This article was originally posted at National Review. President Donald Trump’s decision last week to order airstrikes to punish Syria for a chemical-weapons attack that killed and injured scores of civilians has exposed conservatism’s intellectual confusion about U.S. foreign policy. Perhaps the most troubling thing about this debate is the deficit of historical perspective – a […]

This article was originally posted at Providence. By the spring of 1917, the most advanced nations on earth had spent nearly three agonizing years destroying themselves in a frenzy of blood-letting never seen within the boundaries of Europe. The United States watched, with bewilderment and anxiety, as a “Great War” among the European states broke out […]

This article was originally posted at The Weekly Standard. A new one-man play about one man’s spiritual pilgrimage, C.S. Lewis on Stage: The Most Reluctant Convert, opens with a riff against a cruel, indifferent, and seemingly meaningless universe reminiscent of a Woody Allen monologue. “And what is ‘life’?” the protagonist asks in defending his youthful atheism. […]

This article was originally posted at Providence. In his address to Congress this week, President Trump noticeably declined to mention his Byzantine relationship with Russia. The president defends his friendly posture toward Russia—including his campaign’s high-level contacts with Moscow, his praise of Vladimir Putin, and his selection of a Secretary of State with close business ties […]

This article was originally posted at Providence. Warning about a rising tide of xenophobia, the American Civil Liberties Union assailed the White House’s most recent executive order as “the greatest deprivation of civil liberties in this country since slavery.” The administration that the ACLU had in its sights, however, was not that of Donald J. Trump. […]

Modern Islam will need a Locke, or someone like him, in its own hour of crisis.

This article was originally posted at The Times. The presidency of Donald Trump, barely twenty-four hours old, has left many Muslims in the United States anxious about their futures. Although Trump has backed off his campaign pledge to ban Muslim immigration outright, talk of a Muslim “registry” persists. Some members of his cabinet, not to mention […]

I was interviewed by the BBC about how a Trump presidency might stack up to that of Dwight D. Eisenhower—a leader with no prior political experience, but arguably one of the best prepared men imaginable to assume the presidency in a time of crisis.                  

This article was originally posted at Providence. Perhaps the best-known memoir of post-war disillusionment is the 1929 book Goodbye to All That. In it, poet Robert Graves laid bare the confusion, cynicism, and loss of innocence brought on by the mechanized slaughter of the First World War. “Pessimism made everyone superstitious,” Graves wrote, “and I found […]

The peaceful disintegration of the Soviet Union twenty-five years ago, on December 26, 1991, astonished nearly everyone in the democratic West.