When Alain Delon died this August, I happened to be in France. I can’t say I was paying much attention to the news. How was he mourned in the papers? I have no idea. But I do remember feeling this strange…

What will foreign policy be like under Trump II? Biden-Harris hand over a weakened global deterrence, with major wars in the heart of Europe and at hotspots in the Middle East, including Israel attacking…

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Culture The Original Sigma Male The strange, enduring appeal of Alain Delon’s gangster films. Credit: image via Getty Images When Alain Delon died this August, I happened to be in France. I can’t say I was paying much attention to the news. How was he mourned in the papers? I have no idea. But I do remember feeling this strange sensation that, dead or alive, the actor’s figure was inescapable. One day I walked into a bookstore in a small city in Brittany, and there he was, a life-size cutout, wearing the tan raincoat and fedora of Le Samouraï, propped next to shelves showcasing the film, along with the two subsequent movies he made under Jean-Pierre Melville’s direction, Le Cercle Rouge and Un flic, and an array of other neo-noir favorites. I found it charming that the recently deceased actor should come back so soon to haunt the bookstores of provincial France. My wife only smiled when I told her: She did not share my amusement. Whenever he comes up in conversation, she reminds me that while many women appreciate Alain Delon, the actor’s most fervent admirers are men.  It’s funny how these things work. Delon was billed as one of the great international sex symbols of his generation, with good reason. He had a perfect face, piercing eyes, and an exuberant smile—assets that won him starring parts in some of the great romances of the 1960s, notably Visconti’s Leopard and Antonioni’s L’eclisse. But his lasting appeal has proven to be of a different order entirely. Delon’s most memorable performances are those in his gangster films, of which Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge are the best, where he plays smartly dressed and enigmatic criminals who came from nowhere and are going nowhere. There is a cool hardness in them. Delon’s face may be perfectly formed, but when he curls his lip and pulls the trigger of a gun, the smile is transformed into something metallic, heartless.  To the intellectually sensitive young man, alienated as much from himself as he is from his surroundings, the attraction of this Delon is often overpowering. (I have known a few to buy raincoats matching Delon’s after first seeing his Melville films.) Here, at last, is a hero who strides through the world completely unfazed by the petty rituals of daily life; he is bound only by his byzantine moral code. These attitudes shade many of Delon’s dramatic performances as well: the sadistic boyfriend in La piscine or the amoral art dealer in Monsieur Klein. It is unsurprising that his breakout role was as the first screen version of Tom Ripley, in René Clément’s Plein soleil, where he simultaneously plays the charmer and the lone wolf. You could say that Alain Delon was the original “sigma male.” I find it funny how frequently I run into people who have gone through a serious Delon phase for this very reason. I’ve discussed the subject in bars, in airports, and on trains, sometimes with perfect strangers. A few years ago, I went down to the bank to apply for a new credit card. It was the day that Jean-Paul Belmondo had died, and I fell into conversation with the teller, an older immigrant from Tunisia, about the French films of his youth. In those days, he told me, actors such as Belmondo and Delon were heroes to every young man in the Francosphere because, in their on-screen personae, they adopted an icy insouciance when met with certain doom. That attitude seemed like the only honest way to confront the world, especially for those coming of age in former colonial outposts, where the future was as uncertain then as the present is now. It was for similar reasons that The Smiths idolized Delon on the cover of The Queen Is Dead, where his flippance in the face of uncertainty is transported to post-imperial, post-industrial England. Of course, there are inherent limitations to this sort of character. And, once noticed, the spell is broken. To the young man who identifies with Delon, Le Samouraï is thrilling. To an older one who has a little more distance, it is just depressing. Melville wrote the movie specifically for Delon, in part, I think, because he understood that the actor could effectively convey the deep, numbing sadness that accompanies life outside of society.  