Despite the torrent of rhetorical abuse (”useful idiot”) coming from the usual suspects, Tucker Carlson performed a public service by interviewing Russian president Vladimir Putin because it allowed the American people to consider the so-called ‘Operative in the Kremlin’ for themselves. The Russian president eschewed the temptation to launch a “charm offensive” and engaged in an extended defense of his view (shared, incidentally, by a man who was once a great hero to the neoconservatives, Alexander Solzhenitsyn) of Ukrainian nationhood and the causes of the current war.
Read More… What is much less convincing is the authors’ assumption that such negotiations with Russia can be successfully concluded even in the absence of trust. As they put it: “Moscow and Washington have decades of useful Cold War experience in constructing, implementing, and monitoring a wide range of security agreements despite mutual distrust and broader geopolitical competition.”
Read MoreIn his article “Why Conservatism in Today’s World Has to Be Left-Wing,” my friend and colleague Rustem Vakhitov poses the most important question: how is conservatism today possible? While I welcome the posing of this question, I cannot agree with most of the author’s reasoning nor with his article’s ultimate conclusion.
Nevertheless, the question is relevant and pressing, and the root problem here is obvious. Indeed, how in our modern, “advanced” world is it possible to remain a true, non-fake conservative without ending up as an escapist and/or marginalized?
Read More… A conservative makes his own assessment of socialism, and takes into account not only its merits, but also its shortcomings, and in this sense a conservative cannot agree with socialism’s left-wing apologists. A conservative, furthermore, has his own perspective on what is meant by progress (whatever one may say about its dialectics) and his own relationship with religion. At the same time, he is aware that capitalism is leading all of humanity into the abyss of a postmodern new barbarism …
Read MoreWhy do we not turn to the Byzantine Church Fathers in search of an alternative to the Augustinian concept of a fatal original sin that devalues human virtues and ultimately leads to the pessimism, cynicism, and misanthropy of Western European modernity?
Read More… For all the United States’ vaunted freedom, it exhibits surprisingly little freedom of maneuver when it comes to its foreign policy. Far from taking into consideration Russia’s vital security needs, to say nothing of Russia’s identity, U.S. ideologues have behaved as if both are either non-existent or fundamentally illegitimate. Such compulsive political behavior is the sure sign of ideological infection . . .
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