Free Republic

President Trump shocked the world Thursday night when it was announced that he planned to sit down with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in the coming months. The political world was so overwhelmed by the news that even the journalists at CNN were more or less optimistic. Yet over at MSNBC, host Rachel Maddow was anything but enthused by the idea as she spewed skepticism and threw shade at the commander-in-chief for excepting North Korea’s offer. Towards the beginning of her bitter rant, Maddow seemed to question the President’s intelligence and/or knowledge of history for taking the meeting: You might...

It's past time the United States did some soul-searching and accept responsibility for exacerbating an unwinnable war in Afghanistan. This will require a rethink of Washington's current handling of Afghanistan and indeed its entire view of the region. Steve Coll recently made a cogent argument in the New York Times that the U.S. should seriously engage with China and other regional powers. However, this is impossible so long as Washington remains convinced that Pakistan alone is the primary impediment to peace rather than its own mistakes... Both Islamabad and Washington compete to wear the cloak of victimhood. Pakistan remains in...

In a long, rambling February 20, 2018, speech before the UN Security Council, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas fed fables to his audience — and continued to attack Israel’s legitimacy. The speech marked the third time in two months that Abbas has publicly distorted history, and shifted blame for the lack of a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And once again, Abbas had a key ally: An uncritical press, seemingly determined to present the Palestinian leader in the best possible light. In his opening remarks before the Security Council, Abbas claimed that Palestinians “are the descendants of the Canaanites...

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin warned that if Senator Barack Obama were elected president, his “indecision” and “moral equivalence” may encourage Russia’s Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine. Palin said then: After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama’s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next. For those comments, she was mocked by the high-brow Foreign Policy magazine and its editor Blake Hounshell, who now is one of the editors of Politico magazine. Hounshell wrote then that Palin’s comments were “strange” and...

Dutch Foreign Minister Halbe Zijlstra said for years that, when he was working for oil company Shell in 2006, he attended a meeting in Russia with President Vladimir Putin. Putin, Zijlstra explained on several occasions, said he aimed to restore "Greater Russia" in its full glory. Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic states were all part of this "Greater Russia." On Monday, we found out that Zijlstra wasn't in any meetings with Putin back in 2006. He admitted this to Dutch daily the Volkskrant after having repeated the story for years, including at his political party's congress back in 2016. [VIDEO]...

The 2018 Winter Olympics were in full swing and Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and head of their Propaganda and Agitation Department, had bizarrely become a liberal media darling. Despite the fact her job entailed censorship and glorifying public executions, numerous outlets had touted her for “stealing the show,” winning “diplomatic gold,” being the “Ivanka Trump of North Korea,” and hyping the extremely creepy North Korean cheerleading corp. CNN, who has a history of climbing into bed with murderous regimes (Iraq and Saddam Hussein) to stay relevant, was one of the more notable...

If Turkey is not bluffing, U.S. troops in Manbij, Syria, could be under fire by week's end, and NATO engulfed in the worst crisis in its history. Turkish President Erdogan said Friday his troops will cleanse Manbij of Kurdish fighters, alongside whom U.S. troops are embedded. Erdogan's foreign minister demanded concrete steps by the U.S. to end its support of the Kurds, who control the Syrian border with Turkey east of the Euphrates, all the way to Iraq. If the Turks attack Manbij, the U.S. will face a choice: Stand by our Kurdish allies and resist the Turks, or abandon...

Recently, I was speaking with a friend of mine, a committed liberal and an equally committed member of the anti-Trump camp. Despising President Donald Trump is almost a default position in my Chicago-area community; however, my liberal friend has always impressed me as reasonable and well informed. Hence my particular consternation when he, in a most matter-of-fact way, said President Trump is costing us friends and influence around the world, as if it were an accepted truth. This was more annoying than surprising, because ever since Donald Trump took office, the mainstream media and their political allies have been working...

Despite the “rise and fall of the unipolar concert,” China and Russia’s balancing strategies have backfired: they are not leading to multipolarity, but are actually reinforcing unipolarity. The reason is that China and Russia’s balancing strategies have focused on regional “revisionism,” which has provoked powerful responses in East Asia and Europe to contain them. Russia’s balancing strategy has to a large extent proven to be counter-productive. Instead of preventing the expansion of NATO through a “divide and conquer” strategy, or driving a diplomatic wedge between the United States and Europe, Russian revisionism has united NATO...Perhaps most illustrative of all, a...

ABC Clinton lackey George Stephanopoulos stepped up the liberal media’s condemnation of President Trump during Sunday’s This Week by heinously exploiting the heroic death of a U.S. soldier to take a snide shot at the President for his recent immigration comments. As he was wrapping up the show, Stephanopoulos drew attention to the death of Private Emmanuel Mensah. Private Mensah was an immigrant from Ghana who sacrificed himself to save several others from a fire that was consuming the apartment building he was staying at with family while he was on leave. Stephanopoulos Exploits Death of US Soldier to Take a...

