Tag: Cold War

Commentary: The U.S. Defense Industrial Base

RealClearWire

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, along with increased tensions in the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific region, has generated many debates. Debates about the stability of the international order, the cohesion of NATO, and many others. But for the United States, one significant debate regards the size and expansibility of the American defense industrial base. It’s a discussion that is well past due.

Last year, Under Secretary of Defense Colin Kahl testified to Congress that, “What the Ukraine conflict showed is that, frankly, our defense industrial base was not at the level that we needed it to be to generate munitions.” But the challenge with ammunition is more symptom than cause, in economic terms something of a “leading indicator.”

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Commentary: Europe Needs to Embrace Western Civilization Again

Connecticut Star Staff

For the first time in a millennium, Europe no longer plays a critical role in promoting Western civilization nor in world history at large.

Ostensibly it should. Some 750 million people live on the European subcontinent.

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Commentary: John F. Kennedy – A Remembrance

RealClearWire

Sixty autumns have passed since the assassination of John F. Kennedy that Friday, Nov. 22, a day that traumatized a generation of children and revealed the impermanence of their innocence. For many, it was their first rendezvous with death. It endured as a vivid remembrance even as other memories lapsed with the passage of age. Many of those children are now grandparents, having lived past the average American life expectancy in 1963. Others, like my father, are not here for the somber milestone. But until his own twilight, my father – like any Irish-Catholic child of that period – remained haunted by that afternoon, transfixed by what Kennedy meant at that time, and committed to imparting those reminiscences unto his three sons.

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Commentary: The Third World Revolt

Connecticut Star Staff

Back in my high-school debating days, policy debate teams frequently concluded their arguments with an extreme and somewhat absurd parade of horribles. This was a testament to their intelligence and creativity, plus being dead wrong carried few consequences. Through convoluted chains of logic, they argued that some small change in environmental or trade policy would lead to nuclear war or America’s domination by the “global south.”

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Commentary: Non-Binary Pronouns Are Conquering the West

Admin

For a long time now, Sweden has had a history of being impressively ahead of the rest of the West in a number of areas: appeasing Nazis, remaining neutral during the Cold War, exporting porn, legalizing euthanasia, serving meatballs at furniture emporia, capitulating to Islam, putting legitimate Ukrainian refugees into asylum centers where they’re raped by bogus Muslim refugees, etc.

It should not come as a surprise, then, that Sweden was also ahead of the curve on the pronoun front. Way ahead.

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Commentary: The True Origins of ‘America First’

Admin

What were America’s founders and their followers trying to foster and preserve by their conduct among nations? What were they trying to put first? Why did the Progressives turn away from these concerns? What did they put first? How dismissive were they of reality? What have been Progressivism’s effects on how America has fared among nations? How have changes in the world and in America itself made it impossible to continue on the Progressive’s course? How would John Quincy Adams and those following his principles manage America’s present international situation?  

By what principles might today’s statesmen put America First?

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Report: Biden Close to Invoking Cold War Powers to Bolster Green Agenda

Admin

President Joe Biden is planning to use a Cold War-era law to boost U.S. production of critical minerals essential for electric vehicle batteries and defense equipment, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

The president would add battery materials to a list of materials protected under the 1950 Defense Production Act (DPA) if he were to move forward with the plan, people familiar with White House plans told Bloomberg. Such a move would give mining firms access to a $750 million fund established under the DPA and used to “to carry out all of the provisions and purposes” of the act, according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS).

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Commentary: A Huge Opportunity for America Arises as the Iron Curtain Falls Once Again

Admin
statue of Winston Churchill with British flags in front of him

Almost exactly 76 years ago, on March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill, the former prime minister of Great Britain, delivered one of the most important speeches of the century. Surveying the increasing despotic rule by the Soviet Russians over Central and Eastern Europe in the wake of World War Two, Churchill declared, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

That phrase, “iron curtain,” stuck, helping to define the Cold War for the next five decades. In such a chilled environment, significant trade and normal exchange of any kind between the Free World and the Communist Bloc was unthinkable.

So now today, we can see that an iron curtain is once again descending; only time will tell if brave Ukraine will be held, once again, as a captive nation on the wrong side of this terrible barrier.

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Commentary: When I Met Putin

Admin

Going through Checkpoint Charlie into gloomy and dark, dank East Berlin was always frightening. The Wall itself was ominous, the guards were the fiercest looking on the planet, and the barbed wire and landmines were right there for everyone to see. All of us have seen jaw-dropping spy movies about the infamous Friedrichstrasse and what happened on the other side of it. They were commies, after all.

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