Of course, it’s customary at year’s end to share our favorite news items from the year past. As someone who teaches and writes about history, I tend to focus on historical things I fear are lost to American education. So, my enduring “news item†of 2010 falls under the category of historical outrage, though...
The people of Poland got an early Christmas present this year. It’s bittersweet but long awaited, and indeed a gift of sortsâ€â€and from an unlikely source: Russia. In Moscow, the State Duma, Russia’s legislature, passed a statement conceding Soviet responsibility for the Katyn Woods massacre, one of the 20th century’s worst war crimes. The...
It was 35 years ago this summer that the conservative movement found itself in a defining moral struggle not with the liberal Left but with the establishment wing of the Republican Party. Here was the context: Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn had published his majestic Gulag Archipelago, blowing the whistle on the brutality of the...
Like Obama, Jimmy Carter has always been embarrassed by a vibrant and strong America. Consequently, as its leader he could never muster the inner strength to bear a robust national character in front of the rest of the world. Eventually, his own weakness was perceived as America’s weakness.
Sadly, few Americans can even name any of the courageous dozen of their countrymen who have walked on another world.
The Moscow trip was not a favorable photo-op as it turned out, with Putin doing his best to appear nonplussed, and the meetings seemed to have accomplished nothing of substance. What was the point?
For giant corporations such as Ikea, size means that the price extracted for doing business becomes an impossible number to cap in Russia.
Russia has rejected the latest proposal from the United States on missile defense aimed at easing Russian concerns over the deployment of American MIM-104 Patriot anti-ballistic missiles in European countries near Russia. This is according to reports by ITAR-Tass, RIA Novosti and Interfax, all of which cited an unnamed Kremlin official as saying that...
On Saturday, twenty people were killed and twenty-one injured by the fire fighting system aboard a submarine of the Russian Pacific Fleet. Further details about the incident were confirmed by Russian officials today, as a formal investigation continued. The incident occurred aboard K-152 Nerpa, a newly built Akula class nuclear submarine, during sea trials...
Now that we know who will lead our nation beginning in January 2009, it’s time to evaluate the problems President Barack Hussein Obama will face in the early days of his presidency. While the Democrat Party hacks, the news media and the bureaucrats concentrated on the economy and the selfishness of an increasing number...
Ever since America gained Georgia via the Rose Revolution in 2003, and then cemented her influence in parts of Ukraine through the Orange Revolution in 2004, Russia’s antagonism towards American influence in the post-soviet space has grown immensely. The conflagration between the two erstwhile adversaries is greatest over NATO’s attempts to include Georgia and...
Trading on Russia’s major stock markets has been suspended for a second consecutive day due to the ongoing turmoil in the financial markets around the world. The suspension took place due to an order of the Russian government’s Federal Service for the Financial Markets, which demanded the suspension. “It took too long for the...
The International Monetary Fund and the European Union approved aid packages to help Georgia recover from its conflict with Russia, which occurred in early August. The IMF approved a $750 million loan, which will allow Georgia to rebuild its currency reserves. The European Union also approved an aid package of €500 million in aid...
A Defense Department task force has recommended the Air Force Space Command be re-designated as Air Force Strategic Command and be home to the service’s nuclear mission. Former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger briefed the press on the task force’s conclusions during a Pentagon news conference today, while DOD official Jim Garamone briefed Internet Journalists...
As the parliament of Georgia voted to approve closing the nation’s embassy in Moscow and severing diplomatic ties with Russia, officials in the breakaway territory of South Ossetia are stating that their ultimate goal is not independence, but to be absorbed into Russia. Znaur Gassiyev, the speaker in the parliament of South Ossetia, said...
Russian President Dimitri Medvedev has floated a not-so-subtle warning of Russia and the West descending into a new “Cold War,†the blame for which he places, in traditional Russian fashion, squarely on America. As a follow up, Vladimir Putin has since hinted at the possibility of a direct conflict between Russian and American naval...
Georgij Chaindrawa, a former minister of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s government, who was in charge of dealing with the conflicts with Abkhazia and South Ossetia until 2006, has accused Saakashvili of undemocratic behavior and war mongering. In an interview with the German news magazine Der Spiegel, Georgij Chaindrawa accuses the United States administration of...
Influencing, countering and ultimately defeating regional threat networks in the greater Middle East will require a “whole-of-many-nations’-governments approach,†a US commander said during a conference call yesterday with bloggers and online journalists. Faced with threats from Al-Qaeda and similar groups, as well as a nonspecific “malign Iranian influence,†US and allied strategic planners are...
Talk, they say, is cheap. And generally worth no more than it costs, when confronting international military aggression. Senator Obama’s eagerness for face-to-face meetings with foreign dictators, without preconditions, echoes Senator John Kerry’s “sensitive” foreign policy enunciated in the 2004 presidential election campaign: Last Thursday, Kerry told minority journalists at the Unity 2004 conference...
Russia’s invasion of the sovereign nation of Georgia has pushed major news stories off the front-pages of newspapers and news magazines, and usually is the lead story on broadcast news shows. The images of Russian tanks pouring into Georgia is a reminder that Putin’s Russia is not to be ignored by US officials. During...
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