On Maneuvers

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Ernst Jünger (1895–1998), the German writer, war hero, man of the Right, and sphinx, claimed that On the Marble Cliffs (Auf den Marmorklippen, 1939) came to him in a dream.1 It may have. Jünger was a devotee and a hoarder of dreams, and this story reads as if it were one of them. Now available in a new, and significantly improved, translation for New York Review Books Classics by Tess Lewis, the book is a tale of mounting horror, in which its two principal protagonists (the unnamed narrator and his brother, Otho, are proxies for Jünger and his younger brother, Friedrich Georg) are participants and yet, in a sense, spectators, as in a dream: “While evil spread across the land like fungus on a rotten log, we delved ever deeper into the mystery of flowers.”…

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Yellen and China — Reality and Illusion

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Although the “rules” that governed the Cold War were never so clearcut as many now imagine, they were a model of clarity compared with how America’s relations with China are currently run. The frank acknowledgment that the U.S. and the USSR were enemies made that contest easier to “manage”— and so, thanks to determination, luck, and the courage of one Soviet lieutenant-colonel, here we still are.

Our relationship with China, by contrast, is an updated version of pre-1914 great power rivalry that has evolved into something that may be more dangerous, not least because our tangled economic relationship makes it hard to say aloud how things really stand. And so it is to Treasury Secretary Yellen’s credit that in a speech at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies on April 20, she attempted to do just that. Her talk was an interesting mix: combining realism with an attempt to cling to older illusions that went, I suspect, beyond mere politeness.

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"The Windsors at War" tells the rest of Edward VIII’s story

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Alexander Larman’s The Crown in Crisis ended with the former Edward VIII, “now exiled to Europe, traveling away in the night.” In his engrossing The Windsors at War, Larman relates what happened next. In some respects, the tale he tells can be read as a pitch-black comedy, something signaled by the dramatis personae that begins it. A “disgraced Yugoslavian prince” makes it into “Society — high” joining, among other grandees, a millionaire murder victim, and no fewer than three “playboys,” one of whom was the millionaire’s suspected murderer. A “would-be royal assassin” fares less well, banished to “Society— low,” along with the likes of a journalist (naturally) and an American engineer “unimpressed by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.”…

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Lessons from Nigel Lawson

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April 3 saw the death of one of the last Thatcherite greats, Nigel Lawson. He was ninety-one. Serving as Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor of the exchequer (finance minister) between 1983 and 1989, Lawson played a vital part in creating a British economic revival so strong that it took the combined efforts of both the Conservative and the Labour parties decades to destroy it…

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Climate policy’s latest threat to property rights

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Say what you will about Jamie Dimon, the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, but when it comes to property rights, he is pretty consistent. He was chairman of the Business Roundtable when, in 2019, in a statement co-signed by a large number of CEOs, it jettisoned its support for shareholder primacy — the idea that the principal purpose of a corporation is to generate return for its shareholders. That was old hat. Now corporations should “deliver value” to all their stakeholders, of which shareholders are only one class.

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Shipwrecks, amputations and polar-bear attacks: the doomed voyage of the Karluk

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The heroic age of polar exploration gave birth to epics as grand and as harsh as the landscapes in which they unfolded. And, as in all the best epics, their protagonists are often of interest not only for what they do, but also for who they are, or, in the case of the Arctic adventurer — “explorer” is too confining a word — Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962), who they pretend to be…

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The Border of Borders

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In 2019, writer and historian Timothy Phillips embarked on a 3,000-mile trek along the route of Europe’s postwar dividing line—almost a third was on foot. The trip began in Norway’s far north and ended where Turkey and Azerbaijan meet, and in his engrossing “Retracing the Iron Curtain,” Mr. Phillips uses that journey to tell the story of this brutal “border of borders,” which in the early days after World War II reached much further than is typically recalled.

And so Mr. Phillips shows up in Bornholm, a Danish island in the Baltic, which was still being “liberated” by the Soviets when Churchill spoke of an Iron Curtain….

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Mr. CHIPS’s Pack Mule

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Those who believe in free markets — or who are familiar with the history of developed economies after they became developed (or, maybe, completed postwar reconstruction) — ought to have little time for industrial policy. Free markets are bottom-up, flexible, and work with their own imperfections. They function through a continuous process of communication that recognizes that the valuable message sent by a price yesterday may be worthless today. Much of their operation is by trial and error. To be sure, there are disasters — plenty of them — but they often point to a better use of capital elsewhere or next time. The prosperity free markets have brought, and the human flourishing they have enabled, is unmatched.

By contrast — and despite some successes — industrial policy has a generally inglorious track record…

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Germany’s folly: Berlin has miscalculated on Russia and China

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The notion that closer trade connections with the West will necessarily set less enlightened nations on a course toward prosperity and liberty is nonsense, but convenient nonsense. Germans have a phrase for it — Wandel durch Handel, change through trade — often given as a justification for their business dealings with Russia and China. Unfortunately, the change they triggered was in Germany. In one case it has been for the worse; in the other it appears to be headed that way…

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