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Uncommon Decency

Mar 30, 2022

"Politics in America, Britain, and other Western nations", reads the blurb for the Edmund Burke Foundation’s National Conservatism series of conferences, "have taken a sharp turn toward nationalism—a commitment to a world of independent nations”. In the US and the UK, this inflection point crystallized in 2016...


Mar 23, 2022

"A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy”, wrote Henry Kissinger, "will achieve neither perfection nor security". In an era where few countries have the means to back their moral postures on foreign policy, the statesman’s comments should not fall on deaf ears. Kissinger knows a thing or two...


Mar 16, 2022

France looks back on November 13, 2015 with a mix of pain and horror. That day, a group of ISIS-trained jihadists launched coordinated attacks on the Bataclan nightclub, the Stade de France, and a handful of Parisian cafés. The onslaught left 130 dead, shell-shocked French public opinion, and forced a reckoning across...


Mar 9, 2022

Mere hours after Russian tanks rolled over Ukraine’s borders, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock made this chilling statement : « We buy 50% of our coal from Russia. If we exclude Russia from the SWIFT payment system, the lights in Germany will go out. » In our 44th episode a few weeks ago (« Europe Braces...


Mar 2, 2022

"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. This oft-quoted passage from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks sounds eerily apt to describe Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine over the past week and its...