Our common European civilization—of which the old American Republic is an integral part, or else it is nothing —is rooted in “the glory that was Greece.” Our spiritual and intellectual mentors are to be found among Greek thinkers, scientists, and artists. This inheritance is reflected even in the way we repeat the political follies of...
Two centuries after de Maistre, we still encounter Frenchmen, Italians, and Russians; as for “man,” we have yet come across him anywhere. Nations still survive, in spite of the attempts of dictatorial “Western” ruling elites to destroy them, and families, and all other communities bonded by kinship, language, faith, and myth. Those elites are united...
At the European Union summit in Nice last December France initiated plans for a new European military structure. While the stated purpose of the emerging 15-member alliance is to complement NATO rather than replace it, there is growing concern in Washington that the ultimate objective of French and German strategic planners is to sever the...
A thousand editorialists have described Vojislav Kostunica, Yugoslavia’s new president, as a “moderate nationalist.” In fact, Kostunica is no more “nationalistic” than Jacques Chirac or Vaclav Havel. He is a self-described Serbian patriot, who says he wants for his people no more—and certainly no less—than he is prepared to grant to others. That is enough...
The Serbs, after a decade of being treated as the designated demons of Europe, were, in the first week of October, transformed by Western media and politicians into a nation of Walesas and Havels. The ethnic cleansing and mass rape stories were gone, replaced by those of freedom, democracy, and gallantry. As Matthew Parris remarked...
On September 1, President Clinton announced that he would leave to his successor the decision on whether to move from research and development to deployment of the National Missile Defense (NMD). The announcement to shelve the NMD was long overdue. The United States came very close to spending billions of dollars—and risking a confrontation with...
President Clinton failed to restart the Middle East peace process at the United Nations’ “millennial” summit in New York in September. In meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Clinton made one final attempt to provide his presidency with a badly needed foreign policy success by brokering a deal. His...
Because of illegal immigration, there is no other country that affects America’s way of life as profoundly as does Mexico. Its politics should he followed, therefore, with the same attention to detail that characterized Kremlinology at the height of the Cold War. Instead, there was an air of unreality to the hundreds of American editorials...
Joseph Lieberman, Al Gores pick for vice president, is supposed to bring the Democratic ticket back to the center. Gore secured his presidential nomination by pandering to leftist interest groups, from radical feminists and “gays” to supporters of abortion and Sharptonite hate purveyors. But to have any chance of winning in November, he needed a...
Vuk Draskovic, the leader of Serbia’s major opposition party, was slightly wounded on June 15 when gunmen opened fire through a window of his holiday home in the Montenegrin coastal town of Budva. After being treated at a nearby hospital, Draskovic immediately accused Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic of masterminding “an assassination attempt.” Two days later,...
For years, the Clinton-Gore administration has been in the forefront of efforts to create international judicial bodies—such as the Yugoslav war-crimes “tribunal” at The Hague—that could be used as auxiliary tools of diplomatic decisionmaking in Washington. Madeleine Albright liked the façade of legality that could be invoked to justify their policies. All along, of course,...
Many Americans would be horrified at the thought of discussing Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Benito Mussolini as anything but moral and political antipodes: democrat versus dictator, peacemaker versus aggressive bully, good versus bad. Fifty-five years of bipartisan hagiography have placed FDR in the pantheon of American saints, roughly at number two between Abraham Lincoln and...
In the last week of May, the Clinton administration successfully pressed Congress into granting China permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) status as part of a recently negotiated trade pact. With that vote—the result of an unholy alliance between the GOP and the White House—American legislators have given up their annual review of Peking’s conduct, surrendering...
Bill Clinton, many conservatives believe, is a smooth political operator. Shifty, unprincipled, and generally odious he may be, they say, but Clinton is a “consummate politician” and a master salesman. Mr. Clinton’s performance in Moscow during the first weekend in June did not confirm this view. He did not sell the National Missile Defense (NMD)...
We have always known that a Gore presidency would continue the flawed foreign policy of the Clinton administration; but now we know that—unlikely as it may sound—things may be even worse if the Vice President wins in November. On the last day of April, Al Gore gave his first major foreign policy speech of the...
Zimbabwe is in turmoil, and by early- May, the existence of elaborate plans for a British-led emergency evacuation of thousands of British and other European Union nationals was confirmed by the Foreign Office in London. Zimbabwe’s Marxist president, Robert Mugabe, reiterated his pledge to redistribute white-owned farms to landless blacks, using “emergency legislation” empowering the...
