The US used to produce experts on Soviet and Russian affairs like Jack Matlock. Today we get the likes of Michael McFaul. The decline of popular interest in Russian-area studies, combined with intellectual laziness on the part of the average US citizen, is to blame. On February 21, Russia’s President Vladmir Putin gave what will most likely go down in history as one of the most important speeches in modern history. It was a brutally honest example of how current events are shaped by the forces...

"Bad" Vlad Putin only "took over" part of Ukraine because of President Biden's weakness. So says many in the US right wing. A "real man" president would have imposed costs so prohibitive that Putin would never have dreamed of recognizing what has been de facto reality since 2014: that the Russian-speaking part of Ukraine wants no part of the US-installed government in Kiev.So goes the thinking of the armchair right-wingers. And I don't even mean neocons: plenty of those now scoring body blows...

Foreign policy hawks in the United States habitually equate a noncommunist Russia with the totalitarian Soviet Union. An especially graphic example is a recent article in 19FortyFive by Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. The title, "Russia Was a Rogue State Long before Ukraine and Georgia," accurately conveys the extent of Rubin’s Russophobia. Predictably, he blames Moscow entirely for the 2008 Georgia war, even though a European Union...

One can frequently disagree with government policies without necessarily regarding them with disgust, but the Joe Biden Administration has turned that corner, first with its senseless promotion of a new Cold War that could turn hot with Russia and, more recently, with its actions undertaken to undermine and punish Afghanistan. The fact that the White House wraps itself in the sanctimonious, self-righteous twaddle that is so much the hallmark of the political left is bad enough, but when the...

Well you'll be shocked to learn that, while the Ukraine invasion we've been told for weeks was happening any day now still has not occurred, the US and UK have declared that Russia attacked Ukraine in an invisible and unverifiable way for which the evidence is secret. "The White House blamed Russia on Friday for this week’s cyberattacks targeting Ukraine’s defense ministry and major banks and warned of the potential for more significant disruptions in the days ahead," AP reports. "Anne...

According to numbers released by the US government, consumer prices have increased by 7.5 percent in the past year, the steepest increase since 1982. The actual price increases are even worse than the government numbers suggest, given that the “official” statistics are manipulated to understate the real rate of price increases. According to John Williams of ShadowStats, prices have actually increased by around 15 percent over the past year.The fact that prices remain at historically high...

On President’s Day weekend, let us commemorate the record of the best president in US history: John Tyler. A random poll of Americans would draw mostly puzzled looks at the name, but according to Independent Institute Senior Fellow Ivan Eland, in his 2009 ranking of the presidents, Recarving Rushmore, this 10th US president has the strongest record upholding Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty. On the prosperity front, Tyler vetoed both the attempt to revive the national bank, and a bill to raise...

Amid soaring tensions with Russia, the United States is spending a fortune on foreign interference campaigns in Ukraine. Washington’s regime-change arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), has spent $22.4 million on operations inside the country since 2014, when democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown and replaced by a successor government handpicked by the US Those operations included propping up and training pro-Western political parties, funding pliant...

It has become something of a habit in both the American and Canadian media to insist that the Canadian trucker protest against vaccine mandates is an "illegal protest." They are "illegal border protests," one American news affiliate proclaims. Canada's National Post dutifully refers to the protests in its headlines as illegal acts. The term "illegal" has been used a multitude of times by Liberal Party politicians in the House of Commons. The premier of Ontario—one of Canada's most hysterical...

Is it better to win a war without firing a shot, or rather, convince people that you stopped a “war” that never had a chance of actually starting?  With poll numbers continuing to tank, and midterm elections right around the corner, the Biden Administration desperately needs a win. It appears they’re enacting a bold strategy that involves first manifesting a crisis and then proceeding to take credit for solving the non-existent crisis they created. For weeks, the White House has been telling...

After the US Supreme Court last month froze the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for large private employers, some companies — including Boeing, General Electric and Starbucks — dropped plans to implement the mandate. Others, based on guidance issued in 2020 by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, left the mandates in place. Most of the large employers that opted to mandate COVID vaccines for their employees, even though the Supreme Court ruled they didn’t have to, have...

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”— George Orwell The US government, which speaks in a language of force, is afraid of its citizenry. What we are dealing with is a government so power-hungry, paranoid and afraid of losing its stranglehold on power that it is conspiring to wage war on anyone who dares to challenge its authority. All of us are in danger. In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,”...