Looking for titillating summer reading? Interested in stories about espionage, murder, power, and ill-begotten wealth? Then I have just the thing for you to take to the beach: The report of the British Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament.

Released last week, the report focuses on "Russian Hostile State Activity." It begins on a nostalgic note: "The dissolution of the USSR was a time of hope in the West. Western thinking was, if not to integrate Russia fully, at least to ensure that it became a partner. By the mid-2000s, it was clear that this had not been successful."

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A year ago, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asked a group of scholars "to furnish advice on human rights grounded in our nation's founding principles." In normal times, this would be a dog-bites-man story - at most. But we don't live in normal times.

So, Mr. Pompeo's naming of a bipartisan Commission on Unalienable Rights, chaired by Harvard legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon, author of a book about Eleanor Roosevelt, provoked outrage, anger, and intolerance.

An example that sticks in my mind: A staff writer for The New Yorker suggested that Mr. Pompeo should be disqualified from any discussions about human rights because he "was, for many years, a Sunday-school teacher and a church deacon."

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Peter Beinart is at it again. If you don't know to whom I'm referring you might count yourself lucky, not bother to read the paragraphs that follow, and pick up a summer novel instead.

For those not dissuaded: Mr. Beinart is a writer and TV commentator who has long wished to be regarded as a bold thinker, someone who says what lesser men dare not – though nothing that could possibly trigger the exquisite sensitivities of those who identify as "woke."

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The Cold War was an endless war until, to the surprise of most political scientists, intelligence analysts and astrologers, it abruptly ended.

Was the Cold War necessary? After World War II, it seemed preferable to the alternatives: A new hot war to drive the Soviets out of Central and Eastern Europe, or leaving the Western European countries we had liberated from Nazi totalitarianism to the tender mercies of Communist totalitarianism.

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If I use the term "restrainer" what does that call to mind? A device that keeps an infant safe in the back seat of an automobile? Something Nurse Ratchet used to subdue unruly patients?

No, what I'm referring to today are those eager to see the United States pass on the hot and heavy torch of global leadership. That's what a war-weary and no-longer-so-great Britain did following World War II. A question that should arise: To whom would Americans pass it? Sweden's leaders are good enough but not strong enough. China's rulers are strong enough but not good enough.

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