This article was originally posted at Providence. The deadly attack by the Islamic State on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris last January was an omen of things to come: a growing campaign against freedom of the press, much of it driven by religious extremism. The result, according to recent reports, is that media freedom […]

This article was originally posted at Providence. “Donald Trump’s ideas aren’t just different,” Hillary Clinton told an audience in San Diego yesterday. “They are dangerously incoherent.” There are several truths, bitter and profound, about Clinton’s speech in which she excoriated Trump for his foreign policy views. Taken together, they point to an almost unprecedented crisis in […]

This article was originally posted at Providence. President Obama’s announcement yesterday lifting the decades-old ban on weapons sales to Vietnam—despite the nation’s appalling human-rights record—fits a desultory pattern of the White House reinforcing bad behavior. Worse still, the rueful lessons of the Vietnam War, especially their roots in the hubris of modern liberalism, remain largely forgotten. […]

This article was originally posted at Providence. Last week’s startling confession by White House operative Ben Rhodes—that the Obama administration lied to the American people about its dealings with Iran to secure a nuclear agreement—not only confirms the perception of a mendacious and arrogant presidency. It exposes a feverish and even delusional frame of mind: an […]

This article was originally posted at Providence. President Obama’s explanation for removing a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office—he wanted to make room for a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr.—probably won’t satisfy his conservative critics. For years they’ve interpreted Churchill’s disappearance as a snub rooted in the president’s anti-colonial sentiments. “I love Winston […]

This article was originally posted at Providence. One of Barack Obama’s proudest moments as president, by his own description, was his 2013 decision to repudiate his “red line” warning to Syria’s Bashar al Assad: the threat of U.S. military force to punish the regime for using chemical weapons against its own people. Instead, Mr. Assad, after […]

This article was originally posted at Providence. Reports of murderous assaults on Christians in Pakistan—like the Easter massacre last Sunday in Lahore—have focused on the Pakistani government’s double-dealing with the Taliban, or its intelligence failures, or the supposed blowback effects of U.S. drone attacks on terrorist cells in Pakistan. Most of this analysis evades the deepest […]

This article was originally posted at National Review. In the many sermons preached from church pulpits this Sunday, expect lots of talk about the “true meaning” of Easter. One theme, however — perhaps the most urgently needed message of our time — will almost certainly be neglected. Whether the Easter story of death and resurrection is […]

This article was originally posted at Providence. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg begins his roughly 19,000-word examination of Barack Obama’s foreign policy by recounting the moment, on August 30, 2013, when the president reversed himself on his pledge to punish Syria’s Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons against his own people. Mr. Goldberg posits two contrasting judgments of […]

This article was originally posted at Providence. Testifying before Congress last week, Secretary of State John Kerry defended his role in brokering a cease fire in the Syrian civil war—a temporary “cessation of hostilities” that no one expects to produce a just outcome for the Syrian people. “If it doesn’t work, the potential is there that […]