To try to be a meaningful bridge from Europe to America, that’s a daunting project for even the most agile of European leaders. Understandably, most do not even try. The United States, after all, was born in revolt from Europe—from the “Old World.” The great exception proves the rule. Winston Churchill was a fellow member of the Anglosphere who came to power at a time of crisis, the Second World War, that begged for close cooperation between Europe and America. As for Thatcher, she was never, as Churchill was for Americans, an adopted folk hero. She was a link to the Reagan Revolution and its cadres. In her Thatcher-patterned play for ideological sympathizers across the pond, Giorgia Meloni’s target is what she vaguely calls, in I Am Giorgia, a deeper America…

“Dictators are easy to read. Democratic leaders are more difficult to decipher. However, they can be just as unbalanced as dicta­tors and can play a truly destructive role in our history.” So Patrick Weil writes in the final paragraph of his thought-provoking treatment of Woodrow Wilson as the “madman in the White House.” His case is built on the seemingly irrational obstinacy—“no compromise or conces­sion of any kind,” Wilson vowed—that resulted in the U.S. Senate’s rejection…