https://pjmedia.com/michaelledeen/feedPJ Media is a leading news site covering culture, politics, faith, homeland security, and more. Our reporters and columnists provide original, in-depth analysis from a variety of perspectives.en-usWed, 08 Apr 2026 17:42:49 -0400<![CDATA[I worry about Trump’s foreign policy. A lot. He is forever trying to make deals, whether we’re talking about Iran, Russia, China, the EU, the Middle East, Cuba or North Korea. He measures “success” by the deal. No deal, no success.]]>Mon, 05 Aug 2019 09:25:52 -0400<![CDATA[Michael Ledeen]]>https://pjmedia.com/michael-ledeen/2019/08/05/trumps-deals-will-not-be-sufficient-to-bring-down-enemy-regimes-n188879<![CDATA[If I were writing a fictional account of the effort to prove there was “collusion” between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russians, and the subsequent quest to drive him out of office, I would include a lot of material on how the intelligence services of the United States and Great Britain worked together.]]>Sat, 20 Jul 2019 17:48:56 -0400<![CDATA[Michael Ledeen]]><![CDATA[2016 presidential election]]><![CDATA[britain]]><![CDATA[Donald Trump]]><![CDATA[Russia]]>https://pjmedia.com/michael-ledeen/2019/07/20/did-the-brits-collude-on-trump-russia-n188875<![CDATA[So the Iranians—through the voice of President Rouhani—are going to enrich more uranium.  My guess is that they’ve been doing it all along, and the announcement simply confirms their past behavior.  I doubt that our spies know the details, and the Iranians love to tell tall tales, if necessary for a thousand and one nights.]]>Mon, 08 Jul 2019 16:45:14 -0400<![CDATA[Michael Ledeen]]><![CDATA[Iran]]><![CDATA[iran nuclear deal]]>https://pjmedia.com/michael-ledeen/2019/07/08/reality-check-iranian-faith-in-the-12th-imam-is-stronger-than-americas-negotiating-patience-n188871<![CDATA[Among the urgent tasks we must quickly undertake, few are so urgent as a thoroughgoing revamping of the intelligence community. At the moment, it isn’t very impressive in either of the two main activities with which it’s entrusted: spying on our enemies and supporting our friends. You can see this easily enough. The Israelis, not the CIA et al., made off with the Iranians’ secret nuclear plans. So much for effective espionage. And there are two very closely linked enemies, Iran and Venezuela, that should be prime targets for subversion, but we don’t seem to be making good progress.]]>Wed, 29 May 2019 16:25:03 -0400<![CDATA[Michael Ledeen]]>https://pjmedia.com/michael-ledeen/2019/05/29/its-time-for-a-thoroughgoing-revamping-of-the-intelligence-community-n188866<![CDATA[It seems we may have an important defector from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a senior commander no less. The news first appeared on Banafshah Zand’s indispensable website on the crimes of the Islamic Republic of Iran:]]>Thu, 25 Apr 2019 14:01:25 -0400<![CDATA[Michael Ledeen]]>https://pjmedia.com/michael-ledeen/2019/04/25/senior-revolutionary-guard-corps-commander-reportedly-defects-to-the-u-s-n188862<![CDATA[I used to be a professional bridge player, a member of the “Omar Sharif Bridge Circus.” Sure, I believe in omens. Like most all card players I’m superstitious. But my Italian friend Christian Rocca is surely right to point out that we have to start with the hard facts about the Notre Dame fire: the cathedral wasn’t destroyed, most of its treasures were saved, the damage will be repaired, nobody died, and the fire was not an omen of the decline and fall of Western civilization. If anything, the very sad accident—as it seems to have been—suggests a very different theme, a theme of Western strength and endurance, perhaps even Western vitality and faith that many of our wisest and most eloquent thinkers see in perilous decline.]]>Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:31:25 -0400<![CDATA[Michael Ledeen]]>https://pjmedia.com/michael-ledeen/2019/04/16/notre-dame-a-bad-omen-or-a-sign-of-the-strength-of-western-civilization-n188857<![CDATA[March 31 marks the anniversary of the date on which, in 1492, Spanish Jews were faced with the choice of converting to Catholicism or leaving.  