Enjoying the view from Limbo
2024 U.S. Election / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 24, 2023
In 2012, Barack Obama directly told Dmitry Medvedev to beg the latter’s leash-holder, “Vladimir,” to be patient until after Obama’s upcoming “last election,” at which time he, Obama, “would have more flexibility” with regard to accommodating Putin’s wishes on (Russian) defense matters. In 2014, Putin occupied Crimea, a direct and overt violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty, in response to which Obama did exactly nothing....
During the acknowledged period of the Cold War (which never really ended), the nuclear risk, though serious, was always somewhat mitigated by the fact that the Soviet Union’s goals and strategies were systemic, rather than personal. That is, the Cold War was waged not against one unstable individual who, if feeling threatened — including from within his own country — might become rabid...
Vladimir Putin appears to be on the verge of launching a full-on military assault against a democratic ally of the Western democracies, a country that was most infamously decimated by the Soviet tyranny under which Putin did his dictator training course, and the renewal of which was one of the West’s great boasts at the supposed “end” of the Cold War. In response...
I have always scoffed, publicly and privately, at the fanciful notion that the United States “won the Cold War.” No. Ronald Reagan won a battle in that war, but by no means the final battle. Since Reagan’s achievement, the U.S., along with the West in general, has left Russia to freely rearm and develop its strategy for long-term renewal. We are seeing the...
The current rivalry between the United States and China has much less in common with the Cold War than with the old Russia-China tensions. For the Cold War was, as common parlance would have it, “a clash of ideologies,” whereas today’s semi-hostile relations between the U.S. and China are really just a turf war between ideological allies whose respective self-interested ambitions have inevitably...
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 1, 2016 · Last modified October 2, 2016
This is the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of How Democracies Perish, an analysis of the spread of world communism by Jean-François Revel, one of freedom’s most serious French defenders since Tocqueville. At the heart of this work, Revel details “The Tools of Communist Expansion,” among which the most relevant for understanding our current situation comes in Chapter 16, “Ideological Warfare and Disinformation.”...
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