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by the end of the century, the historian Henry Adams was depicting the war as an aimless exercise in blunder, arrogance and human folly.

During the 20th century, historians recast the war in national terms: as a precondition for the entrenchment of Southern slavery, the jumping-off point for the goal of Manifest Destiny and the opening salvos in the race for industrial-capitalist supremacy

In this postmodern narrative about American selfhood, the “enemy” in the war—Britain—almost disappeared entirely.

Not surprisingly, the Canadian history of the war began with a completely different set of heroes and villains.

By contrast, the British historiography of the War of 1812 has generally consisted of short chapters squeezed between the grand sweeping narratives of the Napoleonic Wars. The justification for this begins with the numbers: Roughly 20,000 on all sides died fighting the War of 1812 compared with over 3.5 million in the Napoleonic.

The truth is, the British were never happy. In fact, their feelings ranged from disbelief and betrayal at the beginning of the war to outright fury and resentment at the end. They regarded the U.S. protests against Royal Navy impressment of American seamen as exaggerated whining at best, and a transparent pretext for an attempt on Canada at worst.

The record-tampering charges accused Mr. Daleiden and Ms. Merritt of making and presenting fake California driver’s licenses, with the intent to defraud, for their April meeting at Planned Parenthood in Houston.

Abortion opponents claimed that the videos, which were released starting in July, revealed that Planned Parenthood was engaged in the illegal sale of body parts — a charge that the organization has denied and that has not been supported in numerous congressional and state investigations triggered by the release of the videos.

In a statement on Monday night, Mr. Daleiden said: “The Center for Medical Progress uses the same undercover techniques that investigative journalists have used for decades in exercising our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and of the press, and follows all applicable laws. We respect the processes of the Harris County district attorney, and note that buying fetal tissue requires a seller as well. Planned Parenthood still cannot deny the admissions from their leadership about fetal organ sales captured on video for all the world to see.”

The release of the videos last summer created a furor and gave new strength to the conservative drive to defund Planned Parenthood. The organization was forced to apologize for the casual tone that one of its officials had used to discuss a possible transfer of fetal tissue to what she believed was a legitimate medical company. But Planned Parenthood said the fees being discussed were to cover costs and were legal. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story

Professional wrestling generates intense interest and drama through relentless confrontation. Everybody knows it’s fake at some level, but it is perceived as fake and real at the same time (sort of like politics). What matters is not so much who wins or loses, or whether you are good or evil, but the aggressiveness by which you wage each mano-a-mano confrontation.

Trump brought this style onstage at the first Republican debate, and a thousand taboos were smashed all at once. He insulted people’s looks. He stereotyped vast groups of people — Mexicans and Muslims. He called members of the establishment morons, idiots and losers.

Trump was unabashedly masculine, the lingua franca of pro wrestling. Every time he was challenged, he was compelled by his code to double down the confrontation and fire back.

we saw a big management failure in Trump’s organization. Bernie Sanders is a good enough executive that he was able to lead a campaign that brought outsiders to the polls. Trump is not as effective a leader as Sanders.

What happened in Iowa was that some version of normalcy returned to the G.O.P. race. The precedents of history have not been rendered irrelevant.

North Korea said the launch of the satellite Kwangmyongsong-4, named after late leader Kim Jong Il, was a "complete success" and it was making a polar orbit of Earth every 94 minutes. The launch order was given by his son, leader Kim Jong Un, who is believed to be 33 years old.

"If it can communicate with the Kwangmyongsong-4, North Korea will learn about operating a satellite in space,"

North Korea launched a long-range rocket carrying what it called a satellite, drawing renewed international condemnation just weeks after it carried out a nuclear bomb test. Critics of the rocket program say it is being used to test technology for a long-range missile.

North Korea had notified United Nations agencies that it planned to launch a rocket carrying an Earth observation satellite, triggering opposition from governments that see it as a long-range missile test.

