It's the European Commission

The Problem with Brexit Isn’t Britain, National Review Online, March 6, 2018. "Several decades of studying Britain’s relations with the European Union and its predecessor organizations have left me pessimistic about the U.K.’s ability to secure exit from the E.U. on the terms that appear clearly to be in everyone’s best interests. And a few days in Brussels have led me to conclude that the prospect of a negotiated exit is growing more remote."

The Other Half Smuggled the Gun

At the U.N., Lather, Rinse, and Repeat for Gun Control, National Review Online, June 14, 2016, "The more time you spend at the U.N., the more its activities fall into a pattern. There are big promises, followed by failure and complete unwillingness to look that failure in the face. The affair invariably concludes with the piling up of yet more promises. Like a naughty child, the U.N. responds to evidence of past underperformance with pledges of future overachievement."

More Gun Control, More Guns

At the SHOT Show, Business Booms, National Review Online, January 26, 2016. "The annual SHOT Show — Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trade, i.e., the world’s largest gun show — wrapped up on Friday in Las Vegas. You might think that, with the White House talking gun control again, the mood in the industry aisles would be dour. If so, you’d be wrong. No one in any industry likes being abused by the president. But in the short run, Obama’s latest announcements will have little to no practical effect. And since everything this administration does now is short-run, the industry has less reason than ever to be concerned about the long haul."

When the Tory Music Stops

Tories Count on Labour’s Looniness – For Now, National Review Online, October 9, 2015. "The annual conference of Britain’s Conservative party, which commands a slender but welcome parliamentary majority after the May elections, wrapped up on Wednesday in Manchester. If last year’s conference was an exercise in nerves and jitters, this year’s was a display of confidence — coupled with quiet grumbles from within the party, and shouts of rage from outside of it."

The Other Cost of Shredding Sanctions

The Iran Deal Will Have Disastrous Non-Nuclear Consequences, Too, National Review Online, July 23, 2015. "So far, the most intense criticism of the Obama administration’s deal with Iran has focused on its wildly imbalanced nuclear provisions, under which, in exchange for limited inspections, Iran gets to keep many of its centrifuges, its entire nuclear infrastructure, its research and development programs, and its ballistic-missile program, among many other things. This criticism is certainly warranted, but the deal will have consequences beyond the realm of nuclear weapons: The fate of the regime of Western sanctions on Iran matters just as much, because those sanctions have wide-ranging global implications."

The Ponderous PoA

The U.N. Confuses Gun Ownership with Arms Trafficking, National Review Online, June 9, 2015. "I spent last week at the U.N., watching so-called national experts talk about guns. Turns out most of them weren’t experts. Then again, the ponderousness of the meeting’s title — the Second Meeting of Governmental Experts for the U.N.’s Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat, and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects — gave fair warning that the gathering was unlikely to achieve anything of use."

The Social Vision of the Magna Carta

Magna Carta: It’s Not Just About Rights, National Review Online, June 15, 2015. "The characteristic argument of liberalism today is, first, that every institution — family, church, business, art, education, travel, leisure, entertainment — is fundamentally political, and so not really separate from the political realm at all. It’s all politics all the way down, a claim that would (and did) horrify British conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott. And that claim opens the door to a second one, which is that, as everything is political, all the peaks need to do the same job as the government — and if they do not, they will be forced to do so."

At the UN, the US Fires Back

At a U.N. Meeting on Guns, the U.S. Stands Up Under Fire, National Review, June 5, 2015. "This week, Turtle Bay is hosting the second Meeting of Governmental Experts for the U.N.’s Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat, and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects – mercifully abbreviated to MGE2 and PoA, respectively. The PoA is a strange entity. It’s a political agreement, not a treaty, so it’s never come before the Senate and it has no binding legal force. But that doesn’t make it harmless. It’s one of the many international institutions engaged in creating so-called “norms” that will constrain the U.S., though not the U.N.’s many dictatorships. But despite its painful name and dubious intentions, it’s more amusing than most such institutions."

The UK Election, Featuring An Entirely Wrong Prediction

The UK’s General Election Will Be Either a Mess or a Disaster, National Review, May 7, 2015. "The recurring theme of election coverage in Britain this year has been that no one cares about the campaign. The satirical magazine Private Eye’s cover this week shows a sleeping David Cameron, with the caption “Passionate Cameron catches national mood.” Funny stuff, but wrong: The campaign has failed to move voters not because it’s been dull, but because Britain is balanced on an ideological knife edge, caught between a fading belief in a limited state and a pudgy love affair with banning, restricting, taxing, and spending. That knife-edge balance will find its reflection in today’s results."

The Election, Viewed from Brent Central

Why Britain’s Conservatives are Facing Defeat: They’re Short-Sighted, National Review, May 6, 2015. "The constituency of Brent Central, in northwest London, is a strange place. It’s new, for one thing: It was created by amalgamating and splitting several other constituencies in 2010. If the incumbent member of Parliament, Sarah Teather, had not decided to stand down, it might have stayed Liberal Democrat, which — in this election, when the Liberal Democrats are forecast to lose about half their seats — would have been an achievement for that party."

