Campaigning in a Munich beer tent on May 28, German chancellor Angela Merkel reflected upon Donald Trump's blitz through Europe at the tail end of his first trip outside the United States. "The times when we could fully rely on others are kind of over," she said. "We Europeans really need to take our fate into our own hands. . . . We have to fight for our own future, as Europeans, for our destiny."

Merkel was reflecting on the antagonistic approach to multilateral trade regimes and the Paris climate change agreement Trump had displayed at the NATO summit in Brussels on May 25 and a subsequent meeting of the G7 in Italy.

Donald Trump's recent sojourn in the Middle East leaves the United States where it was before the president departed: His administration remains committed to containing Iran while philosophically adopting a pre-9/11 approach to combating Sunni Islamic militancy. Sunni Arab leaders have reason to be content. However much Candidate Trump wanted to avoid wars and costly alliances, President Trump clearly isn't going to abandon the southern Middle East to Iranian aggression. His Riyadh "Islam speech," which was more about the Islamic Republic than anything else, signaled that Trump wasn't particularly moved by the reelection of the foreign-investment-loving Iranian president Hassan Rouhani.

Donald Trump is fond of claiming that his predecessor mismanaged America's role in the world. "And I have to just say that the world is a mess. I inherited a mess," the president noted during a joint press conference with King Abdullah of Jordan in the Rose Garden on April 5. "Whether it's the Middle East," he continued, "whether it's North Korea, whether it's so many other things, whether it's in our country—horrible trade deals—I inherited a mess."

The world is an inherently messy place, and each president is left with problems unresolved by the man who preceded him. But when it comes to America's fight against terrorism, Trump has a point. Barack Obama claimed that he brought the war in Iraq to a "responsible end"

There is something dispiriting about the debate over trade policy, and the problem does not lie with Donald Trump, or his tweets, or his on-again, off-again threats to various trading partners, or his fickle choice of partners to head the negotiating queue: EU to the front, Brexiting Britain to the rear, Angela Merkel trumps Theresa May, presidential promises notwithstanding. No, the problem lies with the belief that in the world in which we live and make our livings, free trade remains a global system that produces the efficient specialization of labor and allocation of resources that the textbooks promise. Rather than face reality, too many defenders of free trade adopt the ostrich position, leaving themselves exposed to attack by

Washington greeted the news that the Justice Department had named Robert Mueller special counsel to oversee the FBI's investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election with a collective sigh of relief. The speed and intensity of events and developments about this interference—and the possibility that Trump associates were involved or had knowledge of it—had only increased over the first four months of Donald Trump's presidency.

It was particularly virulent in the nine days preceding Mueller's appointment.

It's constantly surprising to me how promiscuously Americans use the term "expert." An expert is someone who has comprehensive knowledge of a subject or total mastery of a skill. We all recognize such people—the guy who repaired my roof last year is an expert, I think, because you can't perform the job better than he did. But the sheer variety of people termed "experts" today is enough to make you ponder the term's meaning. A quick Google News search suggests there are experts on pets, human rights, security, technology, travel, housing, North Korea, climate change, and education.

"Everyone said it would be impossible to do what we did," France's new president, 39-year-old Emmanuel Macron, told a crowd of politely applauding supporters in the courtyard of the Louvre shortly after the polls had closed on May 7. "But they didn't know France!"

Almost none of what he said was true. Last year, Macron defected from the unpopular Socialist party to found his own political movement, En Marche. He had served as the economics minister of the very unpopular president François Hollande. But he had a seductive power on the stump that was visible almost immediately. Since January, every poll of the French electorate had shown him advancing to the run-off in France's two-round presidential elections.

Political scientist and law professor Carol Swain retired from academia just when some of her research had become remarkably relevant. She doesn't see it quite that way, though. Swain prophesied the rise of the alt-right 15 years ago, but she won't call Donald Trump's election victory a vindication of her prediction that a new white nationalism would infiltrate mainstream politics. It might be because the 63-year-old Southern black woman and distinguished, though increasingly controversial, scholar supports the populist president's most contentious policies.

Days after the election, Vanderbilt University publicized Swain's prescience, pointing to her 2002 book The New White Nationalism in America: A Challenge to Integration.

That liberals run American universities is never going to be a man-bites-dog news headline, but the urgent question ought to be: When are university liberals going to stand up and defend liberalism?

For most of the last few years, it has been possible to regard the antics of the campus left with a mixture of benign neglect and schadenfreude at the supine reaction of college administrators, who seem not to have read the chapter on appeasement in their history books. The obsession with "microaggressions," the insistence on "trigger warnings," and the demand for "safe spaces" amply supplied with plush toys and grief counselors are pathetic compared with the campus left of the 1960s.

When Reince Priebus wants to talk with the most powerful aide in the West Wing, he steps out of his corner office, walks down the hall toward the Oval Office, and knocks on the door of Jared Kushner—sometimes twice. Priebus may be the chief of staff, but it's he who waits for Kushner, the 36-year-old senior adviser and son-in-law to President Donald Trump, and not the other way around.

Kushner's been called Trump's "secret weapon," his "secretary of everything," the "super secretary of state," and, during the campaign, the "de facto campaign manager." To Forbes writer Steven Bertoni, Kushner was the Trump campaign's "savior." To Trump's chief strategist and alt-right operator Steve Bannon, Kushner is a "globalist" and a

The rise of Donald Trump began a debate about the proper place of nationalism in American politics. A growing chorus on the political right, including even many who opposed his candidacy, has been praising the president’s "America First" agenda as a healthy restoration of nationalism and fleshing out an intellectual framework to fit his worldview. It is right to give his ideas serious and thoughtful examination, as it is to consider any ideas that seek to protect our country and unite its people. But there are good ways and bad ways to pursue these goals, ways that stay true to the ideals on which this country was founded and ways that do not.