The U.N. Security Council condemned the launch in an emergency meeting on Sunday, and vowed to take "significant measures" in response to Pyongyang's violations of U.N. resolutions, Venezuela's U.N. ambassador said.

an epochal event in developing the country's science, technology, economy and defense capability by legitimately exercising the right to use space for independent and peaceful purposes".

NEW MISSILE DEFENSE?South Korea and the United States said that if the advanced missile defense system called Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) was deployed to South Korea, it would be focused only on North Korea.

Beijing says the Thaad anti-missile system compromises its security and would undermine its nuclear deterrent.

Uses hit-to-kill technology - where kinetic energy destroys the incoming warhead Has a range of 200km and can reach an altitude of 150km

The enemy launches a missile2. The Thaad radar system detects the launch, which is relayed to command and control3. Thaad command and control instructs the launch of an interceptor missile4. The interceptor missile is fired at the enemy projectile5. The enemy projectile is destroyed in the terminal phase of flightThe launcher trucks can hold up to eight interceptor missiles.

The French interior minister said that the French government has set up over 100 shelters across the country for migrants as an alternative to this camp.

Nobody's even looking to see which direction the refugees are walking in. No one's checking to see they get a better home. This exercise is about dismantling the camp.

The legal advice we'd been given was that they have a human right to accommodation. They're in Europe, and they have human rights now, so they were advised that they should be able to stay in their homes

They've refused food, they're on hunger strike, and I just - I cannot even explain to you how awful it is to see people driven to these kind of desperate measures when the law has failed them, the aid workers can't help them, and there's just nothing else they can do. It's heartbreaking.

“I think what it represents is Republicans coalescing, saying it would be a disaster for Donald Trump to be our nominee and we’re going to stand behind the strongest conservative in the race,” Mr. Cruz told reporters in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, one of four states with Republican contests on Tuesday.

Mr. Trump’s losses underlined his continued vulnerability in states that hold time-intensive caucuses: He has lost five of seven such contests. He has performed far better in states holding primaries, which require less organization, and some of which also allow Democrats and independents to vote in Republican races.

The results suggested that a substantial number of Republicans were still uneasy about Mr. Trump: He finished above 40 percent in just one state. It was an indication that the growing campaign to deny Mr. Trump the nomination may not be a pointless exercise. The Stop Trump campaign was joined last week by Mitt Romney, who delivered a blistering attack on the Republican front-runner, portraying him as a threat to the party and the nation. And Mr. Trump reinforced questions about his candidacy at a debate on Thursday by making a barely veiled reference to his penis.

Whether he has incurred significant damage will be better known on Tuesday, if Mr. Kasich and Mr. Cruz can compete in Michigan and Mr. Cruz can threaten him in Mississippi.

Mr. Trump’s comments about building a wall along the border with Mexico and about illegal immigrants causing crime have drawn demonstrations almost everywhere he goes, and that was true in Wichita, too. Trump supporters in the caucus line engaged in shouting with several dozen protesters, many of them Hispanics, who make up 20 percent of the city’s population. Trucks with Mexican flags hanging out the windows and Latin music blaring from the speakers cruised slowly past the line.

The Trump doctrine, if that term can be employed, is reminiscent of basic foreign policy realist tenets.

as Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution first pointed out in Politico, Mr. Trump has a “remarkably coherent and consistent worldview.” Mr. Trump, you could even say, is a spheres-of-influence kind of guy: Europe should take care of Ukraine, Russia should handle Syria. “When I see the policy of some of these people in our government,” he said on MSNBC this month, “we’ll be in the Middle East for another 15 years if we don’t end up losing by that time because our country is disintegrating.”

Mr. Trump’s position can resemble realism on steroids. At bottom, he doesn’t want America to lead the world; he wants the world to get out of its way.

Once George W. Bush and the neocons led us into Iraq, it was probably only a matter of time before the neocons were called to account. Maybe the surprising thing isn’t that the party is starting to morph back into its original incarnation, but that it took this long.

it’s World War II, Vietnam, or Iraq that tend to be invoked more often—it remains a point of contention among academic

Six months after Wilson was reelected, he asked Congress to declare war against Germany to “make the world safe for democracy.”

