Articles

Do previous epidemics help us to prepare for the future? These various historical incidents are highly instructive when we consider the key difference between, for example, the Plague which struck in the mid-14th century or cholera outbreak of the 19th century and COVID-19. What makes the latter distinct is that, despite intensive media reporting, mortality…

This article was written by IWP alumna Patricia Schouker.  Although Russia’s foreign policy is fundamentally reactive in nature, Moscow’s approach to the Arctic is pro-active. While the COVID-19 pandemic has of late garnered most of the world’s attention, in the Far North, Russia has one ambition: “to reconquer the Arctic.” The Arctic is not the…

Israel’s new so-called unity government is an obscenely expensive monster inadequate to deal with the challenges it faces. Well, it appears that Israel will have a government finally after months and months of shoddy political maneuvering. That is the good news–all of it. The bad news is that this “coalition” government is a hunchbacked, three-legged…

Thomas Flichy de La Neuville is a Research Professor at IWP and a Doctor of Research (with French Agrégation qualification) in History and Geopolitics Chair at the Rennes School of Business. The art of diplomacy is founded on ambiguity.[1] Foreign policy is rarely enacted singlehandedly. Duets are infinitely more effective. As such, an official representative…

An abbreviated version of this article was published by American Thinker. Nationalism is what made us great, argues Rich Lowry in The Case for Nationalism: How It Made Us Powerful, United, and Free (New York: Broadside Books/HarperCollins Publishers, 2019). Nationalism tends to sport its particular flavor depending on who champions and shapes it.  In our…

Rogue states are taking advantage of the American preoccupation with the COVID-19 pandemic. North Korea may test another long-range missile according to the head of U.S. Northern Command, Gen. Terrence O’Shaughnessy. He warned Congress in March that the North Korean regime is still a serious threat and is improving its missile program. And last week, Iran’s Revolutionary…

The coronavirus crisis highlights the resilience problem of civilian nuclear power plants. The coronavirus crisis has revealed a significant Achilles’ heel in civilian nuclear power: The plants can’t operate if their relatively few highly skilled operators get sick or become contagious and have to be quarantined, a situation that, according to news reports, some plants are…

Plans for a new Baltic–Black Sea waterway, passing through Ukraine, Belarus and Poland, have the potential to revolutionize the geopolitics of Europe’s East as well as exacerbate East-West tensions (see EDM, February 18). The European Union has labeled the project “E40,” and the United States has signaled its support. And were the E40 waterway to be…

There are two key resources we can use: reading and travel. We still need to be able to distinguish those few books which truly speak to us from the masses which do not. A university’s heart is therefore its library. If it were to be emptied or neglected, this would indicate that something had gone…

In his interwar work Les regards sur le monde actuel (1962), Paul Valéry intuits that civilization would one day enter a new era following the triumph of technology over contemplation. For Valéry (who worked as a clerk in the French War Ministry), an intelligence-disrupting regime had already been established by fraudulent intellectuals who disconnected thought…