1 Witch. When shall we three met again In thunder, lightning, or in rain? 2 Witch. When the hurlyburly’s done, When the battle’s lost and won. Shakespeare, Macbeth   Shakespeare’s Macbeth opens in the “fog and filthy air” of an “open place,” a no-man’s-land where three witches – theRead More

  Sometimes it seems we are living in different worlds — Vladimir Putin, 23 December 2021 There is another world, and it is this one — French poet Paul Éluard   The curtain was raised on 2022 with the stage set for not one, not two, but three major regional conflicts,Read More

Thirty Novembers ago, leaders of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) met in Paris to inaugurate a post-Cold War order of peace and prosperity. The Conference – encompassing North America and Soviet Asia as well as Europe – had convened at Summit level only once before, inRead More

“The unease and fear are appropriate and can be useful, all the more so as the self is liberated from convoluted efforts at falsification and denial.” — Robert Jay Lifton, The Climate Swerve   On February 8, as COVID-19 fast-approached a slow-moving British government, BBC World News aired a discussionRead More

Canso Spaceport Reading Joan Baxter’s account of the correspondence between Maritime Launch Services (MLS), the proponents of the Canso Spaceport, and public servants with the Municipality of the County of Guysborough (MODG) reminded me of the correspondence between Chris Skidmore, the proponent of an RV park in Big Pond, andRead More

I did not weep, I turned to stone inside…Dante, Inferno   I rarely cry, but on the evening of 8 December 1987, glued to radio coverage of the signing of a nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Soviet Union, I wept with a relief I had neverRead More

  Editor’s Note: Spectator contributor Sean Howard begins the New Year with a two-part consideration of the actual legacy — both domestic and global — of the 41st President of the United States, George Herbert Walker Bush. This month, in Part 2, Howard considers Bush’s foreign policy failures. (Read Part I)  Read More

Last November I lamented ‘The Lost Art of Arms Control,‘ the abject failure to build on the platform left by the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, and US President Ronald Reagan, who famously urged Gorbachev to “tear down” the Berlin Wall dividing Europe into nuclear-armed camps. Nearly 30Read More

On 27 July 1953, the Korean War Armistice was signed, suspending hostilities (after 4 million deaths, mostly civilian, in three years) “until a final peaceful settlement” was “achieved at a political conference” to be convened “within three months.” Sure enough, less than 90 days later, a treaty was concluded: theRead More

On 8 December 1987, US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty eliminating all ground-based ballistic and cruise missiles with a range of 500-5,500 kilometers. As the leaders shook hands in Washington, 2,692 such missiles were deployed across Europe, each armed withRead More