Get ready for Putin’s Great Purge of 2022. It won’t be as fierce as Stalin’s in 1937 when 680,000 were executed, 116,000 sent to the gulag, and thousands committed suicide.

By Jakub Grygiel –  wsj.com – March 28, 2022 Over the past three decades these regional orders—in Europe, the Middle East and Asia—have been relatively stable and the local competitions subdued. The resulting impression was of a world order. Liberals saw this global stability as the product of international rules, a growing number of democracies, and greater international trade—a “rules-based order”...

By: Jerry Hendrix – nationalreview.com – March 17, 2022 How to correct decades of strategically unserious underspending For 30 years the United States has been fundamentally unserious about its national-security strategy, which was predicated on the assumptions that it had entered Immanuel Kant’s era of “perpetual peace,” that the nation was the lone superpower, and that it would remain so...

By: Kevin D. Williams – nationalreview.com – March 20, 2022 The lesson of the hour: Unfree societies are weak. The allure of strongman nationalist government — Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, the America that Donald Trump and his acolytes dream of — has always been the promise of power. You can take the word of the...

We should not rehash the past but learn from it — and thereby ensure Putin is defeated now and deterred in the future.

By: Kevin D. Williamson – nationalreview.com – March 11, 2022 About the war in Ukraine: Is the United States a belligerent? The Russians think so. Kremlin spokesreptile Dmitry Peskov says that the United States “definitely has declared economic war against Russia” and promises that the Russian response will be . . . something. We should assume that in this if nothing else the...

An email from the UN’s global communications department, reported that employees have been told to refer to the fighting as a “conflict” or “military offensive.”

By: Seth Cropsey – wsj.com – March 9, 2022 The Russian invasion of Ukraine has inaugurated a new era of political competition but not a new cold war. The American people and their leaders need to prepare for a new kind of geopolitical competition—more intense, more dangerous and more aggressive than anything since World War II. Bismarck, Metternich and Louis XIV’s world...

CIA Director William Burns says Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has fallen far short of Vladimir Putin’s expectations. Burns now predicts weeks of “ugly” fighting for control of Ukraine’s cities.  

The casual speculation about Vladimir Putin’s mental state has become more serious.