Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest. He lives in Washington DC
In 1981, when President Reagan lifted the grain embargo on the Soviet Union, Washington Post columnist George F. Will went on to complain that the Reagan administration ‘loved commerce more than it loathed communism’. Well, yes. American conservatives have, more often than not, put commercial interests before ideological ones. Sometimes the two even coincide. For all
On Wednesday John Kerry managed to attract more attention with what amounted to a declaration of failure than any success he has achieved during his tenure as Secretary of State. In his speech blasting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which came on the heels of US abstention on a United Nations resolution condemning settlements, Kerry
Former State Department official Eliot A. Cohen is a prominent neoconservative who has led the ‘Never Trump’ faction of the Republican party. After Trump was elected, he suggested that younger Republican national security wonks might consider working for him. But it didn’t take long for Cohen to rescind that advice: ‘After exchange [with] Trump transition team,
Once upon a time Republicans routinely accused Democrats of being soft on Russia. Irving Kristol, writing in Commentary in 1952, famously allowed that Joseph McCarthy was a ‘vulgar demagogue’ but emphasised that ‘there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American
Poor Donald Trump. Even Utah, which has voted for Republican presidential candidates with metronomic regularity since 1964 and which I’m visiting for a few days, looks like it’s about to turn its back on the New York tycoon. There are no ‘Make America Great’ or Trump signs in Salt Lake City, the citadel of the
Washington, DC A few weeks ago, I attended the 40th gala dinner of a Washington think tank called the Ethics and Public Policy Center at the St Regis Hotel, just down the street from the White House. William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard and unrepentant champion of the Iraq War, was the MC
The American election cycle is beginning to resemble the 1993 comedy Groundhog Day. In the film, you may recall, Bill Murray plays an egomaniacal Pittsburgh weatherman named Phil Connors who discovers that he’s stuck in a time loop in which the same day repeats itself over and over. He goes bonkers, driving a truck over
Washington, DC The American election cycle is beginning to resemble the 1993 comedy Groundhog Day. In the film, you may recall, Bill Murray plays an egomaniacal Pittsburgh weatherman named Phil Connors who discovers that he’s stuck in a time loop in which the same day repeats itself over and over. He goes bonkers, driving a
Washington DC So it’s come to this: the only thing that can save President Obama from his own complacent and lofty self-regard, not to mention his serial failures, are his enemies, and that is what it appears they are about to do. Even as his poll numbers sink to new lows that not even George
When an earthquake hit Washington DC last August, it seemed a freakish event. But in retrospect the damage caused to national symbols such as the Washington Monument seems to have been a portent of the literal collapse of America. The monument will be enshrouded in scaffolding until at least 2014. Even if the cenotaph were
Only a year ago the American right was in a state of cataleptic shock as the Democrats won the House of Representatives, the Senate and the presidency. Conservatism looked as though it was headed for the skids, while the left celebrated its startling comeback. No longer. A populist right-wing revolt against big-government liberalism has sent
