Articles

Shortly before midnight on December 12, 1941, not yet a week since the surprise Japanese attack on America’s naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Judge Mortimer W. Byers asked jury foreman, Edward Logan, to rise and read the verdict. Only a day before, in Berlin’s Reichstag, Adolf Hitler had announced to the world that Germany…

Leaders who fail in their global missions are normally dismissed by history. What do we remember about Napoleon? Waterloo. Wilsonianism Woodrow Wilson, another case in point, is not remembered for his efforts to re-make the world but by his failure to do so. The League of Nations and Wilson’s crusade to “make the world safe…

Douglas Smith’s magisterial Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016) is a story of mass hysteria that resulted in a murder most foul. The object of the hysteria was Grigori Rasputin, hypnotically spiritual, if increasingly debauched, Siberian peasant, who weaseled his way into the confidence of…

With the West’s acquiescence, Soviet propaganda continues to dominate the official Russian line on World War II. To liberate means to make free. In the Second World War, Stalin no more liberated anyone than Hitler did. But Russian President Vladimir Putin refuses to acknowledge this verity. The lord of the Kremlin periodically regurgitates Soviet propaganda…

A shorter version of this article was published in The American Thinker.  James Verini, They Will Have to Die Now: Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019), has gifted us with gruelingly realistic war vignettes of the Islamic State from Iraq’s “second or third most populous city (depending…

This article was written by former IWP Navy Fellow LTJG Joshua Fiveson and published by the Columbia Journal of International Affairs. Robots have long presented a threat to some aspect of the human experience.  What began with concern over the labor market slowly evolved into a full-blown existential debate over the future of mankind.  But lost somewhere in…

On our first day of practice, the football coach uttered these memorable words to his new team: “Remember men, there’s no ‘I’ in team.” Such an admonition has remained a mainstay of human activity, sports included, since the dawn of time. The realization that human progress depends upon “teamwork” instead of “the individual” has descended…

Great Britain’s exit from the European Union illustrates a half-forgotten scenario entitled “Islands” envisaged by the National Intelligence Council in 2017. Two years ago, this center for strategic thinking predicted that the world would enter a period of economic slow-down, generating resistance to globalization. According to the American forecasters, high technology would become more widespread,…

The United States may be the only country on earth where most of its citizens represent themselves by halves. Hyphenated Americans appear to be the whole, with almost all of them identified first by their ancestry, and second by their citizenship. Not only does this mock the term “united,” but it serves also to question…

President Trump boasted about the military in his State of the Union address Wednesday night. Trump is right that the military has received significant investments during his tenure. But recent events also reveal where there are vulnerabilities. Iran’s missile attack against bases in Iraq last month wreaked havoc, although mercifully not resulting in the deaths…