He Kept Us Out of War.” Two years after shooting began, the prevailing American sentiment was that the war was an uncivilized exercise conducted by savages

part of its mission was to stay free of such senseless carnage, which it did—until 1917.

American story of WWI may not always tell us much about the war itself, but offers an excellent window into the outlook of the nation at any given time.

The 1920s also saw the beginnings of a cultural revolution: flappers, bootleggers, and jazz. There was enough change at home

an emerging continental power with a new sense of its role in the world.

ith the aftermath of WWI would be an understatement. Immediately following the war, the Versailles Peace Treaty swiftly disintegrated

-turn, the idea behind it wasn’t. Europe was still barbaric—but instead of hiding from the old continent, America needed to redeem it

America returned to “normalcy,” a word Warren Harding coined in his successful presidential campaign.

From this, he drew many lessons, among them that simply showing up and winning isn’t enough:

He cultivated Republicans to ensure continued US engagement, acceded to the reality of Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe

That’s what President Clinton meant when in 1995, making the case for intervening in the former Yugoslavia,

“The Guns of August.” A history of WWI’s origins, the book argued that none of the combatants wanted a war—

‘The Missiles of October,’” JFK told his brother.) Tuchman’s view would become the most popular one among an American public scarred by the futile-seeming war in Vietnam,

This wasn’t initially an American idea, however: It came from a 1961 book by the German historian Fritz Fischer, whose work blaming his own country rocked the nation.

Fischer’s argument found a sympathetic audience in America, reassuring doubters that US participation in the war, and its ultimate role in stopping Germany, hadn’t been futile after all.

In 2011 Sean McMeekin, an American historian who works at a Turkish university, released a book in which he pointed to a new culprit: Russia,

raming the war as an Eastern land grab that just happened to lead to the deaths of millions of Europeans might not ever become the standard narrative,

. Scientists are confirming what our ancestors knew instinctively: that our sleep is not empty time.

, 43 percent of those polled said they've tracked their exercise workouts and 41 percent have tracked their diet.

Sleep + Wellness has already kicked off with a range of perspectives on sleep and how it can improve our lives.

Many old-stock inhabitants see immigrants not only as competitors for jobs, but also as rival claimants on government resources.

These voters have turned to Trump because no other political actor offers them anything at all.

to condemn the concerns themselves as mere bigotry is to deny some important truths about American life in the 21st century. Immigrants really do compete with natives. Sometimes they displace them. Immigration has costs as well as benefits, and those costs fall more heavily on those who are already losing ground.

As in Europe, as in America: the refusal of responsible leaders to address real and important voter concerns does not banish those concerns: it only opens the door to extremists and demagogues who will promise to address issues that the mainstream won’t acknowledge.

if 2015 has a political message for Republicans, it is that the rank-and-file of the party does not think that the “Republican reform” agenda as advanced by the GOP’s internal policy elite goes anything like far enough.

Republicans have spent half a decade talking about the need to develop new ideas at some point in the future. And it is ideas that are needed—plans that might make a difference—not mere messaging exercises. If nothing else, the Jeb Bush campaign should mark the limits of the post 2012 strategy that you can rebrand the Republican pizza while making no changes to the recipe

Even then, however, Mr. Kono noted that the recruiting had been conducted mainly by private agents working at the request of the Japanese military, and by administrative and military personnel. For outraged South Koreans, the caveats rendered the apology useless.

others said the talk of academic freedom missed the main point of the backlash. This month, 380 scholars and activists from South Korea, Japan and elsewhere accused Ms. Park of “exposing a serious neglect of legal understanding” and avoiding the “essence” of the issue: Japan’s state responsibility.

Yang Hyun-ah, a professor at the Seoul National University School of Law, said that Ms. Park’s most egregious mistake was to “generalize selectively chosen details from the women’s lives.”

