This article was originally posted at Providence. Although the leading Republican presidential candidates offer a sometimes vague and muddled mélange of views about American foreign policy, doubts about the Democratic Party’s ability to navigate the nation in a complex and dangerous world are legion. Skepticism is in order: think of Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War, […]

This article was originally posted at Providence. The butchery and barbarism committed under the banner of Islam—by groups such as the Islamic State, Boko Haram, and al-Shabaab—is finally generating a little soul-searching in the Muslim world. What faithful Muslims will ultimately discover from a spiritual inventory, though, remains to be seen. Last month, for example, about […]

This article was originally posted at CapX. For those still trying understand the political rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, consider an insight from Eric Fromm’s 1941 book, Escape from Freedom that a sense of powerlessness created a willingness among ordinary people to surrender personal responsibility in order to regain a sense of control over […]

This article was originally posted at Providence. Whatever the actual “State of the Union,” as proclaimed by Franklin Roosevelt in his January 3, 1936 address to Congress, the president’s state of mind was a perplexing mix of admission, obfuscation, and denial. If President Obama’s speechwriters are casting about for models of statecraft in the age of […]

This article was originally posted at Providence. Every once in a while the left-wing elites at The New York Times experience a spasm of moral clarity. “North Korea stains the record of President Obama, who took office promising to make ridding the world of nuclear weapons a priority,” its editors sheepishly admitted this week, following North […]

This article was originally posted at Providence. Seventy-five years ago, while America slept, Western Civilization was fighting for its life. In September of 1940, after occupying and enslaving most of continental Europe in less than a year, Hitler’s Germany turned its gaze north, across the English Channel. Beginning on September 7, the Luftwaffe unleashed a storm […]

This article was originally posted at Providence. In November 2013, tens of thousands of Ukrainians filled the central square of Kiev to protest President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to reject an “association agreement” with the European Union. Waving European Union flags, the crowds chanted slogans demanding to be part of the West. As Liudmyla Babych, a saleswoman […]

This article was originally posted at National Review. How the refugees of the Great War informed the works of two great Christian writers. Thomas Hardy, in “Poems of War and Patriotism,” described an appalling refugee crisis in the heart of Europe a century ago. They were “pale and full of fear,” and came by the thousands […]

This article was originally posted at MetroFocus. Authors J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis share the distinction of being two of the most important writers of the twentieth century, but they were also close friends, bonded by their shared experiences of the First World War and its aftermath. In his book, A Hobbit, A Wardrobe and a […]

This article was originally posted at Providence. Perhaps like no other Republican presidential candidate, Senator Ted Cruz exemplifies the nation’s conflicted conscience over the direction of U.S. foreign policy in the age of terror. Should the United States promote democracy in the Middle East, or should we learn to live with Arab dictatorships, even as we […]