John O’Sullivan

John O’Sullivan

JOHN O’SULLIVAN (Liverpool, 1942) is editor-at-large of National Review in New York where he served as Editor-in-Chief for ten years. He was a Special Advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street and later assisted her in the writing of her two volumes of memoirs. He has held a wide variety of senior editorial positions in the media on both sides of the Atlantic. He is the founder and co-chairman of the Atlantic Initiative, an international bipartisan organisation dedicated to reinvigorating and expanding the Atlantic community of democracies, launched at the Congress of Prague in May 1996 by President Vaclav Havel and Lady Thatcher. His book, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister (on Pope John Paul II, President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher), was published in Hungarian, too, in 2010. Until 2011, he was the Executive Editor of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in Prague. Currently he is the President of the Danube Institute, Budapest.

TO GYULA KODOLÁNYI AT 80

Words quarrel, ideas clash, truths hide, theories mislead, deadlines have seized strategic chokepoints threatening paralysis, supplies of semicolons have failed to arrive on time, metaphors and similes are suspected of being enemy agents, irony and litotes have changed the road signs sending the unwary in the wrong directions, and all

POSTMODERN WARS
AND THEIR LESSONS

In August 2008, Vladimir Putin provoked a war with Georgia by giving its president, Mikhail Saakashvili, the poisoned choice of either losing two ‘breakaway’ regions of his country to pro-Russian separatists and Russian ‘peacekeepers’ illegally present there or of risking an attempt to recover them by military action. Saakashvili chose

ATHWART HISTORY

A Review of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for AmericanConservatism by Matthew Continetti ‘The right’ is a term that, as we are currently reminded by the travails of Republicans in the US and Tories in Britain, covers a multitude of sinners. And the longer the period under inspection, the bigger

UKRAINE DIARY

‘A man who starts a war enters a dark room.’ I sent out this quote in a tweet a few weeks before the start of the full-scale Russia–Ukraine War. To avoid any possible misunderstanding, I pointed out that though the words were those of Adolf Hitler whom I would normally

AMERICA INTO THE WHIRLWIND

My earlier odyssey through America’s fruited plains ended with a prediction that the recent struggle between the country’s twin political hysterias of left and right was starting to trend in the right’s direction after a year in which the left had dominated the field. At the same time, the struggle

AMERICA AS THE CLIMATE CHANGES

America is often said to have taken a ‘holiday from history’ between the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the jihadist attacks on two symbols of American power—New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington—on 11 September 2001. President Clinton, who was the most powerful man

AMERICA AS THE CLIMATE CHANGES

America is often said to have taken a ‘holiday from history’ between the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the jihadist attacks on two symbols of American power—New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington—on 11 September 2001. President Clinton, who was the most powerful man

REFLECTIONS ON ‘A NATION DISMEMBERED’

“But obligations are reciprocal. Those who gained at Trianon have obligations as well. Their obligation is to shape countries with an absolute minimum of injustice so that they can ask for loyalty from the citizens placed wholesale under their sovereignty without asking that they surrender their souls too.” We are

AFTER SHE LOST, DID MARGARET THATCHER WIN?

By most historical standards 1989 should have been a year of triumph for Margaret Thatcher – and judged in a historical perspective, it was exactly that. It was the year that saw the fulfilment of her main political and personal hopes with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse

CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS THEN AND NOW

“As for almost all other Westerners in 1966 and later, we looked at the theory-intoxicated antics of the cultural revolutionaries with amazement and thought “it could never happen here”. Well, it is happening here now, of course, at least in Britain and the United States, and even in parts of