President Trump set off another Twitter firestorm last week when he hinted that he may be considering cutting off hundreds of millions of dollars in annual U.S. aid to the Palestinians. snip In the meantime, most other "refugees" the world over have long ago moved on. snip Trump may be rash and unfamiliar with the stagnant Middle East peace process, but his political instincts are probably correct. Polls show that less than 20 percent of Americans support the Palestinian cause. Many U.S. citizens are tired of subsidizing those who claim that they do not like their benefactors in the United...

If you haven’t yet realized it, President Trump has no trouble defying the conventions, norms and policies established by the previous forty-four presidents. According to John F. Kelly, the White House Chief of Staff, the president often meets with aides to discuss policy or prepare for a speech. He may ask about the pros and cons of a given approach, its possible impact, or the best way to frame his case. But according to Kelly, there is one thing he almost never does, “He very seldom asks how other presidents did this.” One such decision was President Trump’s announcement to...

There could be no greater contrast in leadership on the world stage and in interpreting reality than President Obama’s “lead from behind” model in Iran versus President Trump’s “lead from the front” model. When the Iranian people demonstrated against the nation’s dictatorship in 2009, President Obama was weak and quiet. He was so interested in getting a nuclear arms deal with the dictatorship that he did not want to irritate Iran’s leaders In all fairness, the Obama administration was an accurate reflection of the dominant academic elite theory of the world. In the view of the left, appeasement is always...

The anti-government protests targeting government and religious leaders sweeping across Iran took a bloody turn Sunday as overnight reports surfaces of two protestors being killed at the hands of the corrupt government. Disgustingly, the deaths didn’t trigger much air on the three major American networks. ABC’s Good Morning America had a blackout of the deaths and protests all together while NBC only found 24 seconds for them. CBS finally discovered the protests, as they continued into their fourth day, dedicating a meager 16 seconds. Instead of allowing serious time for the brutal murders of Iranian civilians and the protests, whose...

After CBS initially ignored the Iranian people’s uprising against their oppressors from Thursday to Saturday, and then downplayed the murder of two protesters and shootings of others earlier on Sunday, White House Correspondent Major Garrett finally dedicated some sort of significant time to the subject (two minutes 31 seconds) for the network when he was filling in on Face The Nation. Unfortunately, he only brushed over the details and questioned if President Trump should be speaking out in support of the people fighting for freedom. Garrett began the show with an interview with Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and before getting...

2017 Was the Year I Learned About My White Privilege I used to be a smart-alecky conservative who scoffed at “political correctness.” The Trump era has opened my eyes. In college — this was in the late 1980s and early 1990s at the University of California, Berkeley — I used to be one of those smart-alecky young conservatives who would scoff at the notion of “white male privilege” and claim that anyone propagating such concepts was guilty of “political correctness.” As a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union, I felt it was ridiculous to expect me to atone for the...

NBC and MSNBC have been on a crusade during the Christmas season to smear and slam the United States at every opportunity because of the Trump administration’s new direction in dealing with the inept United Nations. During Tuesday’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, fill-in host Ayman Mohyeldin and former Obama-era Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Evelyn Farkas were worried that the U.S. negotiated spending cut was politically motivated and that the administration’s attitude towards the U.N. could harm the U.N. mission of preventing “global war.” After introducing Farkas, Mohyeldin downplayed the U.N.’s wastefulness by describing it as a “somewhat a bloated bureaucracy.”...

Nearly 30 years ago, the people of Eastern Europe were freed from the yoke of communism. Their liberation is a reminder that the Cold War didn’t just end -- it was won. And it was won because the ideas espoused by leaders such as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II were far stronger than any army the Soviet Union could ever field. But eternal vigilance, as the saying goes, is the price of liberty. Freedom that is won can, through neglect, become freedom lost. Which is why, since the lifting of the Iron Curtain, America has...

Now that the National Security Strategy has been released, the American public can get a closer look at what the Trump administration considers important for foreign policyThe Trump administration released its National Security Strategy (NSS) yesterday to a media and foreign policy establishment that waited with bated breath. Everyone has something to say about it, and criticisms abound. Yet there’s no doubt the NSS got one thing right: China and Russia are indeed America’s major national security threats.Congress requires the White House to release a National Security Strategy every two years. This document outlines the administration’s top national security...

“America First” is officially all grown up. President Donald Trump unveils his National Security Strategy (NSS) today in a big set-piece speech at the Reagan Center. There is a lively debate about the utility of these documents among experts and I am squarely on the side of those who argue that they provide an important window into the thinking of an administration. As I explain below, such windows may be especially important for this administration and so this is a document worth studying. Such deeper reflection may change my assessment, but I have a more-positive-than-expected reaction, however, as reflected in...