George F. Will

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A German Leopard 2 tank during a demonstration event held for the media by the German Bundeswehr in Munster near Hanover in 2011. (Michael Sohn/AP)

EuropaUnión EuropeaPolítica Exterior, , , ,

Eighty years ago, the hinge of history swung just north of Ukraine. There, the outcome of World War II in Europe was determined in the largest tank battle ever, a boiling cauldron in what was called the Kursk salient. Raging from July 5 to Aug. 23, 1943, the clash between German and Soviet forces involved what military historian John Keegan termed “tank armadas”, a total of about 6,000 tanks and 2 million troops. After this, Germany never again had the strategic initiative on the Eastern Front, where, 10 months before D-Day, attrition guaranteed Adolf Hitler’s defeat.

Today, the outcome of the first major European war since 1945 might turn on tanks, particularly German Leopard 2 s.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Shortly after the end of World War II in Europe, which began when Germany attacked Poland and Britain honored its commitment to Poland, Henry “Chips” Channon, a Conservative member of Parliament, attended a high-society event in London with Lady Cunard. Gazing upon the lavish gathering of the upper crust, and marveling at how quickly normality had been restored for those whose normality was especially enviable, Channon said contentedly, “This is what we have been fighting for”. Lady Cunard replied dryly, “Why, are they all Poles?”

Wars, including the one that began 10 months ago, cause events to take unanticipated caroms that, cumulatively, eclipse the wars’ origins.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Under Russia’s czars, military officers had the right to inflict summary punishment on unsatisfactory soldiers by punching them in their faces. When, in spring 1917, disorder spread, the lynchings of police and other representatives of order were sometimes accomplished by tying their legs to vehicles and dragging them through the streets. A pastor in Petrograd — soon, Leningrad — said “thirty or forty policemen were pushed through a hole in the ice [of the Neva River] without as much as a stunning tap on the head — drowned like rats”. Others were “lifted on bayonets”: impaled by perhaps half a dozen and lifted off the ground.…  Seguir leyendo »

In an image provided by the U.S. Army, contactors from General Atomics load Hellfire missiles onto an MQ-1C Gray Eagle at Camp Taji, Iraq, in 2011. (Jason Sweeney/U.S. Army/AP)

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“In war, moral power is to physical as three parts out of four”. — Napoleon Bonaparte

On the afternoon of June 18, 1815, near the Belgian village of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington said: “Hard pounding, this, gentlemen: let’s see who will pound the longest”. If Ukraine is given material aid equivalent to one-fourth of that nation’s moral resources, Ukraine can prevail against the Russian invaders, which means, at a minimum, restoration of the status quo ante Feb. 24. So, the immediate imperative is to supply Ukraine with the most sophisticated and dangerous U.S. unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), a.k.a. drones, which can be force-multipliers for Ukraine’s hard pounding of the Russians.…  Seguir leyendo »

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II unveils a painting by artist Robert Lloyd of the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth II passing through Southampton waters during a visit to tour the ship in Southampton, England, in 2008. (Arthur Edwards/AFP via Getty Images)

EuropaReflexionesTestimonios,

In 1932, arguably Europe’s oldest political institution embraced the newest communication innovation, radio. Britain’s King George V gave the first royal Christmas broadcast, during which he coughed. His subjects were smitten. “A King who coughs is a fellow human being”, said the Spectator, for readers who harbored doubts about this.

The death at age 96 of George V’s granddaughter, herself a great-grandmother, underscores continuity in an era of disjunctions. Elizabeth II became queen in 1952 at 25, when her prime minister was Winston Churchill. Her father, George VI, died at 56; her mother, however, lived to 101, and Elizabeth easily surpassed (in September 2015) Victoria as the longest occupant of Britain’s 1,000-year-old throne.…  Seguir leyendo »

Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow in March 1990. (V.Armand/AFP/Getty Images)

ReflexionesTestimonios,

Failing upward into the world’s gratitude, Mikhail Gorbachev became a hero by precipitating the liquidation of the political system he had tried to preserve with reforms. He is remembered as a visionary because he was not clear-sighted about socialism’s incurable systemic disease: It cannot cope with the complexity of dispersed information in a developed nation. Like Christopher Columbus, who accidentally discovered the New World, Gorbachev stumbled into greatness by misunderstanding where he was going.

Two of Gorbachev’s uncles and an aunt died in Joseph Stalin’s engineered famine of 1932-1933. The tortures of the Great Terror were visited upon both grandfathers. One of them remembered: An interrogator broke his arms, beat him brutally, then wrapped him in a wet sheepskin coat and put him on a hot stove.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea,

This jest has serious implications: French libraries file their nation’s constitutions under periodicals. There have been 14 of them (and five republics) since the revolutionary year of 1789. So, unsettled governance is as French as brie. As is its menu of extremisms, which includes extreme animosities among France’s factions.