Ms. Park said she had tried to broaden discussions by investigating the roles that patriarchal societies, statism and poverty played in the recruitment of comfort women. She said that unlike women rounded up as spoils of battle in conquered territories like China, those from the Korean colony had been taken to the comfort stations in much the same way poor women today enter prostitution.

She also compared the Korean comfort women to more recent Korean prostitutes who followed American soldiers into their winter field exercises in South Korea in the 1960s through ’80s. (The “blanket corps,” so called because the women often carried blankets under their arms, followed pimps searching for American troops through snowy hills or built field brothels with tents as the Americans lined up outside, according to former prostitutes for the United States military.)

“Korean comfort women were victims, but they were also collaborators as people from a colony,” Ms. Park wrote in one of the redacted sentences in her book.

she added that even if the Japanese government did not directly order the women’s forced recruitment and some Korean women joined comfort stations voluntarily, the government should still be held responsible for the “sin” of creating the colonial structure that allowed it to happen.

“Whether the women volunteered or not, whether they did prostitution or not, our society needed them to remain pure, innocent girls,” she said in the interview. “If not, people think they cannot hold Japan responsible.”

Political identity has become so central because it has come to overlap with so many other aspects of identity: race, religion, lifestyle. In 1960, I wouldn’t have learned much about your politics if you told me that you hunted. Today, that hobby strongly suggests Republican loyalty. Unmarried? In 1960, that indicated little. Today, it predicts that you’re a Democrat, especially if you’re also a woman.

Meanwhile, the dividing line that used to be the most crucial of them all—class—has increasingly become a division within the parties, not between them.

Since 1984, nearly every Democratic presidential-primary race has ended as a contest between a “wine track” candidate who appealed to professionals (Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, and Barack Obama) and a “beer track” candidate who mobilized the remains of the old industrial working class (Walter Mondale, Dick Gephardt, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton).

The Republicans have their equivalent in the battles between “Wall Street” and “Main Street” candidates. Until this decade, however, both parties—and especially the historically more cohesive Republicans—managed to keep sufficient class peace to preserve party unity.

The Great Recession ended in the summer of 2009. Since then, the U.S. economy has been growing, but most incomes have not grown comparably. In 2014, real median household income remained almost $4,000 below the pre-recession level, and well below the level in 1999. The country has recovered from the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. Most of its people have not. Many Republicans haven’t shared in the recovery and continued upward flight of their more affluent fellow partisans.

What was new and astonishing was the Trump boom. He jettisoned party orthodoxy on issues ranging from entitlement spending to foreign policy. He scoffed at trade agreements. He said rude things about Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers. He reviled the campaign contributions of big donors—himself included!—as open and blatant favor-buying. Trump’s surge was a decisive repudiation by millions of Republican voters of the collective wisdom of their party elite.

It’s uncertain whether any Tea Partier ever really carried a placard that read keep your government hands off my medicare. But if so, that person wasn’t spouting gibberish. The Obama administration had laid hands on Medicare. It hoped to squeeze $500 billion out of the program from 2010 to 2020 to finance health insurance for the uninsured. You didn’t have to look up the figures to have a sense that many of the uninsured were noncitizens (20 percent), or that even more were foreign-born (27 percent). In the Tea Party’s angry town-hall meetings, this issue resonated perhaps more loudly than any other—the ultimate example of redistribution from a deserving “us” to an undeserving “them.”

As a class, big Republican donors could not see any of this, or would not. So neither did the politicians who depend upon them. Against all evidence, both groups interpreted the Tea Party as a mass movement in favor of the agenda of the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Owners of capital assets, employers of low-skill laborers, and highly compensated professionals tend to benefit economically from the arrival of immigrants. They are better positioned to enjoy the attractive cultural and social results of migration (more-interesting food!) and to protect themselves against the burdensome impacts (surges in non-English-proficient pupils in public schools). A pro-immigration policy shift was one more assertion of class interest in a party program already brimful of them.