The center-right in particular is engaged in a civil war of sorts over the

Whether it happens before or after health care reform—the White House has been sending mixed signals—President Trump has consist-ently promised "massive" tax cuts for the middle class and businesses. He told an interviewer a few weeks ago, "It will be the biggest tax cut since Reagan, and probably bigger than Reagan's.

The history of the twentieth century is littered with the carcasses of failed revolutions. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, and Hitler all tried to master modernity—to curb or accelerate it—and all failed. After the attacks on September 11, 2001, it appeared the most consequential revolutionary of the last century might turn out to be Mustafa Kemal Pasha, better known as Atatürk, founder of the secular Republic of Turkey. Amidst the wreckage of the multinational Ottoman Empire, Atatürk emerged victorious, using bourgeois nationalism as a basis for reforming a Muslim country in an attempt to demonstrate that popular sovereignty and Islam could successfully coexist.

In hindsight, much of the coverage of Donald Trump’s candidacy could have run under the same headline: "Unexpected bull poised to enter china shop." But commentators spent virtually all of their energy expounding on the first half of that metaphor. Our campaign ethologists incessantly analyzed the behavior of this curious new political animal. What conditions created the bull, who's feeding it, why is it acting this way?

This isn't totally surprising. Such analysis of presidential contenders is the grist of campaign mills. What was unusual is how matter-of-factly the analysts cast America's institutions as a china shop.

We were continuously advised of the porcelain-level delicacy of our system of government.

In hindsight, much of the coverage of Donald Trump’s candidacy could have run under the same headline: "Unexpected bull poised to enter china shop." But commentators spent virtually all of their energy expounding on the first half of that metaphor. Our campaign ethologists incessantly analyzed the behavior of this curious new political animal. What conditions created the bull, who's feeding it, why is it acting this way?

This isn't totally surprising. Such analysis of presidential contenders is the grist of campaign mills. What was unusual is how matter-of-factly the analysts cast America's institutions as a china shop.

We were continuously advised of the porcelain-level delicacy of our system of government.

Seoul

It was probably not the most traumatic moment of Park Geun-hye’s life. In 1974, after all, Park's mother, then the first lady of South Korea, was assassinated by a North Korea sympathizer in a crowded Seoul theater. Only five years later, her father, the long-ruling dictator Park Chung-hee, was offed by his own spy chief after a banquet in central Seoul.

But Park Geun-hye's appearance at the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office on March 21 was nonetheless a watershed moment for a woman who has spent most of her 65 years in and around the corridors of power. She was the first daughter of South Korea and after her mother's murder officially deemed the country's first lady.

On April 2, 1917, Woodrow Wilson became only the fourth president to ask Congress for a declaration of war. The others were James Madison, James K. Polk, and William McKinley. Those three wars cost a total of some 30,000 lives.

Wilson’s war would leave more than 115,000 American fighting men dead from hostile fire, disease, and other causes. The only costlier conflicts in the nation's history were World War II (405,399) and the Civil War (750,000). Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war in 1941, making him the last president to do so, though certainly not the last to preside over a nation at war. The Civil War required no declaration of war. For Lincoln to have requested one would have recognized the enemy as a

The contest for loneliest person on the right in Donald Trump’s Washington would be hard fought among free traders, pro-immigration libertarians, neoconservative globalists, and fiscal hawks convinced of the necessity of entitlement reform. But none of these could possibly be as lonely as the conservative Republican who believes climate change is a serious threat that his party should make a priority. That person is Jay Faison.

But don't tell Faison that. Despite seeming out of step with the climate skepticism of most conservatives and the Trump administration, this ebullient 49-year-old from Charlotte, North Carolina, brims with optimism and a can-do spirit deriving from his practical experience as a successful

According to the popular-again Alexander Hamilton, “Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government." In light of this requirement and the failure of the Articles of Confederation to meet it, the authors of our Constitution took careful measures to create a powerful executive. After witnessing the expansion of executive rule, in both foreign and domestic affairs, over the past two administrations, we might well wonder whether the Founders went too far or created enough of the checks and balances they thought made our executive consistent with "the genius of republican government." Or perhaps our experience confirms that however useful they may be, institutional restraints can never fully

The pronouncement that “democracies don't go to war with one another" has been a standby of chipper talk-show personalities for most of this century. We might want to reconsider it in light of the way Dutch and Turkish authorities were brought to the brink of an armed confrontation by little more than the overlap of their election seasons.

Since he founded the Justice and Development party in 2001, the onetime Islamist mayor of Istanbul Recep Tayyip Erdogan has done more to revive his country's standing in the world than any leader this side of Vladimir Putin. Now Erdogan is president. He has Islamized Turkey's laws steadily, tightened its links to Iran and the Arab world, and refused U.S.

During my teaching days, along with courses on Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Willa Cather, I taught an undergraduate course called Advanced Prose Style. What it was advanced over was never made clear, but each year the course was attended by 15 or so would-be—or, as we should say today, wannabe—novelists and poets. Usage, diction, syntax, rhythm, metaphor, irony were some of the subjects taken up in class. Around the sixth week of the eight-week term I passed out a list of 12 or so names and historical events—among them Sergei Diaghilev, Francis Poulenc, Mark Rothko, Alexander Herzen, the 1913 Armory Show, John Cage, the Spanish Civil War, George Balanchine, and Jean Cocteau—and asked how many of these items

"I often use Sweden as a deterring example.” The words are not those of Donald Trump, but Anders Fogh Rasmussen. In an interview with Swedish public television in January, the former NATO secretary general and Danish prime minister described Sweden's immigration policy as a failure and a warning to other countries.