Sunday, the 80th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland, Vice President Mike Pence spoke in Warsaw’s Pilsudski Square of “five decades of untold suffering and death that followed” the invasion. Five decades! What Pence was saying was that, for Poland, World War II did not end in victory but defeat and occupation by an…
US President Donald Trump is a master of the withdrawal method. That said, it is often forgotten that the United States remains that most fickle of creatures, joining, or abandoning international regimes that might be seen to jar with the national interest. Initial preparations for such global arrangements tend to be initially optimistic, even rosy….
Is it the country that corrupts the staff, the employees, of the UN? (No other country has the power to do that. This one does, and it takes full advantage of the opportunity, and carries out that corruption, ruthlessly.) Is it the country that’s so corrupt at the very top, so that the model their…
The much-acclaimed series ‘Chernobyl’ tells the story of the 1986 nuclear disaster and the authorities’ attempts to play it down. Ironically, 33 years on, it’s Western leaders who need to learn how to be honest and transparent. It was the accident which some think led directly to the fall of communism. “Reformers in the Soviet…
On my many walking visits to the vast Normandy battlefield in France, I kept recalling the ever so wise dictum of Prussia’s great monarch, Frederick the Great: ‘he who defends everything, defends nothing.’ On this 74th anniversary of the D-Day landings, it’s well worth recalling the old warrior-king Adolf Hitler, a veteran of the infantry,…
Operation Bagration was the D-Day of the Eastern Front. In scope, size, scale and impact, it was a remarkable feat of arms unmatched in WWII. Crucially, Overlord (D-Day) and Bagration were planned and undertaken as part of a coordinated effort on the part of the Grand Alliance to break the back of German resistance in…