The Republican National Committee made it all official in a March 2013 postelection report signed by party eminences. The report generally avoided policy recommendations, with a notable exception: “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.

Republicans’ approval ratings slipped and slid. Instead of holding on to their base and adding Hispanics, Republicans alienated their base in return for no gains at all. By mid-2015, a majority of self-identified Republicans disapproved of their party’s congressional leadership

In 2011–12, the longest any of the “not Romneys” remained in first place was six weeks. In both cycles, resistance to the party favorite was concentrated among social and religious conservatives.

The closest study we have of the beliefs of Tea Party supporters, led by Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist, found that “Tea Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients. The distinction between ‘workers’ and ‘people who don’t work’ is fundamental to Tea Party ideology.”

Half of Trump’s supporters within the GOP had stopped their education at or before high-school graduation, according to the polling firm YouGov. Only 19 percent had a college or postcollege degree. Thirty-eight percent earned less than $50,000. Only 11 percent earned more than $100,000.

Trump Republicans were not ideologically militant. Just 13 percent said they were very conservative; 19 percent described themselves as moderate. Nor were they highly religious by Republican standards.

What set them apart from other Republicans was their economic insecurity and the intensity of their economic nationalism. Sixty-three percent of Trump supporters wished to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants born on U.S. soil—a dozen points higher than the norm for all Republicans

More than other Republicans, Trump supporters distrusted Barack Obama as alien and dangerous: Only 21 percent acknowledged that the president was born in the United States, according to an August survey by the Democratic-oriented polling firm PPP. Sixty-six percent believed the president was a Muslim.

Trump promised to protect these voters’ pensions from their own party’s austerity. “We’ve got Social Security that’s going to be destroyed if somebody like me doesn’t bring money into the country. All these other people want to cut the hell out of it. I’m not going to cut it at all; I’m going to bring money in, and we’re going to save it.”

He promised to protect their children from being drawn into another war in the Middle East, this time in Syria. “If we’re going to have World War III,” he told The Washington Post in October, “it’s not going to be over Syria.” As for the politicians threatening to shoot down the Russian jets flying missions in Syria, “I won’t even call them hawks. I call them the fools.”

He promised a campaign independent of the influences of money that had swayed so many Republican races of the past. “I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”

Trump has destroyed one elite-favored presidential candidacy, Scott Walker’s, and crippled two others, Jeb Bush’s and Chris Christie’s. He has thrown into disarray the party’s post-2012 comeback strategy, and pulled into the center of national discussion issues and constituencies long relegated to the margins.

Something has changed in American politics since the Great Recession. The old slogans ring hollow. The insurgent candidates are less absurd, the orthodox candidates more vulnerable. The GOP donor elite planned a dynastic restoration in 2016. Instead, it triggered an internal class war.

there appear to be four paths the elite could follow, for this campaign season and beyond. They lead the party in very different directions.

Maybe the same message and platform would have worked fine if espoused by a fresher and livelier candidate. Such is the theory of Marco Rubio’s campaign. Or—even if the donor message and platform have troubles—maybe $100 million in negative ads can scorch any potential alternative, enabling the donor-backed candidate to win by default.

Yet even if the Republican donor elite can keep control of the party while doubling down, it’s doubtful that the tactic can ultimately win presidential elections.

The “change nothing but immigration” advice was a self-flattering fantasy from the start. Immigration is not the main reason Republican presidential candidates lose so badly among Latino and Asian American voters, and never was: Latino voters are more likely to list education and health care as issues that are extremely important to them. A majority of Asian Americans are non-Christian and susceptible to exclusion by sectarian religious themes.

Perhaps some concession to the disgruntled base is needed. That’s the theory of the Cruz campaign and—after a course correction—also of the Christie campaign. Instead of 2013’s “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Liberalization,” Cruz and Christie are urging “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Enforcement.”

