Chronicle of a War, 20 Years On The case for removing the worst of the Arab prison states looks more justifiable than ever, even as the blunders involved in its execution look even more unpardonable. Brian Stewart 19 Mar 2023 · 17 min read
Will It Be Different This Time? It is starting to look like a question of when, not if, the Islamic Republic of Iran will fall. Brian Stewart 19 Nov 2022 · 9 min read
Death From Above Ayman al-Zawahiri’s reign of pious terror is now over. Brian Stewart 4 Aug 2022 · 6 min read
America Must Not Abandon Europe The United States retains the capacity to defend the liberal order on both sides of Eurasia. Brian Stewart 14 Jul 2022 · 6 min read
Pacifism and Papal Fallibility The Pope is a perverse sort of pacifist, not a man of peace. Brian Stewart 20 May 2022 · 8 min read
Revolution Betrayed A review of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism by Matthew Continetti, Basic Books, 496 pages (April 2022) “So inevitable and yet so completely unforeseen” was Alexis de Tocqueville’s verdict on the French Revolution. Much the same can be said of Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of Brian Stewart 4 May 2022 · 15 min read
Macron Will Have to Do A decent and competent Left might point out that France stands to gain exactly nothing from an “alliance” with Putin’s dictatorship proposed by the likes of Le Pen. Brian Stewart 24 Apr 2022 · 7 min read
Can the Revolution in German Foreign Policy Last? During the fierce debate over the Iraq war, the German political scientist Karl Kaiser said, “Europeans have done something that no one has ever done before: create a zone of peace where war is ruled out, absolutely out.” And, he added, “Europeans are convinced that this model is valid for Brian Stewart 11 Apr 2022 · 6 min read
A Failure of Deterrence According to foreign policy “realists,” the tale we are being told about Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked war in Ukraine is a fiction. Realists like to be known for their clear-eyed appreciation of the realities of global power, and in their telling, responsibility for the war does not lie chiefly with Brian Stewart 17 Mar 2022 · 6 min read
Ukraine in the Balance As I write this, Vladimir Putin has moved more than 100,000 troops to Russia’s Ukrainian border, and has strongly implied that he will invade absent an ironclad guarantee that Ukraine will never be permitted to join NATO. Although the Biden administration has rejected that demand, a chorus of Brian Stewart 14 Feb 2022 · 10 min read
This Is About More Than Ukraine In the early days of World War Two, George Orwell published a marvelous essay entitled “England Your England.” With the Luftwaffe in the skies above London laying waste to the city, Orwell observed a peculiarly contemptible trait of the English intelligentsia. In a word, this portion of the national elite Brian Stewart 28 Jan 2022 · 6 min read
The Free-ish World A review of World in Danger: Germany and Europe in an Uncertain Time by Wolfgang Ischinger, Brookings, 280 pages (November, 2020) Every winter in Bavaria, the great and the good from Europe and the United States gather to take stock of the threats facing the world. The Munich Security Conference Brian Stewart 3 Jan 2022 · 8 min read
What a Free Republic Owes Thomas Jefferson Late in his life, John Adams sent a letter to his great political rival Thomas Jefferson in which he wrote, “You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.” Adams must have understood Jefferson by the end, because on the 50th anniversary of the Brian Stewart 7 Dec 2021 · 8 min read
Fulton and the Case Against Normalcy A long-ago speech by a foreign dignitary may hold the key to recovering some lost wisdom about how America came into this role in the first place. Brian Stewart 23 Mar 2021 · 11 min read