Ross Douthat

When Donald Trump was first elected president, foreign policy seemed like the zone of greatest danger, the place where a political novice promising to remake the world order was most likely to blunder into true catastrophe. Instead, Trump’s first-term foreign policy was broadly successful, with…

On Thursday the prime minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, addressed her country in what was effectively a wartime statement, regarding the sudden appearance of mysterious drones over critical infrastructure, civilian and military. I say “effectively” because normally a wartime statement…

Conservatism on college campuses has traditionally mixed tweedy intellectualism, shock-value provocation and ruthless training for future G.O.P. operatives. All of these forms — and I say this with familiar affection — have tended to attract nerds and dorks and oddballs, campus outsiders, the…

A limp caudillo. That was a phrase I once applied to Donald Trump’s pretense to be a strongman, in a first term that was actually characterized by the imperial presidency’s retreat. Barack Obama and George W. Bush were far more successful at consolidating presidential power, and Trump 1.0 mostly…

Scientists studying the cosmos often speculate about hypothetical forces that might explain peculiar data or results. For instance, some astronomers have suggested that our solar system has an extra planet, way beyond the demoted Pluto, whose effects explain certain other celestial movements. And…

When future historians study the arc of American foreign policy, they will probably fold all the major events since 2020 — our pell-mell withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran — into a unified narrative of global conflict. If…

Must any pair of would-be great men of history always find a path to conflict? Ask Caesar and Pompey, Octavian and Antony, Lennon and McCartney. But the specific thing they fight about is less predictable. I would not have guessed, six months ago, that Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s version of the…

By general consensus, if the policies of President Trump’s first administration were a compromise between his impulses and the doctrines of the pre-Trump Republican Party, then Trump 2.0 is Trumpism in full. The old order is dissolved, the Bush and Reagan Republicans are exiled or subjugated, and…

Pope Francis, who passed to his reward on the morning after Easter at age 88, was a version of the liberal pope that many Catholics had earnestly desired all through the long reign of John Paul II and the shorter one of Benedict XVI — a man whose worldview was shaped and defined by the Second…

There are two related theories of what Donald Trump’s dramatic revision of the global trade system is intended to accomplish. First, the goal is to revitalize American manufacturing, our capacity to build at home and export to the world. The global free trade system that took shape in the late…