Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Blog, page 86

Why Trump Now Says ‘Russia Will Have To Give Up All of Ukraine.’

On May 4th, U.S. President Trump — about whom I had headlined on 4 December 2024, “Reuters reports Trump is set to continue Biden’s policies on Ukraine.” — told NBC News, that “Russia will have to give up all of Ukraine. Because that’s what they want.”

Not only is that the exact opposite of what Russia is, in fact, deeply committed to — they’ve made clear, numerous times, that the five regions of the former Ukraine where voters in plebiscites have voted overwhelmingly to be Russians instead of U...

The Classical Liberals Were Radical Opponents of War and Militarism

One of the most disastrous elements of the post-World War II conservative movement in America has been its commitment to severing the ideology of “classical liberalism” from its historical roots in antiwar and anti-interventionist foreign policy. What we now call classical liberalism—the ideology of John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Frederic Bastiat, Richard Cobden, and Herbert Spencer—was consistent in opposing state power in all spheres, both international and domestic.

This was true in the United...

The Thought Police Arrive

Just last year in California, a federal court declared a first grader’s crayon drawing may constitute “impermissible harassment.” Ironic, perhaps, that such a decision was made in nation where—starting in elementary school—talk about the founding principle of liberty and the sanctity of an individual’s rights are drummed into the people daily.

Are such lessons serious? Were they ever?

This crayon drawing episode and its aftermath is not some dystopian fiction but came as a heavy dose of reality ...

Americans Could Learn From Socrates

Most of us who studied philosophy when we were young think of Socrates as the guy who questions everything in Plato’s Dialogues. For a long time I suspected that if I had attended a dinner party in Athens at which he was present, I would have found him annoying.

During the dark days of the pandemic, I read about the plague that struck Athens in 430 BC, when the city state was under siege by Sparta during the Peloponnesian War.

Over the following three years, most of the population was infected, ...

The Catholic Artificial Intelligence Moment

Soon after his election, Pope Leo XIV revealed why he chose his papal name, and he noted that the rise of artificial intelligence was on his mind:

I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revo...

What Are Pope Leo XIV’s Priorities and Why Did He Choose That Name?

VATICAN CITY — What exactly will Pope Leo XIV’s papacy look like? The American Pope has given signs of his personal priorities, citing Vatican II and synodality alongside missionary activity and resistance to atheistic industrial developments.

Offering his inaugural address to the College of Cardinals on Saturday, Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate was presented to them in sum. He may have been less than 48 hours into wearing the white cassock, but Leo already had his priorities laid out in mind.

Key th...

In Saudi Arabia Trump Rejects Interventionism, Regime-Change Schemes

Foreign policy statements by the Trump administration continue to surprise.

At the end of January Secretary of State Marco Rubio made remarks that strongly diverged from decades of U.S. policy. He did away with ‘unipolarity’ – the assumed leading role of the U.S. in global policy – and acknowledged and endorsed a multi-polar world.

He set a limit to U.S. intervention by acknowledging the legitimate interests of others:

The way the world has always worked is that the Chinese will do what’s in the...

Trump Envoy Reveals NATO Troop Deployment Plans for Ukraine

I have been wondering if the Trump regime’s peace negotiations are sincere.  The plan revealed by Trump’s envoy Keith Kellogg indicates that the negotiations are not sincere.  Putin, Lavrov and Security Council Secretary Shoigu, the former Minister of Defense, have all made it clear that NATO troops in Ukraine are unacceptable and could result in World War III.  So why has Kellogg supported, or arranged, a joint statement by the foreign ministers of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the...

Donald of Arabia

Since 1898, the guys who developed and executed U.S. foreign policy have modeled it after British foreign policy during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries—that is, a policy of meddling in the affairs of the rest of the world in an effort to expand British domination.

On the whole, the British were considerably better at global meddling to their advantage than the Americans have been. This was because the guys who staffed the East India Company and later the Foreign Office tended to be educ...

Trump Is Making America Constitutionally Literate—By Violating the Constitution

“Donald Trump ran on a platform of relentless, thoroughgoing rejection of the Constitution itself, and its underlying principle of democratic self-government and individual rights. True, he never endorsed quartering of troops in private homes in time of peace, but aside from that there is hardly a provision of the Bill of Rights or later amendments he did not explicitly promise to override, from First Amendment freedom of the press and of religion to Fourth Amendment freedom from ‘unreasonable s...