The edict was driven by the queen, “Isabella the Catholic,” and was issued despite widespread opposition throughout the kingdom, including Sicily, where most of the Italian Jews lived and which was ruled by a Spanish viceroy.  Some converted, some pretended to convert and maintained Jewish practices in secrecy for centuries, but the bulk shipped out, many to the Ottoman Empire, some to Amsterdam (which became known as the “second Jerusalem”), a much smaller number to Palestine.  Henceforth the Spanish Kingdom was firmly under the brutal hand of the Inquisition, whose chief was the infamous Torquemada.]]>Tue, 02 Apr 2019 12:04:41 -0400<![CDATA[Michael Ledeen]]>https://pjmedia.com/michael-ledeen/2019/04/02/the-failed-spanish-inquisition-offers-an-important-lesson-to-modern-anti-semites-n188853<![CDATA[What, then, was it all about? I think I know. It was all about General Flynn. I think it began on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, when Flynn changed the way we did intelligence against the likes of Zarqawi, bin Laden, the Taliban, and their allies.]]>Tue, 26 Mar 2019 14:24:09 -0400<![CDATA[Michael Ledeen]]>https://pjmedia.com/michael-ledeen/2019/03/26/make-no-mistake-the-mueller-investigation-was-all-about-flynn-n188849<![CDATA[I’ve long been forecasting that the Democratic Party was headed for a replay of its last big crackup, when it nominated George McGovern for president in 1968, and he carried only one state. So far, the Dems’ big field of candidates makes me think something slightly different:]]>Sun, 24 Mar 2019 17:31:03 -0400<![CDATA[Michael Ledeen]]>https://pjmedia.com/michael-ledeen/2019/03/24/dems-go-third-party-n188845<![CDATA[Yes, the radical Islamists and their allies, the radical Leftists, hate Jews and Americans. Bernard Lewis wrote a masterpiece about it entitled What Went Wrong?, explaining that the Middle Eastern Islamic world constitutes one vast area of failure. Unwilling or incapable of taking the blame for this epic failure, they blamed it on the West &#8212; above all, on the United States and the Jews. Ironically, they imported these doctrines from the West they hate.]]>Mon, 11 Mar 2019 10:04:37 -0400<![CDATA[Michael Ledeen]]>https://pjmedia.com/michael-ledeen/2019/03/11/multicultural-jew-hatred-failed-ideologies-bond-over-scapegoating-n188841<![CDATA[I have long said that the most important human instrument for perceiving when a revolution is on the verge of success is the nose. It’s not the mind, as you can easily see by the “intelligence community’s” repeated failure to see one coming. For a revolution to succeed, the current leader must sense that his or her time has come, that the forces of history have turned against him, and that he or she had best arrange a safe haven, or make a deal with the revolutionaries, instead of dedicating all efforts to prolonging his or her rule, and the dominating system.]]>Fri, 01 Mar 2019 15:08:54 -0500<![CDATA[Michael Ledeen]]>https://pjmedia.com/michael-ledeen/2019/03/01/what-does-a-successful-revolution-smell-like-n188837<![CDATA[Like most of us, I was at first convinced that the Internet would be a great weapon in the fight for freedom.  I figured that the wide-open exchange of ideas would turn the world into one big college campus (the way it used to be, not today’s weird 1984-type version). I was even temporarily seduced by Wikipedia and the like, believing that errors would be quickly corrected.]]>Fri, 15 Feb 2019 08:14:22 -0500<![CDATA[Michael Ledeen]]>https://pjmedia.com/michael-ledeen/2019/02/15/power-and-the-internet-n188833<![CDATA[His name is Touraj Esmaeeli, and you haven’t heard it before.  And yet, he’s a big story.  He worked as a top advisor to the Iranian intelligence service, as an expert on that country’s cyberwar against the United States and other Western countries.]]>Sun, 03 Feb 2019 10:18:24 -0500<![CDATA[Michael Ledeen]]>https://pjmedia.com/michael-ledeen/2019/02/03/iranian-defectors-n188828<![CDATA[Years ago, when I went to Venezuela to write a report on the country’s seemingly unstoppable boom, I was told that “God is Venezuelan.”  Oil aplenty.  Trees grow incredibly fast.  