Tag Edward Luttwak

Rorty misquoted (again)

Writing in the New Republic, Chris Lehmann points out that a certain passage in Richard Rorty’s 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, appeared to prophesy the conditions of Donald Trump’s shocking ascension to the presidency. Lehmann then summarizes Rorty’s argument –…

Added in translation II

It’s good to know that Edward Luttwak put things straight when the Italian new agency Adnkronos asked his view on President Biden’s “killer” interview: Biden spoke the truth: Putin is a murderer [assassino]… In Berlin, where Navalny was hospitalized, they…

70 to 30

When Trump visited Moscow in 1987, he did some preliminary probing for a possible real estate deal but came back disappointed: the USSR had no private ownership of land at all and the dispute resolution procedure his Soviet counterparts proposed…

Altishahr, Beshbalik, and Yettishar

In a text to accompany an exhibition of visual works by the artist Mikray Pida, Edward Luttwak wrote: Mikray Pida’s art is her own transcendental creation, yet it is not irrelevant that she is an Uighur, that being a rather…

Luttwak on Napoleon, China and Trump

Back in 2014, more than two years before Trump’s elevation to the presidency, Edward Luttwak summed up his thoughts on grand strategy in application to the Napoleonic wars: In retrospect​ the fight against Napoleon seems to have engendered a new…

Richard Rorty posthumously edited

This is a perfect long article for its genre: a foreign policy expert, who also happens to be a professor of literature, on America’s domestic politics. Rabbit’s clever; the insightful parts are two apposite quotes from Max Weber and Richard Rorty. The problem…

Not so clean hands

In the previous post, I was talking about the “clean hands” operation launched by Milan prosecutors in 1992, which destroyed the old political order and unexpectedly brought a rightwing coalition headed by Berlusconi to power in 1994. Two things stood…