During the Cold War, the United States took its friends where it found them. If they were willing to cast their lot with us, from the Shah to Gen. Pinochet, we welcomed them. Democratic dissidents like Jawaharlal Nehru in India and Olof Palme in Sweden got the back of our hand.
What would be the political benefits to Obama of an amnesty? It could weld Hispanics to the Democratic Party, would be wildly popular with the ideological and Christian Left, and quietly welcomed by those Chamber-of-Commerce Republicans who have silently supported amnesty and secretly want immigration off the table in 2016.
Retired Americans living on Social Security, exempt from taxes because their income is modest, are not the problem.
As polarized as we have been, we Americans are locked in a cultural war for the soul of our country.
If there is a horrific attack on this country like 9/11, the American people will demand we go to war and settle accounts with those who did it. But America's appetite for intervention, for nation building, for democracy crusades, is fully sated.
All you have to do is come to Ohio and say, 'I think NAFTA is a lousy deal,' and everybody cheers.
Stop exporting American jobs. Stop exporting American factories, and stop exporting American sovereignty and independence to global institutions like the World Trade Organization.
When the faith dies, the culture it produced begins to die, then the civilization goes, and, then, the population.
I think the Catholic faith is consistent with the kind of conservatism I believe in.
How does one leave Social Security and Medicare untouched, grow defense by more than $50 billion, slash taxes, launch a $1 trillion infrastructure program - and not explode the deficit and national debt?
Historically, the Balkans have been an incubator of war.
If U.S. air, naval, missile, and ground forces were not in and around Korea, and if we were not treaty-bound to fight alongside South Korea, there would be no reason for Kim to build rockets to threaten a distant superpower that could reduce his hermit kingdom to ashes.
Angela Merkel puts Germany first.
While the 20th century saw the world divided between a Communist East and a free and democratic West, new and different struggles define the 21st.
Undeniably, we were on God's side in World War II and the Cold War. But were we ourselves without sin in those just struggles?
My job is not to make people happy; it's to tell the truth as I see it.
Just as there's garbage that pollutes the Potomac river, there is garbage polluting our culture. We need an Environmental Protection Agency to clean it up.
As the numbers of native-born Europeans begin to fall, with their anemic fertility rates, will the aging Europeans become more magnanimous toward destitute newcomers who do not speak the national language or assimilate into the national culture but consume its benefits?
One can only imagine how Iranians or Afghans would deal with unelected judges moving to de-Islamicize their nations.
Many Muslims put their Islamic faith ahead of their national identity and forbid preachers from other religions from coming into their countries to convert their young. Apostasy is treason to Allah. Heresy has no rights.
Where are the gains for religious freedom and human rights to justify all the bombings, invasions and wars we have conducted in the lands from Libya to Pakistan - to justify the losses we have endured and the death and suffering we have inflicted?
Whatever they did for democracy, the U.S. interventions in the Middle East and the vaunted Arab Spring have proved to be pure hell for Arab Christians.
Turkey, a powerful and reliable ally of the U.S. through the Cold War, appears to be coming unmoored from Europe and the West and is becoming increasingly sectarian, autocratic, and nationalistic.
In 2013, a great national coalition came together to compel Congress to deny Barack Obama authority to take us to war in Syria.
Why, a quarter of a century after the Cold War, do we still have 28,000 troops in Korea?
Russia and China, which have embraced autocratic capitalism, have attracted admirers and emulators by the seeming success of their strongman rule.
If Trump's talking to Putin can help end the bloodshed in Ukraine or Syria, it would appear to be at least as ethical an act as pulpiteering about our moral superiority on the Sunday talk shows.
Among the reasons Donald Trump is president is that he read the nation and the world better than his rivals.
A Syrian war would consume Trump's presidency.
Trump has raised the very issues I raised in the early '90s.
As the culture war is about irreconcilable beliefs about God and man, right and wrong, good and evil, and is at root a religious war, it will be with us so long as men are free to act on their beliefs.
What vital U.S. interest is imperiled in who comes to power in Podgorica, Montenegro? Why cannot Europe handle this problem in its own back yard?
While our corporatists burn incense at the shrine of the global economy, Trump went to visit the working-class casualties. And those forgotten Americans in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin responded.
I'm a traditionalist. I'm a Latin mass Catholic, and I hold to traditional views of responsibility.
Candidate Trump held out his hand to Vladimir Putin. He rejected further U.S. intervention in Syria other than to smash ISIS.
We have no vital national interest in Syria's civil war.
What is good for General Motors is not good for America if General Motors is moving production out of the United States.
With homosexual marriage gaining converts among the young, the party of the Moral Majority declines to stand with Chick-fil-A.
What happened to the America we grew up in, the America of Truman, Ike, JFK and Reagan?
Russian hacking of the DNC is a problem, not a scandal.
When politicians don black robes and seize powers they do not have, they should be called out for what they are - usurpers and petty tyrants.
I opposed the World Trade Organization.
The bipolar world of the Cold War is history. The new world order, however, is not the One World dreamed of by Wilsonian idealists. It is a Balkanizing world where race, tribe, culture and creed matter most, and democracy is seen not as an end in itself but as a means to an end - the accretion of power by one's own kind to achieve one's own dreams.
For Americans of the Greatest Generation that fought World War II and of the Silent Generation that came of age in the 1950s, the great moral and ideological cause was the Cold War. It gave purpose and clarity to our politics and foreign policy, and our lives.
Our Founding Fathers who created this republic did not believe in democracy. When did we come to worship this idol?
Much of the hostility toward Putin stems from the fact that he not only defies the West when standing up for Russia's interests, he often succeeds in his defiance and goes unpunished and unrepentant.
Our elite believe in a new trinity of equality, democracy and diversity. Indeed, after the Cold War, we declared the spread of democracy worldwide to be our historic mission and national goal.
The GOP's insoluble problem is that the multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual country they created with their open borders appears not to like the brand of dog food the party sells.
Secularist justices de-Christianized our country. They invented new rights for vicious criminals as though criminal justice were a game. They tore our country apart with idiotic busing orders to achieve racial balance in public schools.