Fruit is just an arm’s reach away.  Indeed, downtown Caracas featured something I hadn’t—and haven’t—seen anywhere else:  an upwardly mobile slum.  Poor people would move to Venezuela, borrow some money for a down payment, buy a house, and within a relatively short period, sell it for a profit and move up the ladder of life.  Plus, it was a democracy (Arthur Schlesinger was a huge fan). Plus, it was pro-American.]]>Fri, 25 Jan 2019 08:13:50 -0500<![CDATA[Michael Ledeen]]>https://pjmedia.com/michael-ledeen/2019/01/25/whats-at-stake-in-the-venezuelan-struggle-n188823<![CDATA[Real pizza is Neapolitan, having been invented and perfected in Naples in the 19thcentury and named after the queen of recently-unified Italy (the Margherita).  No wonder there is an organization—the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (the True Neapolitan Pizza Association)&#8211;devoted to its propagation and protection.]]>Fri, 18 Jan 2019 16:17:17 -0500<![CDATA[Michael Ledeen]]>https://pjmedia.com/michael-ledeen/2019/01/18/book-your-trip-now-to-the-pizza-olympics-n188800<![CDATA[The Israelis captured copious secret Iranian documents that demonstrate the Islamic Republic long worked on underground nuclear facilities at Parchin. Now a detailed analysis of the Iranian scheme has come out, and it warrants close attention. The analysis shows that the Iranians’ secret nuclear program was successfully hidden from Western intelligence services (including our own) and from the IAEA, the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, which is supposed to monitor Iranian operations.]]>Mon, 14 Jan 2019 21:00:51 -0500<![CDATA[Michael Ledeen]]>https://pjmedia.com/michael-ledeen/2019/01/14/what-is-iran-up-to-n188795<![CDATA[Like all presidents beginning with Jimmy Carter, President Trump isn’t promoting the downfall of the Iranian regime. He loves sanctions, somehow believes that economic misery will eventually provoke the Iranian people to rise against Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his henchmen, and periodically sends our troops to kill proxies and members of the Revolutionary Guards.]]>Mon, 24 Dec 2018 10:50:37 -0500<![CDATA[Michael Ledeen]]>https://pjmedia.com/michael-ledeen/2018/12/24/neither-mattis-nor-trump-recognize-the-scope-of-this-fight-n188791<![CDATA[U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan is scheduled to sentence General Mike Flynn on Tuesday morning, and there’s a lot at stake. To begin with, there’s the future of a fine man who transformed the way we do battlefield intelligence and the ensuing operations against our enemies in Iraq, where we won in large part because Flynn’s (and General Stan McChrystal’s) new tactics, and then in Afghanistan, again in tandem with McChrystal.]]>Sun, 16 Dec 2018 20:51:07 -0500<![CDATA[Michael Ledeen]]>https://pjmedia.com/michael-ledeen/2018/12/16/michael-flynns-ordeal-and-ours-n188787<![CDATA[We moved to Washington from Rome in 1977. It wasn’t much, frankly, after years in Italy. The most dramatic difference was restaurants. Rome was full of great and wonderfully affordable eateries, but Washington, aside from a few great dives, only had 3-4 spots with food worth the expense. For the most part, you didn’t go to restaurants; you went to dinner parties at people’s homes.]]>Sun, 02 Dec 2018 16:10:27 -0500<![CDATA[Michael Ledeen]]>https://pjmedia.com/michael-ledeen/2018/12/02/its-time-to-move-corruptible-washington-bureaucrats-into-flyover-country-n188782<![CDATA[So here we are, at Thanksgiving, surrounded by a crowd of arrogant, ignorant, self-proclaimed superior people who proclaim, as was once declared about Vietnam, that the only way to save the country is to destroy it. That the European welfare state is the proper model for us, and that our electoral choices are mostly wrong. And evil. The first anti-American president put it bluntly in an interview with with one of his cronies, saying Americans are &#8220;confused, blind, shrouded with hate, anger, racism, mommy issues.&#8221;]]>Sun, 25 Nov 2018 18:58:34 -0500<![CDATA[Michael Ledeen]]>https://pjmedia.com/michael-ledeen/2018/11/25/the-anti-american-americans-n188778