In the April 10 first round of presidential voting — the two-candidate runoff is Sunday — Marine Le Pen finished second to President Emmanuel Macron. In third and fourth place, respectively, were the ferociously left-wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Éric Zemmour, a media performer whose high-octane xenophobia helped Le Pen by making her seem comparatively decorous.…  Seguir leyendo »

The pursuit of happiness is happiness

MundoAmérica,

“In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.” — José Ortega y Gasset

But a journalist, whose job is to chronicle and comment on the tor­rent, knows that this is not amenable to being mastered. That is what it means to be unruly. Besides, the enjoyment of life is inseparable from life’s surprises, and hence from its contingencies. Surprises and con­tingencies have propelled this columnist through a happy half-century of arriving at his office each morning impatient to get on with the pleasure of immersion in the torrent.…  Seguir leyendo »

Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas at a gathering of European Union leaders in Brussels in June. (Olivier Hoslet/EPA-EFA/Shutterstock)

EuropaUnión Europea

“August is the month to watch”, said Estonia’s 44-year-old prime minister during a recent visit to Washington. The guns of August 1914 announced the beginning of what was called the Great War until an even worse one began nine days after the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact of Aug. 23, 1939. However, Kaja Kallas radiates serenity during lunch near Lafayette Square across from the White House.

She does not think Russia’s late-summer military exercises near Estonia, scheduled by the man she calls “the bully next door”, presage aggression. She does, however, think it prudent to consider that Vladimir Putin’s revanchist ambitions might not be confined to Ukraine.…  Seguir leyendo »

British destroyer HMS Defender arrives at the port of Batumi, Georgia on June 26. (AP)

InternacionalOrden Mundial

The British Royal Navy destroyer HMS Defender recently broke away from the HMS Queen Elizabeth Carrier Strike Group to conduct a Black Sea mission that triggered Russia’s reflexive dishonesty. This was one episode among several lately that demonstrate increasing resistance to Russian and Chinese assaults on a rules-based international order.

The Defender sailed close to the Crimean coast, through what Russia has claimed are its territorial waters since it seized Crimea from Ukraine seven years ago. The Defender’s mission in Ukrainian waters was to demonstrate that the legality of the seizure has never been recognized internationally. Russia responded by claiming to have fired shots at, and dropped fragmentation bombs near, the Defender, which Russia said then changed course.…  Seguir leyendo »

Riot police walk past a fire set by people protesting the new national security law on Wednesday in Hong Kong. (Tyrone Siu/Reuters)

MundoAsia,

The French revolutionaries’ instrument for administering the 1793-1794 Reign of Terror was the Committee of Public Safety. Today, China’s totalitarians, displaying either ignorance of this unsavory history, or arrogance in flaunting their emulation of it, call their new instrument for suffocating Hong Kong the Commission for Safeguarding National Security. Yet again, actual tyranny is imposed in the supposed service of safety.

Acting as communists do, the leaders of China’s Communist Party, which is the bone and sinew of that nation’s Leninist party-state, have, less than halfway through their commitment, shredded the agreement to respect Hong Kong’s autonomy until 2047. The new law mocks the rule of law, which requires sufficient specificity to give those subject to the law due notice of what is proscribed or prohibited.…  Seguir leyendo »

Santiago Abascal, leader of the Vox party, waves at a rally in Madrid on Jan. 12 protesting the new coalition government of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. (Jon Nazca/Reuters)

EspañaAspectos Generales

Two Spanish factions — the far left, whose agenda includes cultural aggression, and Catalonia’s secessionists — are playing with fire. Santiago Abascal is the fire.

His party’s name — Vox (Voice) — proclaims that it exists to speak for those who think their beliefs have become not just embattled but unutterable. Those beliefs — about nationalism, marriage, immigration, schooling and even bullfighting and hunting — have lost ground in the democratic competition of Spain’s rowdy marketplace of ideas. This does not assuage their sense of grievance because they think the public forum unfairly privileges other voices. Sound familiar, America?

Vox is a counteroffensive that probably will, and perhaps should, mostly fail in cultural matters.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia

With the totalitarians’ talent for invective and the Leninist faith that “history” has a Marxist mind of its own, a Beijing-run “news” agency dismissed Taiwan’s presidential election results as “a temporary fluke” and “bubbles left behind by the tides of history.” Actually, this election, just 48 days after Hong Kong’s resounding repudiation of Beijing in November voting, is another boulder in a growing avalanche of evidence, from the islands of Hong Kong and Taiwan to Central Europe, that China need not be accommodated.

