Breaking News

Opinion

General time is undefeated in battle

National Columnists

I am on a mudslide toward death. Well, we all are, really, when you think about it, but sometimes it just seems you're slipping down the side of the mountain faster than at other times. Like, for example, when you're approaching a birthday that starts with a "fif" and ends with crying in the car because the clouds are moving too quickly overhead. It's not as silly as it sounds – though it is, admittedly, fairly silly. I had dropped off the kids at camp and was driving back to the house when I got to a stoplight. I looked up and saw shocking blue, scattered white puffballs ...

Trump ties name to dubious diplomacy

National Columnists

Donald Trump has been the greatest, most clear-eyed and most transformative foreign policy president of my lifetime. But Trump is also the famed businessman who wrote "The Art of the Deal" four decades ago. There has therefore always been the risk that the president's novel and often unorthodox approach to foreign policy could be subsumed by a greater dealmaking imperative. Because of his dealmaking background, Trump – despite all his foreign policy successes – was always uniquely vulnerable to confusion of means and ends, prioritizing a deal itself above any end that a deal might ...

Trump not following Polk’s example in war

National Columnists

A president orders the onset of hostilities without authorization of Congress and without much in the way of making a case with the public. His troops win important victories and decapitate large parts of the government of the enemy. But in the enemy capital, no one surrenders or will even negotiate seriously. That leaves the president with the unhappy choice of launching a new military attack on the central focus of the enemy, one riskier and less certain of success than those before, or of declaring an incomplete victory, well short of his essential objective, and just getting the ...

Time for merit immigration

National Columnists

Swiss voters went to the polls last week and resoundingly rejected capping the country's rapidly growing population at 10 million by limiting immigration. Congratulations to the Swiss for staging a national conversation over immigration – something the United States urgently needs to do. The Swiss have seen their population soar by more than 25% since 2000. The newcomers are for the most part workers from neighboring European countries, not migrants from the Middle East or Africa. Even so, the right-leaning Swiss People's Party pushed for immigration restrictions, arguing that such ...

Peace worse than war

National Columnists

President Donald Trump started a war with Iran, and now he is ending it on terms worse than the status quo he inherited. That is the plain shape of what happened, however the White House dresses it up. The war came at a price -- lost lives, oil markets convulsing, allies rattled and an economic shock that rippled from Tehran to global commodity prices. Now, we are giving up. The ending arrives as a memorandum of understanding, signed on Sunday, whose full text the administration was conspicuously slow to publish. When a deal is good, you release the text. When you guard it, you are ...

Keep loving America, even when it hurts

National Columnists

The approach of July 4 is making my heart hurt. Love of this country is deep-dyed in my soul, but pondering how or even whether to celebrate the semiquincentennial provokes a riot of mixed feelings. The right – and not just the MAGA right – responds to any queasiness about this particular anniversary with knee-jerk vituperation. Matthew Hennessey, writing in the Wall Street Journal, offered a typical example of this Pavlovian response this week when he accused Robert De Niro of "hating America." What had the actor done to deserve this verdict? Well, he attempted to provide ...