Free Republic

Scholar Gordan Chang warns that the United States must ultimately “disengage from China” on all fronts if it is to maintain its status as a global superpower or risk China’s massive potential to change the geopolitical structure of the world. Chang, who just returned from Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea, spoke on The Sara Carter Show where he described the current state of Beijing and the authoritarian government’s influence across the globe. “This is the Third Reich in the 21st century,” said Chang. China’s policy “is incompatibility with our system. We are unfortunately going to have to reverse course...

The four decades since 2016 have seen a breathtaking restoration of the Republic of the United States of America.  Looking back from 2056, the historians and pundits say it was inevitable. The United States had enormous energy resources, an educated and ethical workforce, a history of entrepreneurial spirit. The fruits of the digital industrial age, genome processing, and robotic development were on the edge of explosion. The resurgence back from the malaise and blame America thinking of the Obama administration was certain to happen, with a wealthy, prosperous, powerful and free America the obvious result. It wasn't that way....

BYRNE v. CLINTON FOUNDATION et al Plaintiff: GARY JOHN BYRNE Defendant: CLINTON FOUNDATION, CLINTON-GIUSTRA ENTERPRISE PARTNERSHIP, MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA, CORRECT THE RECORD, AMERICAN BRIDGE 21ST CENTURY, CITIZENS FOR RESPONSIBILITY AND ETHICS IN WASHINGTON, SHAREBLUE, DAVID BROCK, WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON, HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, GEORGE SOROS, JOHN PODESTA, JONATHAN WACKROW, JAN GILOOLY and CLINTON GLOBAL INITIATIVE

Rules of Engagement (ROE) is defined as a directive issued by a military authority specifying the circumstances and limitations under which forces will engage in combat with the enemy. In the history of warfare we have seen an incredible metamorphosis of the rules of engagement. Long ago, armies presented themselves upon the battlefield in open areas away from civilian populations. The fact that weapons were limited to that which was carried, sword and spear, meant that fighting the enemy meant close-quarter engagement. The rules then were quite simple: engage the enemy, defeat them, and pursue to bring about their ultimate...

One of the most common assumptions is that religiosity is linked to economic and technological underdevelopment. As a society gets more technologically and economically advanced, the thinking goes, religiosity naturally fades away and is replaced by a more secular worldview. Exhibit A is usually Western Europe, which grew more secular as it grew richer (and much, much more violent) across the 19th and 20th centuries. Exhibit B is the world's most religious continent — Africa — which happens to be its poorest. Under this view, the 21st century will be the century in which secularization spreads even further as the...

Chief Justice Roberts has long been troubled by the idea that courts might short-circuit a democratic debate over marriage equality by imposing a constitutional right to marry by judicial fiat. In his dissent from the Windsor case in 2013, he wrote that he was reluctant to “tar the political branches with the brush of bigotry” without convincing evidence that a law’s “principal purpose was to codify malice.” He might vote to uphold same-sex-marriage bans on the grounds that the people, not judges, should decide the future of marriage.

Here's a thought experiment: if the United States and China maintain their present fertility rate and educational systems through the end of the century, which country will have the stronger economy? This is not a forecast, to be sure, just a point of perspective at a distant horizon. The United States will have about one-third more university students than China if everything holds constant, that is, if 21% of Chinese and 38% of Americans of college age actually matriculate. The quality of Chinese university graduates, moreover, is questionable; according to a 2005 McKinsey study, only one in 10 of China's...

Everyone complains about health care, but the real problem is healthcare.  As two words, health care is a service offered by trained professionals to people known as patients.  As one word, healthcare means the system in which the professionals work and where patients receive care. The healthcare system is broken.  It doesn't work because healthcare still thinks it is in the 19th century, but we live in the 21st. In the 19th century, there was a direct relationship between the doctor and the patient.  The doctor delivered both the baby and the bill.  The patient received the new child...

What will the world look like at the end of this century?  I ask this in light of the emergence of Brazil and India, German dominance of the European Union, the rise of China, and the apparent decline of America. China and India each have about a billion people.  Together, they house at least one-third of the human race.  An example of India's presence on the world's stage is the Tata Group.  This is a conglomerate that owns, among other businesses, the London-based Tetley Tea company and the Bermuda-based Orient-Express Hotels.  Tata has unveiled a $2,500 car.  Politically and...

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama says a host of threats face the United States in a rapidly changing world, but that "this nation will maintain our military dominance." Speaking at the dedication of Abraham Lincoln Hall at the National Defense University, Obama said Thursday that the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks "signaled the new dangers of the 21st century." He also said "we're still at war with terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan who are plotting to do us harm."