In the film’s title card, Melville informs the audience that “there is no greater solitude than that of the samurai.” And for the next hour and forty-five minutes, he depicts its effects on a hitman who, for the sake of practicing his art, has chosen a diminished, monk-like existence. When he’s not shooting people, he’s feeding his bird, rearranging his water bottle collection, or straightening his fedora in the mirror, which, even when the police recognize him in it, he refuses to remove out of stubborn commitment to his bit. “He is not normal,” remarks a police commissioner investigating a murder performed by the hitman, and this observation alone convinces him of Delon’s guilt. Jim Jarmusch’s loose remake, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, spools out that observation in an extreme manner, by placing Forest Whitaker in Delon’s role as an high-functioning autistic living in New Jersey according to his own jazzed-up version of the samurai code. It’s an amusing movie, but overdone—Melville makes the same point without clinically pathologizing his characters. Melville filmed two endings for Le Samouraï, both involving a climactic shoot-out in a jazz club. In the first version, Delon is shot, and he falls to the ground with a huge grin on his face. In the second, he is simply obliterated by the cops, and that’s that. Melville chose the second ending for the final cut, and so much the better: those who live by the lonely code of the samurai die by it. The post The Original Sigma Male appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs What Will Trump II Do for Foreign Policy? Defusing China and Iran are at the top of the list. Credit: Evan El-Amin What will foreign policy be like under Trump II? Biden-Harris hand over a weakened global deterrence, with major wars in the heart of Europe and at hotspots in the Middle East, including Israel attacking on the ground inside southern Lebanon again for the first time since 2006. Iran is ever-closer to being a nuclear threshold state, and no one has talked to North Korea for four long years. American troops are on the ground in Israel. There is increased Chinese provocation in Asia. Yet Joe Biden’s China policy is unnecessarily adversarial, impractical, and dangerous. China was artificially reimagined as an enemy-in-a-box as the wars of terror sputtered out. Biden envisions China as an autocratic foe for democracy to wage a global struggle against. “On my watch,” Joe said, “China will not achieve its goal to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world.” (As if they had asked.) Biden went on to claim the world was at an inflection point to determine “whether or not democracy can function in the 21st century.” In Biden’s neo-Churchillian view, the U.S. and what the heck, the whole free world he believes he is president of, are in a deathmatch with China for global hearts and minds. What of Obama? His administration saw the successful Russian invasion of Crimea with little U.S. reaction, and the nagging presence of the U.S. military in the Middle East, including expansion of Americans fighting into Libya, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere. Despite this, the world suffered the rise of the Islamic State and chaotic immigration into Europe. The George W. Bush administration launched two full-on wars of choice without any strategy for victory, destroying American credibility in the wake of the devastating events of 9/11 it failed to stop. Millions died. Trump’s foreign policy, on the other hand, saw a broader sharing of costs within NATO, albeit at the price of being falsely criticized to this day for threatening to abandon the alliance. The United States pulled most of its troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan as Trump took steps to make good on his campaign promise to wrap up the neocons’ endless wars. More importantly, Trump did not initiate any new conflicts in the region, as had Clinton in Somalia, Obama and Bush, everywhere else. The Doha agreement with the Taliban provided an exit strategy for the U.S. from Afghanistan, however poorly executed by the Biden administration. The Abraham Accords, a series of normalization deals, lowered tensions in the Middle East, and the ISIS Caliphate was eliminated within Iraq, oddly with the mostly off-the-record help of the Iranians. For the first time in decades there was the ever-so-slight possibility of progress with North Korea as Trump became the first sitting president to meet with its leader (and was mocked for it by Democrats). “Results matter,” says Foreign Policy, “and the relative peace and prosperity that prevailed during Trump’s first term may make him the most effective U.S. foreign-policy president in the post–Cold War era.” As for Term II, Trump makes clear wrapping up the war in Ukraine is a top priority, going as far as to promise to end it in the months between being reelected in November and Inauguration Day in January. While that timetable may not be possible (because, among other things, Citizen Trump would be violating the Logan Act by conducting diplomacy on behalf of the United States) it does make it crystal clear that Trump will not continue to feed weapons and money into the meat grinder outside Kiev that seems to produce no positive results. Whether he has some special relationship with Putin or not, Trump will radically change policy by opening rounds of diplomacy with Russia. Russia at this point appears ripe for discussions, seeing its efforts to make ground progress inside Ukraine going nowhere. As in most inconclusive wars, the resulting “peace” agreement will be messy. Russia has no reason to quit the field empty handed and Ukraine will no doubt have to cede territory, maybe under the guise of a “Russian-controlled buffer zone” or some other clever excusing term. No one can today say what the cost to each side in men and dollars has been but it has been substantial and thus free from the nationalist pornography of the Biden administration about the “free people of Ukraine,” some sort of deal will be likely. A Republican-controlled Congress will make things move even quicker. With China, Trump may choose to refine the struggle more as competition, primarily economic, between near-peers than WWIII-lite. Between 1991 and 2022, Taiwan invested $200 billion in China, more even than China’s investment in the United States. China remains Taiwan’s largest trading partner. “One country, two systems” has not only kept the peace for decades, it has proven darn profitable for all sides. As Deng Xiao Ping said of this type of modus vivendi, “Who cares what color a cat is as long as it catches mice?” China might one day seek to buy Taiwan, but until then, why drop bombs on one of its best customers? They even invited Taiwan to the Beijing Olympics and participated alongside them in Paris. Any cross-strait violence would also affect U.S.