Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the programme on International Politics, Economics, and Security.
The next few weeks will be filled with remembrances, fulsome appreciations, and harsh criticism of Henry Alfred Kissinger, who died on Wednesday at 100. His prominence is well deserved. The only modern secretaries of state who rank with him are George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson, who constructed the architecture of Cold War containment in
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Freddy Gray is reunited with Charles Lipson and Jacob Heilbrunn to debate the impact of Biden’s Middle East policy, and his shaky reputation at home. Is he a Cold War liberal, out of touch with the modern Democratic Party?
Did American failures contribute to Hamas’s war of terror – its unprovoked attack, its total surprise, its horrific butchering of innocent civilians simply because they are Jews? Yes, but a lesser one. The failures to discover the plans, deter the attack and, having failed at deterrence, to defeat it promptly are Israel’s. The secondary actor
Congressman Matt Gaetz pulled the alarm but, unlike the stunt by his fellow House member Jamaal Bowman – who recently set off a fire alarm to delay a vote – there really was a fire. Gaetz set it himself, with help from seven other Republicans on the party’s populist right. Now the whole party has to
The worst job in America on Wednesday was trying to moderate the second Republican debate. With seven candidates on stage struggling for air time, the moderators, Dana Perino, Stuart Varney and Ilia Calderón, did a creditable job under impossible conditions. They asked the right questions but couldn’t stop the candidates from talking over each other
Deciding whether Ukraine should eventually join Nato is hotly debated. There are good reasons to favour its inclusion, but not now, while the war is ongoing. It would transform the war into a conflict between nuclear-tipped Great Powers and vastly increase the danger. Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, is not happy with the uncertainty over his
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This week Freddy is joined by Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of the National Interest, and Charles Lipson, professor of political science at the University of Chicago. They discuss Charles’s recent piece in The Spectator’s US edition where he argues that the walls are closing in on old Joe, in relation to the Hunter Biden story. Is the President’s involvement
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Donald Trump was in court where he pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying records. To discuss, Freddy Gray is joined by Alan Dershowitz, the American lawyer, and Charles Lipson, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago.
A New York grand jury has indicted former president Donald Trump over alleged ‘hush money’ payments to Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress. The jury was empaneled by Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg, a man on a mission. His mission is simple. Get Trump. On anything. He had to do it with the thinnest of evidence, the weakest of
Donald Trump faces legal jeopardy about payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, but his Republican opponents face political jeopardy about how to handle the issue. Ron DeSantis’s powerful response shows why he’s such a formidable candidate and why Trump fears him. Most Republicans have opted for the easy answer to the hush-money story: criticise Manhattan
The war in Ukraine changed fundamentally after Vladimir Putin failed to capture Kyiv and decapitate the regime there a year ago. His army settled into Russia’s traditional way of war: a slow, brutal, relentless slugfest. That strategy necessarily expends countless Russian lives. Human-wave attacks rely on untrained troops, dragooned from prisons or off the streets.
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Freddy Gray speaks to Charles Lipson, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and regular contributor at Spectator World about Biden’s ongoing docudrama. Image designed by Charles Lipson.
Joe Biden has become the Typhoid Mary of classified documents, spreading them as he goes. They keep turning up in batch after batch, everywhere but the floor at Starbucks. The President has said almost nothing about the mess, except to reassure us that ‘people know I take classified documents seriously’. That defence has since taken
As the fighting in Ukraine slows for the winter, three things stand out. The first is the most obvious: a small, highly motivated country, equipped with advanced weapons and intelligence, is slowly but inexorably defeating what used to be called the world’s second-most powerful military. We need to remind ourselves how stunning that is. The second
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night was a political triumph. It was easily the most impressive speech given to Congress and the American public in years. And it was persuasive, if the audience’s repeated ovations are any indication. Zelensky’s goal was obvious. In thanking the Congress and
There are two pieces of deeply disturbing news to emerge from the ‘Twitter Files’ released by Elon Musk. The first is that Twitter, under its old management, was not the open, politically neutral platform it pretended to be. Journalist Bari Weiss has shown that Twitter had secret ‘blacklists’ and related methods specifically designed to limit
The ‘Twitter files’ Elon Musk released to two journalists have produced a cloud of confusion. So far, we have not seen the files themselves, only what one journalist, Matt Taibbi, has reported about them. The main findings reinforce what we have known all along: Twitter’s former management strongly favoured Democrats and used its powerful platform
‘There is a lot of ruin in a nation.’ So said Adam Smith over two centuries ago. He reminds us that strong, stable countries such as my country, America, can survive the pounding we have suffered over the past few years. Our nation may be continually tested, but it has deep reserves of strength. In
Donald Trump has some well-proven abilities – the ability to cost Republicans winnable elections for the House and Senate, the ability to undermine citizens’ confidence in election outcomes (without providing solid proof the elections were stolen) and the ability to foment some of America’s worst, anti-democratic elements. Trump’s status as party leader contributed to Republicans’
The emperor is naked. The public knows it, and they’re finally beginning to speak the obvious truth. The emperor, in this case, is President Biden. He took office with high hopes from voters and a promise to bring the country together. Those aspirations are dead. The public has lost confidence in Joe Biden – lost
