Author: Justin Raimondo

This election season is so much fun because Donald Trump keeps enraging all the right people – and his timing is perfect. Just as the Republican convention was at its height, with his running mate up there on the podium perorating about the alleged threat of Vladimir Putin, along comes Donald with an interview in the New York Times that has the War Party yelling and screaming bloody murder. The head of NATO; the foreign policy pundits; even some alleged “non-interventionists” – they’re all aghast that Trump is questioning the supposedly sacred tripwires that commit us to going to war … Continue reading →

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Where are libertarians going? What is clear is where they are not going. The much-touted “libertarian moment,” as a New York Times Magazine article phrased it two years ago, never materialized. The story hailed the presidential aspirations of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) as the harbinger of a political sea change that would usher in a new era for the GOP and the country. It never happened. What happened instead was Donald Trump. Throughout his presidential campaign, Senator Paul spent much of his energy backtracking and distancing himself from the strict libertarian positions of his father, former congressman Ron Paul, particularly … Continue reading →

The post Decline and Fall appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Roman republic began its descent into empire as victorious generals – starting with one Julius Caesar – returned to claim the fruits of their victories, their final conquest being the republic itself. “Crossing the Rubicon” has today become a phrase meaning an event that cannot be undone, usually of ominous portent, and surely this applies to the machinations of one General Philip Breedlove, former Supreme Commander of NATO. Revealed by hackers who broke into his email accounts, Breedlove’s plot to start World War III with Russia recalls the recklessness of Dr. Strangelove in a movie of the same name … Continue reading →

The post The Real General Strangelove appeared first on LewRockwell.

There was William Galston at the European Council on Foreign Relations, listening to his fellow elitists and foreign policy honchos caviling about the rise of Donald Trump and bemoaning the fate of the European Union (EU) at the hand’s of Britain’s Euro-skeptics. As the assembled luminaries had a collective sad in their five-star hotel, wondering how the proles could’ve gotten so far out of hand, Galtson – longtime Democratic party hack, former domestic advisor to Bill Clinton, and a senior fellow at the “centrist” Brookings Institution – heard a call to arms. It was almost as if Cecil Rhodes, the … Continue reading →

The post The Revolt Against Globalism appeared first on LewRockwell.

A foreign army consisting of 31,000 soldiers from an anti-American alliance are conducting military “exercises” a few miles from San Diego. Hundreds of tanks converge on the Rio Grande, while jets from 24 countries converge in attack formation, darting through Mexican skies. It isn’t hard to imagine Washington’s response. Yet that’s precisely what has been happening on Russia’s border with the NATO alliance, as the cold war returns. Economic sanctions aimed at sinking Russia’s fragile economy, plus a propaganda campaign designed to characterize Russian President Vladimir Putin as the second coming of Stalin – or, in Hillary Clinton’s view, Hitler … Continue reading →

The post The New Iron Curtain appeared first on LewRockwell.

When President Obama went to Hiroshima, the American media focused on what he would – or wouldn’t – say about Harry Truman’s horrendous war crime against the Japanese people. Would he apologize? Leaving aside how one apologizes for such a monstrous act – short of committing seppuku – as it turned out he just spoke in harmless generalities about the dangers of nuclear weapons, expressing a commendable albeit vague wish to rid the world of them. What the pundits mostly ignored, however, was Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s outrage at the latest murderous sex crime committed by an American soldier … Continue reading →

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Poor Eliot Cohen: one of the principal architects of the Iraq war, and chief ideologue of Bushism in foreign policy – remember the “freedom agenda”? – he’s miffed that “This campaign shows that the foreign policy consensus that has framed this country’s work overseas since 1950 is in peril.” His ire is directed at Donald Trump, but he’s more than a little annoyed at the left-wing of the Democratic party, which is also showing signs of messing around with the Sacred Consensus. How dare these miscreants challenge a “consensus” that brought us a whole series of outright military defeats, from … Continue reading →

The post America First appeared first on LewRockwell.