–China relations, another incentive against war. Total Chinese investment in the U.S. is over $145 billion, and American investment in China has passed $220 billion. When Covid shut down world logistics, everyone learned the American economy is dependent on Chinese manufacturing and vice-versa. China is the second-largest foreign holder of U.S. government debt. If something interfered with all that commerce, China would have to find a way to eat unfinished iPhones. Occasional saber-rattling aside, the Chinese are literally betting the house on America’s continued economic engagement, not war over some miserable little islands in the South China Sea. Expect Trump, in recognition of the economic struggle, to maintain or expand the China tariffs he put into place and Joe Biden grew. America will continue to build out its Navy in the Pacific via strategic cooperation with Japan, South Korea, Australia, and perhaps India (the U.S. Pacific Command has relabeled itself the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command). Indeed, if Trump really wanted to put pressure on China, he would expand relations with India, the world’s largest democracy. In East Asia, Trump’s insistence on greater burden-sharing with South Korea and Japan did not, as POLITICO worried at the time, “push the bilateral relationships near the breaking point.” Instead, it worked. It would not be surprising for Trump to try to restart a relationship with North Korea. His nascent efforts came very close to being Nobel Peace Prize stuff, something clearly on Trump’s mind. Lessening the nuclear threat against Japan and South Korea, as well as diluting the value of North Korea as a buffer state for China in East Asia, are all goals worth pursuing. The North has demurred on testing nukes during the four “out years” of Biden (North Korea last tested a nuclear weapon in 2017), perhaps as a signal it is still willing to talk with a suitor should one have the guts to knock on the door. Trump in moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem showed he is willing to make diplomatic moves against Tel Aviv’s desires, and he may do something similar with Gaza. Trump telegraphed his strategy to Netanyahu: Do what you need to do in Gaza but get it done soon and declare your victory. It is hard to say what role the hostages, including American citizens, will play in all this other than as complicators. Biden has essentially and shamefully made believe there are no Americans involved to remove the U.S. from any actionable role. Trump could go another way, demanding behind closed doors the release of the American hostages. If the hostages remain, he’ll unleash the IDF from American diplomatic pressure. There is rarely a “win-win” scenario in the Middle East in general and Israeli–Arab affairs specifically; this is no exception. Which leaves Iran, another strategic tender spot left substantively untouched by the Biden administration despite its expanding role in the region and influence globally. The Biden administration had hoped to seal a revised nuclear deal with Iran, says Foreign Policy, but when those negotiations failed early on, the West was left without a backup plan for stopping Iran’s nuclear program. Trump in 2018 pulled out of the nuclear agreement negotiated by the Obama administration, leaving a vacuum in policy that 47 needs to fill effectively in Term II. Trump’s Term I focused on isolating Iran, which he calls “the leading state sponsor of terrorism.” On the other hand, Trump, speaking to reporters in New York City, didn’t go into detail about what he, if reelected, would seek in any agreement, but said that talks are necessary because of the threat posed by Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons: “We have to make a deal, because the consequences are impossible. We have to make a deal.” Iran’s new reformist president says he, too, wants to rekindle the nuclear deal. Failure on Iran will continue to drag the whole of the Middle East further down the path toward nuclear brinkmanship, a poor legacy for Term II. Trump would do well to remember the old diplomatic adage: If you don’t talk with your adversaries, you will certainly hear from them. The post What Will Trump II Do for Foreign Policy? appeared first on The American Conservative.

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by Geoffrey Grinder, Now The End Begins: Five explosions were reported heard across Tehran and the nearby city of Karaj early on Saturday morning, according to Iranian media, in what is alleged to be the beginning of an Israeli retaliatory attack on Iran. Earlier today, we told you about the shipment of US F-16s that arrived […]