Claire Berlinski

Writer, Researcher, and Journalist

Paris

Novelist, essayist, journalist, historian, travel writer, biographer, critic.

Claire Berlinski

Writer, Researcher, and Journalist

Paris

Novelist, essayist, journalist, historian, travel writer, biographer, critic.

Featured
How the French Mourn
When countries refuse to look clearly at the past, they are like neurotics controlled by compulsions they cannot understand. On March 23, an ISIS-affiliated terrorist stormed a supermarket in the small French town of Trèbes, shot two people dead, and took others hostage as human shields. After security forces had negotiated the release of all but one of his captives, a senior gendarme, Arnaud Beltrame, volunteered to take her place.
The American Interest
Featured
The Warlock Hunt
The #MeToo moment has now morphed into a moral panic that poses as much danger to women as it does to men. #Metoo, of course. Women are not going nuts for no reason. We’re fed up with feeling prickles down our spine as we walk alone on dimly lit streets. Fed up with thinking, “If he feels entitled to send me that message, what might he feel entitled to do to if he knew where I lived?”.
The American Interest
Featured
Macron Survived Russia’s Dirty Tricks, but Even Bigger Challenges Await
Beating Marine Le Pen was just a start. Now, the real work begins for the French president-elect. Emmanuel Macron vanquished Marine Le Pen in yesterday’s French presidential election. The result again confounded pollsters, who had largely converged on a p
National Review
Featured
Election Eve
Last-minute surprises notwithstanding, the chances of a Brexit- or Trump-style surprise in France tomorrow seem remote. The presidential run-off takes place on Sunday, and nearly everyone in France is sick of both candidates. Wednesday’s debate didn’t help: Marine spent two-and-a-half solid hours shrieking like a fishwife addled by menopause.
The American Interest
Featured
Guilty Men
Turkish democracy didn’t die all at once in last week’s referndum; it’s been languishing for years. Why did so many in the West fail to notice? On April 16, Turkish voters narrowly approved a referendum that replaced their country’s parliamentary democracy with an “executive presidency.”. Steven Cook, of the Council on Foreign Relations, was quick to pronounce modern Turkey dead.
The American Interest
Featured
Last-Minute Thoughts on Marine Le Pen
By the end of the day, journalists will at last be able to stop writing the same column about “the most unpredictable election ever” and the awful choices France confronts. Voting has begun. The first exit polls will be published when polling stations close at 8 p.m. They’re usually fairly accurate.
Featured
The Dark Continent
The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, by James Kirchick (Yale, 288 pp., $27.50) Journalist James Kirchick’s first book is about Europe, not America, but throughout the reader will sense that it rests upon unvoiced axioms about America and its role in the world. These are axioms upon which no argument can rest confidently in the age of Donald Trump.
National Review
Featured
The Closing of the Conservative Mind
Donald Trump won last year’s Republican civil war and most of the losers surrendered. A buffoonish and narcisistic reality TV star who spent his entire life as a boorish Democrat and who had nothing but contempt for the Republican Party and traditional American conservatism has managed, like a conquering warlord, to rally the vanquished around him.
World Affairs Daily
Featured
Trump, une tragédie américaine
Début septembre, on a pu voir dans le Forum du commandant en chef, une émission de la chaîne NBC, un spectacle étrange. Et quand on lui a demandé comment il comptait s’y prendre, Trump a répondu qu’il fallait « laisser quelques groupes s’emparer du secteur… vous savez, avant ça s’appelait la paix des vainqueurs.
Featured
UNE TRAGÉDIE AMÉRICAINE
VANT MÊME LE RÉSULTAT DE L’ÉLECTION, TRUMP A MONTRÉ SA NOCIVITÉ EN DÉTRUISANT LES VALEURS CONSERVATRICES. À CAUSE DE SES ÉLANS XÉNOPHOBES, PROTECTIONNISTES, PROVINCIAUX ET AUTORITARISTES, LE PARTI RÉPUBLICAIN RESSEMBLE DÉSORMAIS À LA CARICATURE QU’EN FAISAIT LA GAUCHE.
Causeur
Featured
Who is Fethullah Gülen?
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, claims that a Muslim cleric living in rural Pennsylvania was the mastermind of a bloody, failed coup attempt in Turkey last Friday. The attempt saw the unprecedented horror of the Turkish military turning its arms against their own people and mowing them down in the street.
Featured
Barbarism Again in France
Last night, during festivities to celebrate Bastille Day in Nice, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel—only one terrorist has so far been identified—killed 84 people, including ten children, and left 18 more in critical condition. It was the seventh terrorist attack in France in 18 months. People had gathered on the popular Promenade des Anglais.
City Journal
Featured
For Europe, the Only Way Forward Is Together
I share Daniel Johnson’s concern about Europe’s future—although not always for the reasons he cites. In general, I believe he conflates Europe’s domestic pathologies with the effects on Europe of global events, not all of which are of Europe’s making and not all of which are as grave as he stipulates.
Featured
Paris Is Worth a Mass
Is it right that Paris gets a mass rally while Boko Haram’s slaughter of thousands in Nigeria merits hardly a shrug? But it’s the response Paris and Nigeria both deserve. This is what civilization looks like. I strolled into the greatest terrorist bloodbath in Paris since the Nazis ran the city.
The American Interest
Featured
The Cold War’s Arab Spring: How the Soviets Created Today’s Middle East
Thus did botched decolonization result in endless instability. The most intractable of the regional conflicts to which this gave rise, that between the Arabs and Israelis, is attributed in this narrative to Israel’s unwillingness to accede to Palestinian national aspirations. Thus did the region become a breeding ground for radicalism, intensified by Cold War rivalry between the superpowers, who replaced the European colonizers as the region’s meddling overlords.
Tablet Magazine
Government Motors 1975
After the Second World War, the United Kingdom’s newly elected Labour government resolved to build of Britain a New Jerusalem. It nationalized the commanding heights of the economy and inaugurated the cradle-to-grave welfare state. By the 1970s, the UK faced an economic crisis unrivaled since the Great Depression.
City Journal

About

Claire Berlinski

Writing novels

Writing essays

Journalism

Travel writing

Historical research

Writing biographies

Criticism

I'm an American novelist, freelance journalist, travel writer, biographer, historian, editor and consultant who lives amid a menagerie of adopted stray animals in Paris. I'm the author of There is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters. I'm also the author of Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's crisis is America's, Too, and two spy novels: Loose Lips and Lion Eyes. I'm the Editor-in-Chief of The Cosmopolitan Globalist, an online journal exploring the age of Caesarism and the global challenge to liberal democracy.

https://claireberlinski.substack.com