The Election, Viewed from West Bradford

A Conservative Takes on Britain’s Israel-Hating Windbag Par Excellence, National Review, May 6, 2015. "Bradford in Yorkshire doesn’t look like you’d expect it to. It’s notorious as the home of several of Britain’s worst race riots, and, since 2012, as the parliamentary constituency of George Galloway, the Soviet apologist and anti-Israel demagogue whose 1994 salute to Saddam Hussein’s “courage” marked the start of a new and more vicious phase of his career as a hater of the West. So you’d expect Bradford to be a post-industrial wasteland. Instead, it’s a city with a heart of broad, strong, Yorkshire stone and beautiful vistas over the dales. Rarely does a place look so much better than its reputation. But you know what they say about appearances."

The Election, Viewed from Darlington

In Northern England, the Tories Look to Regain a Little Lost Ground, National Review, May 5, 2015. "Darlington, a market town in County Durham in England’s northeast, is the kind of constituency that the Conservative party needs to win if it wants to form a government after the British general election this Thursday, May 7."

Obama's Paradoxical Role at the SHOT Show

Why Firearms Makers Are So Worried Even as the Second Amendment Is Stronger Than Ever, National Review Online, January 27, 2015. "In one sense, Obama has been very, very good for the U.S. firearms industry. Far from controlling guns, his outspoken anti-firearms advocacy has made him the industry’s top salesman."

Replying to Foolish Claims on Treaties

, National Review Online, January 14, 2015. "The U.S. has been, and continues to be, a prolific negotiator, signer, and ratifier of treaties. The fact that 36 of them are pending in the Senate leads Jett to conclude that something is dangerously amiss. It leads me to an entirely different conclusion: There are a few treaties that are genuinely controversial, and many hundreds that are not. Most of these controversial treaties date from the 1990s, when it became fashionable to spin them from fairy dust."

Israel's Foolish Signature of the ATT

Israel Signs the Arms Trade Treaty: Unhelpful Appeasement for Implacable Enemies, National Review Online, December 29, 2014, "Last Thursday, Israel signed the U.N.’s Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), a treaty that supposedly prevents nations from arming terrorists and mass murderers. But in reality, the treaty’s advocates spend most of their time vehemently criticizing Israel, and, of course, the United States."

On Land Mines, 538 Gets the Data Wrong

FiveThirtyEight Gets Land Mine Data Wrong and Makes It Look Like a Bad Treaty Is Working, National Review Online, December 11, 2014, "The defining aspect of the 2000s isn’t declining land-mine casualties, and the Obama administration’s push to comply with the APL convention is as irrelevant to humanitarian aims as it is dangerous militarily. But the real irony is that while the ICBL pats itself on the back for its progress in defeating the land-mine scourge, and the Obama administration applauds in the background, the most significant new weapon of war in the past decade is the insurgent’s IED. In other words, Lyte’s wrong: The land mine, so far as international law sees it, is not going away"

At the Conservative Party Conference, Cheers All the Way

In Birmingham, Shut Up and Cheer, National Review Online, October 1, 2014. "A regular complaint of British Conservatives is that the party conference is no longer what it once was. It’s not simply small to American eyes; it’s sadly diminished in British ones. There are now no motions from the floor, no debate, and little sense that the party has much interest in reflecting the views of its most active members. As one MP put it to me, the conference is now for lobbyists, corporate donors, and television. Like American political conventions, it exists to affirm the leadership, not to challenge it. Above all, it must be a success."

Norms v. National Security

Obama Says No to Landmines, with Steve Groves, National Review Online, September 29, 2014. "On March 6, 2014, America’s highest-ranking military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, called anti-personnel landmines (APLs) “an important tool in the arsenal of the armed forces of the United States.” Yesterday, President Obama banned the armed forces from using them. Why? To comply with a treaty — the Ottawa Convention — that the United States hasn’t even ratified. The U.S. Senate has not given its advice and consent to the treaty, but the Obama administration still feels compelled, in the words of a State Department spokesman, to “underscore its commitment to the spirit and humanitarian aims of the Ottawa Convention.”

Concluding Reflections on the U.N. PoA

Concluding Reflections on a Pointless U.N. Gathering on Guns, National Review Online, June 25, 2014. "As I noted Monday on the Corner, the biennial meeting of the U.N.’s Programme of Action on Small Arms and Light Weapons (PoA) that concluded on Friday went about as well from the U.S. perspective as it could have done. But that doesn’t mean it’s harmless: The broader context of the PoA is completely wedded to the promotion of gun control, and to the promotion in the U.S. of supposedly binding transnational norms that would reinterpret and hence change the Constitution."

Summing Up the U.N. PoA

At the Close of the U.N.’s Programme of Action, Wins – and A Few Losses – for the U.S., National Review Online, June 23, 2014. "The U.N. Programme of Action on Small Arms and Light Weapons (PoA), which I’ve been covered for the Corner over the past week, wrapped up on Friday afternoon with a consensus outcome — i.e., one that’s unanimously tolerated, if not unanimously liked. In the field of firearms, nothing that the U.N. does can be genuinely good for the U.S., but as these things go, the PoA wasn’t too bad."