Severed from a larger agenda, however—as Mitt Romney tried to sever the issue in 2012—immigration populism looks at best like pandering, and at worst like identity politics for white voters. In a society that is and always has been multiethnic and polyglot, any national party must compete more broadly than that.

Admittedly, this may be the most uncongenial thought of them all, but party elites could try to open more ideological space for the economic interests of the middle class. Make peace with universal health-insurance coverage: Mend Obamacare rather than end it. Cut taxes less at the top, and use the money to deliver more benefits to working families in the middle. Devise immigration policy to support wages, not undercut them. Worry more about regulations that artificially transfer wealth upward, and less about regulations that constrain financial speculation. Take seriously issues such as the length of commutes, nursing-home costs, and the anticompetitive practices that inflate college tuitio

Such a party would cut health-care costs by squeezing providers, not young beneficiaries. It would boost productivity by investing in hard infrastructure—bridges, airports, water-treatment plants. It would restore Dwight Eisenhower to the Republican pantheon alongside Ronald Reagan and emphasize the center in center-right

True, center-right conservative parties backed by broad multiethnic coalitions of the middle class have gained and exercised power in other English-speaking countries, even as Republicans lost the presidency in 2008 and 2012. But the most-influential voices in American conservatism reject the experience of their foreign counterparts as weak, unprincipled, and unnecessary.

“The filibuster used to be bad. Now it’s good.” So Fred Thompson, the late actor and former Republican senator, jokingly told an audience on a National Review cruise shortly after Barack Obama won the presidency for the first time. How partisans feel about process issues is notoriously related to what process would benefit them at any given moment.

There are metrics, after all, by which the post-2009 GOP appears to be a supremely successful political party. Recently, Rory Cooper, of the communications firm Purple Strategies, tallied a net gain to the Republicans of 69 seats in the House of Representatives, 13 seats in the Senate, 900-plus seats in state legislatures, and 12 governorships since Obama took office. With that kind of grip on state government, in particular, Republicans are well positioned to write election and voting rules that sustain their hold on the national legislature

Maybe the more natural condition of conservative parties is permanent defense—and where better to wage a long, grinding defensive campaign than in Congress and the statehouses? Maybe the presidency itself should be regarded as one of those things that is good to have but not a must-have, especially if obtaining it requires uncomfortable change

Worse, though, are the Republican candidates competing for who can be the most against a woman exercising her Constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. And the Winners are...Marco Rubio who thinks there should be no exceptions to a ban on abortions, not even in cases when the pregnancy results from rape or would threaten the life of the woman, while Ben Carson and Ted Cruz agree that a victim of rape or incest can't have an abortion -- or maybe even the morning after pill.

In their budget, House Republicans voted almost unanimously to eliminate the federal program that funds family planning -- a remarkable position for people against abortion

I've tried to explain to my Republican colleagues that you can significantly reduce abortions by guaranteeing access to effective contraceptives, but they don't seem to grasp the connection.

I am thrilled to think that my President will be a smart woman who has been a tireless advocate for women and children her entire adult life, a person who has experienced pregnancy, who has had her period, and who declared in front of the whole world in Beijing in 1995 that "Women's rights are human rights."

A woman in the White House won't solve all these problems, you say, and you're right. But I guarantee you women's concerns will move up on the national agenda from day one of a Hillary Clinton Administration.

I am really sick of the attacks on women -- on our health care choices, on our pay checks, on our ability to raise healthy children, on our hopes for a secure retirement.

That's why I am going to do everything I can as a member of Congress, a mother, and a proud grandmother like Hillary Clinton, to make her President of the United States. My heart beats a little faster just thinking about it. You can say I'm excited.

Mr Cameron said it was time to be "more assertive about our liberal values, more clear about the expectations we place on those who come to live here and build our country together and more creative and generous in the work we do to break down barriers".

He said: "It's our values that make this country what it is, and it's only by standing up for them assertively that they will endure.

