cold war

Life Punishes the Late—Adapt or Die

Gerry Lynch on February 20, 2025, 2:14 pm

| Readers 6284

A portrait of Donald Trump, featuring his signature blonde hair and serious expression. He is wearing a blue suit, white dress shirt, and blue tie, with a small American flag pin on his lapel. An American flag is partially visible in the background, along with ornate wooden paneling

This will be the first of many shattering weeks in 2025. Even the cleverest members of the establishment that is being routed have started to acknowledge publicly that the old order is dead. This isn’t a matter of a change in the personnel in charge, or even of long-standing diplomatic alliances, but of suddenly finding that the assumptions that most of us shared about how the world functions and how it should function are no longer correct. To think through …

Afghanistan Exposes the West’s Crisis as it did the Soviets’

Gerry Lynch on August 19, 2021, 6:58 pm

| Readers 1830

Soviet APCs depart Afghanistan as part of the first phase of troop withdrawal in 1986.

The Soviet Empire was undone by three things – firstly, overstretching itself, especially through the acquisition of a series of Global South satrapies from Nicaragua through Ethiopia to Vietnam in the 1970s and 1980s; secondly, misrepresenting realities to itself so as to fit Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy; thirdly, because its leaders no longer believed in that political religion even as they presided over a system that permitted no alternative. Mohammad Najibullah’s government hung on in Kabul for three years after Soviet troops …

Clean hands

Andrew Gallagher on March 13, 2018, 6:08 pm

| Readers 2708

FitzJamesHorse pithily describes the formality that Irish is the “first national language” as Ireland’s “first national hypocrisy”. But Ireland is not short of hypocrisies. Its second national hypocrisy has long been the pretence that Ireland is somehow free of the sin of abortion. And to this list we should add a third, the conceit that Ireland is a “neutral country”. The second and third national hypocrisies are remarkably similar. In both cases Ireland has dodged a controversial issue by washing …