Most summits bill themselves as “historic” and those who attend invariably talk about “forging a new consensus”. But Nato’s Madrid summit can credibly make such claims, for there is no question that a military alliance that only a few years ago was famously dismissed by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, …

Once governments normalize censorship and the punishment of points of view, free expression is firmly stamped with an expiration date. Whenever censorship slithers back into polite society, it is always draped in the mantle of “good intentions.” Fifteenth-century Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola’s “bonfire of the vanities” destroyed anything that could …

Putin Returns to the Historical Pattern For half a millennium, Russian foreign policy has been characterized by soaring ambitions that have exceeded the country’s capabilities. Beginning with the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, Russia managed to expand at an average rate of 50 square miles per …