In Britain, men are not frightened of women's success; it is celebrated proudly."

Now it has spent two and a half years trying to sabotage its future. As Bill and others are discovering, this can be a painful truth to contemplate.

But there aren’t any compelling ones

In short, if May wins the no-confidence vote by a comfortable margin, and if she nonetheless fails to get her compromise through, Brexit will probably be postponed or put to a new vote. Britain might exercise its right to freeze the exit process and then never return to the negotiating table. Or it could freeze and hold a new referendum.

The third possibility is that May wins today’s vote, but only by a narrow margin. This seems quite likely: Let’s give it 50 percent. This outcome would deprive May of any hope that she had the political strength to get her compromise deal through Parliament. This would force a consideration of the alternatives laid out in option two: Norway, Canada, and so on. The outcome would be the same: Either an indefinite postponement or a referendum. So all 50 percentage points in option three flow into the postpone or revote bucket, bringing the cumulative total to 60 percent.

Our postwar statesmen were neither weak nor incompetent. They were the architects of the greatest foreign policy triumph in U.S. history.

o successful was this policy that Americans now—most of whom weren’t alive to witness the enormity of these wars—see peace, unity, prosperity and stability as Europe’s natural state. This is an illusion. For centuries, Europe was the fulcrum of global violence. With the age of global exploration, it became the globe’s primary exporter of violence

The U.S. military was always an integral part of the plan to unite and rebuild Europe from the rubble. Since World War II, U.S. troops have been deployed in Eurasia to ensure the continent cannot be dominated by a single power capable of monopolizing its resources and turning them against the U.S. The United States has built overwhelmingly massive military assets there to deter local arms races before they begin, and it has simultaneously assured those under U.S. protection that there is no need to begin local arms races, for their safety is guaranteed.

Only America, and massive power as the U.S. exercised it, could have pacified and unified Europe under its aegis. No other continental country possessed half the world’s GDP. No other country had enough distance from Europe to be trusted, to a large extent, by all parties and indifferent to its regional jealousies. No other country had a strategic, moral and economic vision for Europe that its inhabitants could be persuaded gladly to share

The founders of these institutions fully intended them to be the foundations of a United States of Europe, much like the United States of America. Profound economic interdependence, they believed, would make further European wars impossible.

At the same time, the United States built an open, global order upon an architecture of specific institutions: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the International Court of Justice. This order is in many respects an empire—a Pax Americana—but it is more humane than any empire that preceded it, with institutions that are intended to benefit all parties.

Through the application of economic, diplomatic and military force majeure, the United States suppressed Europe’s internal security competition. This is why postwar Europe ceased to be the world’s leading exporter of violence and became, instead, the world’s leading exporter of luxury sedans.

American grand strategy rests upon the credibility of its promise to protect American allies; this credibility rests, in turn, upon U.S. willingness to display its commitment.

The Soviet Union’s criticism of the Marshall Plan and other American involvement in Europe was eerily similar to the language Russia’s now uses in its campaign to undermine NATO and the EU. The vocabulary and tropes of Russian propaganda are widely echoed, wittingly or unwittingly, by far-right, far-left and other antiliberal politicians, parties and movements throughout the West

The loudest exponent of the idea that the U.S. is getting rolled, that the European Union was “created to destroy us,” and that multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization assault the “sovereignty” of the nations concerned is, unfortunately, the president of the United States.

It’s hard to understate how foolish and reckless these notions are. History can be shoved down the memory hole, for a time, but reality is never so cooperative.

The Second World War proved not only that isolationism and American-Firstism were fantasies, but exceptionally childish and dangerous ones, at that. In the age of hyperglobalized trade, international air travel, the internet, nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles, these fantasies are even more childish and dangerous. The U.S. may be on another continent, but it is not on another planet.

It is true that the U.S. spends more on its military, in absolute dollars and as a percentage of GDP, than any European country. That was always part of the deal. The U.S. is a global superpower. It can fight a war anywhere in the world, invade any country at will, and (at least in theory) fight multiple simultaneous major wars—even in space. Of course this costs more. It is in America’s advantage to be the only power on the planet that can do this.