The landslide reelection of President Tsai Ing-wen happened despite Beijing’s strenuously expressed objections, economic pressures (e.g., refusing visas to tourists wanting to visit Taiwan, where tourism produces more than 4 percent of gross domestic product), military intimidation (last year, Beijing’s fighter jets crossed the median line in the Taiwan Strait for the first time in two decades), and surreptitious but flagrant electoral interference.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea,

The poet Rupert Brooke voiced the exhilaration of those Britons who welcomed the war in 1914 as a chance to escape monotonous normality, “as swimmers into cleanness leaping.” They got four years mired in Flanders’s mud. In a 2016 referendum, Britons voted, 52 percent to 48 percent, for the exhilaration of emancipation from the European Union’s gray bureaucratic conformities. They thereby leaped into a quagmire of negotiations with an E.U. determined to make separation sufficiently painful to discourage other nations from considering it.

On Tuesday, Parliament emphatically rejected the terms of separation that Prime Minister Theresa May negotiated with the E.U.…  Seguir leyendo »

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In my country, the people can do as they like, although it often happens that they don’t like what they have done”.  — Winston Churchill, 1946

During the Second World War, as U.S. power was eclipsing Britain’s, Harold Macmillan, a future prime minister, reportedly said, “These Americans represent the new Roman Empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go”. Today, Britain’s Brexit agonies — its 2½ -year struggle to disentangle itself from the European Union — indicate that the Founders could teach 21st-century Britain something: Direct democracy is dangerous because public sentiments need to be refined by filtration through deliberative institutions.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Armin-Paulus Hampel, a former journalist and commentator who now is a member of the Bundestag, is ebullient, affable, opinionated, voluble and excellent company at lunch. But because his party is Alternative for Germany (AfD), one wonders whether he is representative of it, and whether he is as congenial politically as he is socially.

AfD is a Rorschach test for observers of German politics, who see in it either a recrudescence of ominous national tendencies or a healthy response of the political market to unaddressed anxieties. It was founded in 2013, two years before Chancellor Angela Merkel impulsively decided to welcome almost 1 million asylum seekers, most from the Middle East.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea

In one of contemporary history’s intriguing caroms, European politics just now is a story of how one decision by a pastor’s dutiful daughter has made life miserable for a vicar’s dutiful daughter. Two of the world’s most important conservative parties are involved in an unintended tutorial on a cardinal tenet of conservatism, the law of unintended consequences, which is that the unintended consequences of decisions in complex social situations are often larger than, and contrary to, those intended.

In 2015, Angela Merkel, the Federal Republic of Germany’s first chancellor from what was East Germany, chose to welcome into Germany about 1 million people — many of them Syrians — fleeing Middle Eastern carnage.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

En 1932, durante un almuerzo con Rexford Tugwell, uno de sus asesores, el gobernador Franklin Roosevelt hizo una pausa para atender una llamada telefónica de su homólogo de Luisiana Huey Long. Cuando finalizó la conversación telefónica, Roosevelt se refirió a Long como «el segundo hombre más peligroso de EEUU». ¿Quién era, preguntó Tugwell, el más peligroso? Roosevelt respondió: Douglas MacArthur.

Siendo jefe del Estado Mayor, MacArthur acababa de llevar a cabo de forma ostentosa la dispersión violenta del desvencijado ejército de los veteranos en Washington. Casi 19 años más tarde, estuvo a punto de convertirse en el hombre más peligroso para sí mismo, igual que ha hecho ahora otro general en jefe.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesNaturaleza,

Las personas inteligentes convienen en que, en ausencia de medidas radicales contra el calentamiento global, la raza humana está condenada. Esa es una sentencia tautológica porque aquellos que discrepan son, por definición, idiotas. Según el inteligente primer ministro de Gran Bretaña, Gordon Brown, la Humanidad dispone sólo de alrededor de 30 días para salvarse. Y es que afirma que, a menos que se alcance un acuerdo decisivo en la cumbre sobre cambio climático que se inaugura el 7 de diciembre en Copenhague, todo está perdido.

Así que todo está perdido. Las probabilidades de alcanzar un acuerdo integral y vinculante son más o menos de cero.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

«Ayer», reza el correo electrónico de Allen, un marine destacado en Afganistán, «Doné sangre porque otro soldado, mientras estaba de patrulla, pisó el detonador (de una mina) y perdió ambas piernas». Después «fue ingresado otro compañero con una herida de bala en la cabeza. Ambos fallecieron esta mañana».

«Siento el drama», escribe Allen, un entusiasta soldado de infantería dispuesto a morir «para que cada uno de vosotros podáis envejecer». Dice en su e-mail: «Yo he puesto todo en manos de Dios». Y concluye con un «Semper Fidelis».

Allen y otros miles de jóvenes americanos, parte imprescindible del futuro de este país, también están en manos de Washington.…  Seguir leyendo »