a new division in America: those who pay a double fare, and those who forever ride free.

The Chinese have just made a serious strategic blunder. They dropped the mask and showed their scowling face to Asia, exposing how the Middle Kingdom intends to deal with smaller powers, now that she is the largest military and economic force in Asia and second largest on earth.

"Blacks for Gray, Whites for Fenty," ran the nuanced headline on page one of the Washington Examiner. The story told of how black Mayor Adrian Fenty, who got rave reviews for appointing Michelle Rhee to save District of Columbia schools, was crushed six to one in black wards east of the Anacostia River, as he rolled up margins of three to one in the white wards west of Rock Creek Park.