Conversely, it is not remotely in America’s advantage for other countries to spend as much money on their militaries as we do

Trump’s refusal to deter our shared enemies and protect our allies risks provoking a regional European arms race—exactly what the U.S. has sought to avoid for 74 years

Above all, Trump’s overt support for sordid, Kremlin-backed actors who seek to undermine Europe’s unity is unfathomable: How could it be in Europe’s interest, or in ours, for the American president to lend the United States’ prestige and support to Europe’s Nazis, neo-Nazis, doctrinal Marxists, populists, authoritarians, and ethnic supremacists, particularly since all of them are ideologically hostile to the United States?

Should the unraveling of the order the U.S. built proceed at this pace, the world will soon be neither peaceful nor prosperous. Nor will the effects be confined to regions distant from the United States. America will feel them gradually, and then, probably, overnight—in the form of a devastating, sudden shock.

The American-led world order, undergirded by the ideal of liberal democracy, has been highly imperfect. But it has been the closest thing to Utopia our fallen and benighted species has ever seen. Its benefits are not just economic, although those benefits are immense. Its benefits must be measured in wars not fought, lives not squandered

The alarms sounded when Peterson published what quickly became a massive bestseller, 12 Rules for Life, because books are something that the left recognizes as drivers of culture.

it was difficult to attack the work on ideological grounds, because it was an apolitical self-help book that was at once more literary and more helpful that most, and that was moreover a commercial success. All of this frustrated the critics. It’s just common sense! they would say,

As with Peterson’s podcasts and videos, the audience is made up of people who are busy with their lives—folding laundry, driving commercial trucks on long hauls, sitting in traffic from cubicle to home, exercising. This book was putting words to deeply held feelings that many of them had not been able to express before.

There is an eagerness to attach reputation-destroying ideas to him, such as that he is a supporter of something called “enforced monogamy,”

t is because the left, while it currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase, and it is deeply vulnerable. The left is afraid not of Peterson, but of the ideas he promotes, which are completely inconsistent with identity politics of any kind.

What he refuses to do is to abide by any laws that could require compelled speech.

there is no coherent reason for the left’s obliterating and irrational hatred of Jordan Peterson. What, then, accounts for it?

the endlessly repeated falsehood that he believes that the government should be in the business of arranging marriages. There is also the inaccurate belief that he refuses to refer to transgender people by the gendered pronoun conforming to their identity

In the midst of this death rattle has come a group of thinkers, Peterson foremost among them, offering an alternative means of understanding the world to a very large group of people who have been starved for one. His audience is huge and ever more diverse, but a significant number of his fans are white men. The automatic assumption of the left is that this is therefore a red-pilled army, but the opposite is true.

If you think that a backlash to the kind of philosophy that resulted in The Nation’s poetry implosion; the Times’ hire; and Obama’s distress call isn’t at least partly responsible for the election of Donald Trump, you’re dreaming

All across the country, there are people as repelled by the current White House as they are by the countless and increasingly baroque expressions of identity politics that dominate so much of the culture. These are people who aren’t looking for an ideology; they are looking for ideas.

“It’s now a process designed to measure not how much progress we’re making, but how much damage is being done,” the senior administration official said.

If the trip is another failure, internal critics and some in Congress will push for more pressure on North Korea, more sanctions, a resumption of U.S.-South Korea military exercises, and other measures to show Kim he can’t jerk around the United States. The argument against these measures is that they could create a rift in the U.S.-South Korea alliance and risk sinking the whole process — with the blame falling on the U.S. government.

But the fundamental problem with the Trump-Kim scheme remains: Until there is tangible evidence Kim is actually willing to denuclearize, each concession only plays into his strategy to stall for time, relieve financial pressure and normalize his regime’s status as a de facto nuclear state.