James Carden

2 months ago | thespectator.com | Charles Cornish-Dale |James Carden |Roger Kimball |Becket Adams

Marko Elez. If that name means anything, you might spend a little too much time on the internet. Elez is a whizz kid at DoGE, the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency, which is currently taking a flamethrower/bazooka/heavy weapon of your choice to whole departments of the federal government. Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth from politicians, journalists and common-garden liberals everywhere.

2 months ago | thespectator.com | Douglas Murray |Alexander Larman |James Carden |Mark Galeotti

The new administration in Washington has somewhat startled its critics by issuing a blizzard of executive orders during its opening weeks in office.

2 months ago | thespectator.com | James Carden |Freddy Gray |Robert Bryce |Michael Taube

Since 9/11, Washington has spent billions of dollars promoting “democratic norms” abroad. The policy mirrored the late Soviet Union’s attempts to promote communism in countries outside Moscow’s direct control, as witnessed under the leadership Leonid Brezhnev. And now at last it appears to have ended, following Donald Trump’s executive orders and yesterday’s State Department takeover of the United States Agency for International Development.

Jan 16, 2025 | theamericanconservative.com | James Carden

Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program Login It started out rather differently than we now sometimes imagine it. When Vladimir Putin took over the Russian presidency from Boris Yeltsin 25 years ago, on New Year’s Eve 1999, he was seen as a man with whom Washington could do business. President Bill Clinton lauded Putin’s accession to the presidency as a “democratic transfer of executive power,” which it certainly was not.

Jan 9, 2025 | theamericanconservative.com | James Carden

Foreign Affairs Getting Russia Right  A 30-year-old State Department cable sheds light on the Clinton administration’s failures in Russia. Thirty years ago, March 1994, E. Wayne Merry, a career Foreign Service officer, filed a dissent cable that remained firmly under wraps until last month, when the estimable National Security Archive at George Washington University published it on its website. Many are now comparing Merry’s cable to George F.