I was struck by a tweet from libertarian Republican congressman Justin Amash, who has become the “new Ron Paul” now that the three-time presidential candidate and libertarian icon has taken a well-deserved rest from politics. The other day he tweeted: “Patriotism & nationalism are profoundly different. Patriotism is love of country. FA Hayek called nationalism ‘a twin brother of socialism.’” Amash, who has vowed to never support GOP frontrunner and likely presidential nominee Donald Trump, undoubtedly had the New York real estate mogul in mind, but no matter what one thinks of The Donald, Amash is quite wrong about the … Continue reading →

The post Nationalism, Patriotism, and Libertarianism appeared first on LewRockwell.

The unlikely rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump has focused public attention on an issue that hasn’t gotten much attention since the Civil War era – international trade. One of the biggest controversies in nineteenth-century American politics was tariffs – with Big Business manufacturers for them, and farmers and producers of other commodities against them. Corporate behemoths wanted protection from foreign competition while ordinary consumers wanted lower prices. Furthermore, tariff revenue was used to enrich crony capitalists in the industrialized North: the federal government subsidized the building of railroads, canals, and other infrastructure while the beneficiaries of this largesse … Continue reading →

The post ‘Free Trade’ vs. Actual Free Trade appeared first on LewRockwell.

Get ready for the new cold war, which will no doubt turn hot if Hillary Clinton gets into the White House: NATO has just announced it is “considering” the addition of 4,000 more troops to be stationed in Poland and the Baltic states, i.e. right on Russia’s western border. The Washington Post helpfully informs us that this is being done “to deter future Russian aggression” – as if there’s any real possibility that Putin will order the Russian army to take Warsaw or march on Estonia. What this is is another NATO provocation aimed at showing Putin who’s really in … Continue reading →

The post The Empire vs. Russia appeared first on LewRockwell.

American interventionism isn’t just sending in the Marines – more often it’s sending in the President. The “bully pulpit” has worldwide resonance, and President Obama recently used it to urge the British to reject “isolationism” and stay in the EU. As usual with the White House – and not just this one – the little lecture was accompanied by a threat: if the Brits abjured his advice, and that of British Prime Minister David Cameron, they would be put “at the back of the queue” when it comes to signing trade deals with the US. This is nonsense, as London … Continue reading →

The post Our Movement Is International appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Constitution provides for three branches of government: the executive, Congress, and the judiciary – but there have been a few additions lately. With the rise of mass communications, common parlance has designated the media as the “Fourth Estate,” because – in theory – it is supposed to act as a “watchdog” on the activities of the other three. (Although in practice, as we have seen, it often doesn’t work out that way.) And as America entered the age of empire, stepping out on the world stage and exerting its power, a development the Founders foresaw – and greatly feared … Continue reading →

The post How Much Power Do Foreign Lobbyists Have? appeared first on LewRockwell.

In an editorial in the print edition of Reason, Matt Welch takes me to task for “celebrating” the candidacy of Donald Trump, who he calls a “false prophet of anti-interventionism.” Reason’s editor cites one of my more hopeful predictions about the beneficial consequences of the Trump Effect on American politics: “’If Trump gets the Republican nomination the neocons are through as a viable political force on the Right,’ Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo enthused at the end of February. ‘And if Trump actually wins the White House, the military-industrial complex is finished, along with the globalists who dominate foreign policy circles in … Continue reading →

The post Is Trump the Peace Candidate? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Hillary Clinton and CIA director David Petraeus had a brilliant idea: they would fund, arm, and train a proxy army in Syria, overthrow the regime of strongman Bashar al-Assad, and jump on the rapidly moving train of the “Arab Spring” to extend US influence in the region. What could go wrong? Plenty. The “Free Syrian Army” created by Washington is today, fighting alongside al-Qaeda and its Salafist allies, filling the vacuum left behind by the “Islamic State”/ISIS as it contracts under fire from Russian war planes and the Syrian army. As Middle East specialist Juan Cole points out: “[E]ven as … Continue reading →

The post Foreign Terrorists? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The vicious attack on the Brussels airport and metro underscores the futility of focusing on the Syrian “Caliphate” as the epicenter of terrorism: as I’ve been saying in this space since 2001, the snake has no head. Both al-Qaeda and now ISIS are protean entities with a vast geographical spread, and what the Brussels attack – and, before it, the Paris attack – show is that they have successfully colonized Europe. If the “Islamic State” proclaimed by ISIS was defeated and eliminated tomorrow, the terrorist and criminal networks that pulled off the Brussels attacks would still exist. The population of … Continue reading →

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