WASHINGTON – The U.S. needs a new, modern arsenal of nuclear weapons to use as a deterrent to attacks from other nations for the remainder of the 21st century, the top military commander for strategic warfare said Tuesday. Air Force Gen. Kevin Chilton, head of the military's Strategic Command, said if the Pentagon develops an improved, more reliable nuclear weapon, the U.S. will be able to reduce the number of warheads it keeps on hand. “So long as there are other countries in the world that possess enough nuclear weapons to destroy the United States of America and our way...

Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has launched a mobile-to-mobile text-message campaign in an effort to reach more of America’s 236,000 cell phone users. Users who text the word "Join” to 77007 will receive regular updates about the Clinton campaign, which will "ask for voters’ input and offer a feature allowing supporters to surf Hillary’s Web site on their mobile phones,” according to a statement from her campaign. "By harnessing the power of text messaging, we can engage voters in the political process using the latest technology and provide personalized, local campaign updates to our supporters nationwide.” The text-message initiative is "a...

For a number of years now the European think tank world has been busy churning out report after report with ever more grandiose proposals for turning the European Union into a global superpower. One of the more provocative essays in this genre is titled ‘Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century', which was written by Mark Leonard of the London-based Centre for European Reform. Leonard's thesis is that Europe will dominate this century because it is based on a new understanding of power, which is embodied in the institutions and norms of the European Union. He argues that the economic,...

DAVOS, Switzerland – Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Thursday the world is facing a critical test as it seeks to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists, and that there will be no way “to put that genie back in the bottle” if it fails. Chertoff told a high-level panel on terrorism at the World Economic Forum that the century will only get more dangerous as technology improves, and that global leaders must make some hard decisions now if they want to avert catastrophe. “What we face in the 21st century is the ability of even a...

In America Alone, Mark Steyn presents us with a doomsday scenario backed by impeccable science and research, and he does it in such a clever manner that we are actually amused as we read of the impending demise of Europe-as-we-knew-it, Japan, and Canada. Why are they failing? Procreation, or more pointedly, the lack thereof. Populations in Russia, Italy, and the Low Countries may have already passed the point of no return. Canada is on the borderline. America, on the other hand, appears to have a sustainable reproductive level, a fact that ought to make some Canucks wish that General Hull...

Ideas can be dangerous. I have learnt that the hard way. But I know that when it comes to freedom and human rights these precious ideas, so valued in the West, are worth fighting for. As a young Muslim woman, born in Somalia, I abandoned my family to avoid an arranged marriage to a distant cousin and fled to Holland. I was just 23 and I had no idea back then that my refusal to submit to a traditional Muslim woman’s life would come to dominate my whole career. So for me, the debate that is raging about the veil,...

I was on C-SPAN the other morning, and a lady called in to complain that ''you are making my blood pressure rise.'' Usual reason. The host, Paul Orgel, had asked me what I thought of President Bush and I replied that, whatever my differences with him on this or that, I thought he was one of the most farsighted politicians in Washington. That's to say, he's looking down the line to a world in which a radicalized Islam has exported its pathologies to every corner on Earth, Iran and like-minded states have applied nuclear blackmail to any parties within range,...

It's the end of the world!! Head for the hills!!! No, wait. Don't head for the hills—they're full of Islamist terrorist camps. Let me put it in a slightly bigger nutshell: much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands—probably—just as in Istanbul there's still a building known as Hagia Sophia, or St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's...

[The most thought-provoking sentence is emphasized with bold text.] Implementing a plan to keep rising carbon dioxide levels from reaching potentially dangerous levels could cost less than 1 percent of gross world product as of 2050, a cost that is well within reach of developed and developing nations alike. However, without simultaneous progress in the way energy is found, transformed, transported and used, the world is in danger of facing a severe energy crisis sometime within the next century.Those are the conclusions of a report by Klaus S. Lackner and Jeffrey D. Sachs of The Earth Institute that appears in...

On leaving a theater, have you ever been tempted to yell at the other moviegoers, "Hey, guys: Do ya get it? Do you know what this is about?" That's what I wanted to do when the lights came up and the credits started to roll for Michael Bay's just-released sci-fi block-buster "The Island." "Cloning! Embryonic stem cell research! Abortion! Euthanasia!" I wanted to shout. Still, "The Island's" pro-life message is unmistakable. Liberal critics are grumbling about it. Writing in the Hollywood Reporter, Kirk Honeycutt complains that "These filmmakers have, perhaps unwittingly, delivered a film certain to give succor to the...