Ross Douthat

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…

The divisions in our country are resilient, the reversion to a 50-50 split seemingly inevitable even amid plague and war and protest. Yet in those regions of America that officially have a professional commitment to debate — the realms of academic and journalistic argument — things are still mostly…

The heyday of the new atheism in Western life, when anti-God tracts by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens bestrode best-seller lists, did not arrive because brilliant new arguments for God’s nonexistence were suddenly discovered. Rather, it arrived because specific events and deeper forces…

In 2015, Barack Obama submitted to interviews with three YouTube stars, one of whom was notable for eating cereal out of a bathtub. It was a moment that opened a window into the media landscape of the future, after the mainstream media as we have known it — while also making that future seem…

The election of 2016, both Donald Trump’s shocking victory and Bernie Sanders’s socialist insurgency, created a sudden swell of ideological ambition. Conservative thinkers rushed to fill in the outlines of Trumpian populism, building various intellectual frameworks for an incipient “post-liberal”…

One of the Biden White House’s greatest achievements, from the perspective of its staffers, if not necessarily the country, has been to deny the press the kind of juicy leaks that were constant under Donald Trump and frequent under his predecessors. Save for a very narrow period of time, that is,…