Note from Dick Young: I’m proud to be posting this piece from Justin Logan, a friend of mine. I met Justin during his time at the Cato Institute where he was the director of foreign policy studies. Since he left Cato to start his own restaurant, Ruta Del Vino, in the Petworth neighborhood of Washington, D.C., Justin has written […]
The American Military Needs Better Leaders, Not a Parade
You’ve got to hand it to Donald Trump: he can wind people up like just about no one else. Last week, the Washington Post reported that Trump had asked the Pentagon to begin plans for a military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue to imitate the French military parade that celebrates Bastille Day each year. Liberals–and others–howled […]
North Korea: Maybe We’re Just Stuck
Jeffrey Lewis is the rare scholar who combines the ability to write engagingly with knowledge of national security. His piece in a recent Washington Post Outlook section explaining “how nuclear war with North Korea would unfold” was an eye-opener. Combining too-plausible accounts of the mercurial leadership in Pyongyang and Washington, the paranoia of mid-level military […]
What I Learned About Capitalism from Dabbling in It
If I’m known at all to RichardCYoung.com readers, I’m known as the curmudgeonly foreign policy guy, I imagine. I have little respect and less faith in the ministrations of the Washington elite, which is in part why I stopped trying to break into it and decided to open a wine bar instead. As my final […]
Washington, DC: A Town about Nothing
Jerry Seinfeld wrote that his television program was “a show about nothing.” Similarly, one of the only realistic tics of the hit show House of Cards is the near-total absence of policy. Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood is driven by lust for power and a desire to exact revenge on his enemies, but has no great […]
The Possible Upside of Having an Oil Man at State
With the Rex Tillerson nomination for Secretary of State now official, it’s worth reflecting on how much the punditry surrounding the nomination has focused on the US-Russia relationship. This is understandable, given the extent to which Russia has been in the news lately, but there are implications beyond Russia that bear thinking about. So it’s […]
Questions for General Mattis
President-elect Trump has nominated retired Marine General James “Mad Dog” Mattis as the nation’s 26th secretary of defense. It was, and will be, a controversial pick, since by law a military officer must be retired for seven years to serve in a civilian capacity, but Mattis only retired four years ago. Despite his rock star […]
Two Things Our Children and Grandchildren Won’t Understand
The end of the year is a good time for reflection, and usually in column form, it means taking stock of what the past year has meant for politics, or society, or what have you. I’ll leave that to others this year. Instead, I’ll take a crack at predicting a few things our descendants won’t […]
This Thanksgiving, Get Off the Internet and Talk Turkey
American politics has never been a dreamscape of considered, civil disagreement and wonky progress toward consensus. American politics and the American press have always been rambunctious, tendentious, and at times violent arenas, with warring papers and ideologies fighting viciously. At the founding of the nation, the populace was so whipped up with anti-Catholic fervor that […]
Bill Kristol Paved the Way for Donald Trump
My first column in this space worried that the most dangerous thing Donald Trump could do in the 2016 presidential election was not win, because he almost certainly couldn’t, but rather to make Hillary Clinton look humane and even reasonable by comparison. According to Nate Silver, if that was Trump’s goal, mission accomplished: Both FiveThirtyEight’s […]
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