The outcome of Taiwan’s presidential election in March is potentially the most significant single event affecting American security since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Most analysts have failed to address the fundamental dilemma that Taiwan now presents for the defense strategy of the United States. The issue is fairly simple: Are our overseas commitments...
President Putin is inheriting a mess. After almost a decade of Boris Yeltsin, Russia is reduced to a neocolonial wreck with collapsing birthrates, moribund industry, and a fractured body politic. A narrow stratum of robber barons, who do not give a hoot for the country or its people, are busy squandering Russia’s still ample resources...
Ideological assumptions that but two generations ago would have been deemed eccentric, if not utterly insane or even demonic, now rule the “mainstream.” The trouble is that normal people do not take madmen seriously enough. This works to the advantage of politicians—an inherently insane breed—and their subjects’ attitude of “they can’t be serious” allows them...
It is almost embarrassing to say that we are right on foreign affairs because we are right on everything else. It nevertheless has to be said, because it is true. We are right on foreign affairs because the behavior of our rulers abroad is a logical and inevitable extension of their behavior at home. Having...
The future of NATO looms large in the Clinton administration’s attempt to create an autonomous zone of American military presence and political influence in the Balkans that would be independent of the ups and downs of Washington’s relations with its Western European partners. By imposing its own post-Yugoslav architecture, this administration hopes to ensure that...
“Serbia delenda est,” declared our postmodern, post-civilized rulers in the spring of 1999. Most European countries went along with the verdict. Like Muscovites in 1938, they were thankful that the nocturnal knock was not on their door, and prayed that acquiescence would absolve them of the suspicion of disloyalty. The alternative is to get Serbianized,...
In his article “A Just and Necessary War,” published in the New York Times on May 25, President William Jefferson Clinton summarized the case for his war against the Serbs. He elaborated on his “vision,” arguing that the bombing of Serbia was the response to “the greatest remaining threat to that vision; instability in the...
The acquittal of William Jefferson Clinton by the United States Senate is a good thing, although amidst the gloom that justifiably surrounds this fin de siècle, one is tempted to overlook the good side of the bad news. The acquittal should help dispel three dangerous illusions that still prevail among many Americans who cling to...
Canadian magazines would be protected against the tidal wave of split-run issues of U.S. publications that has swept across the border, under legislation sponsored by Heritage Minister Sheila Copps. The cabinet in Ottawa supported her proposed Bill C-55, which will prevent American magazine publishers from selling advertising to Canadian companies if those ads are meant...
“Some say there is an inevitable clash between Western civilization and Western values, and Islamic civilizations and values. I believe this view is terribly wrong. False prophets may use and abuse any religion to justify whatever political objectives they have—even cold-blooded murder. Some may have the world believe that almighty God himself, the merciful, grants...
The Iraqi crisis last fall seriously eroded American influence in Europe. On November 16, European foreign and defense ministers gathered in Vienna to examine the potential evolution of the Western European Union (WEU) into the full-fledged military arm of the European Union (E.U.), a possibility which would effectively replace NATO in Europe and exclude the...
Dr. Biljana Plavsic can go back to her microscope now that she has failed to win re-election as president of Bosnia’s Republika Srpska. A tenured professor at Sarajevo University, she was elected dean of the faculty of math and science in 1988. As a respected scholar and community leader, she carried, the most votes of...
Kosovo Albanians have been well supplied with arms and money. Some of the support has come from Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East, and some from the extensive heroin trade controlled by Albanians. More recently, as Germany’s Social Democrats and their Green coalition partners prepared to take over the reins of government in Bonn, evidence...
Albanian separatists have been attacking policemen in the Serbian province of Kosovo for years, though only recently has the conflict escalated to the point where Slobodan Milosevic felt compelled to respond with a show of force. Not surprisingly, Milosevic’s action was met by the familiar media barrage against the cruelty of “the Serbs” and bellicose...
“An historian is a prophet in retrospect.” —A.W. von Schlegel Wir sind mit Hitler noch lange nicht fertig (“We are nowhere near done with Hitler”): the warning by two contemporary German historians provides an apt opening line to John Lukacs’s delightful book. His “history of the evolution of our knowledge of...
President Bill Clinton’s announcement, made during his brief Christmas visit to Bosnia, that U.S. troops were going to stay in that blighted Balkan province well beyond the initially announced “deadline” of June 1998, surprised only the naive. The only surprising aspect of the announcement was Clinton’s refusal to set any new deadlines: the troops were...
Seldom has a piece of foreign legislation elicited such an outcry among America’s bien pensants as did a recent Russian bill designed to regulate the activities of the many religious sects that have been setting up shop in Russia since the fall of communism. While the media chorus from New York and Washington was predictable...
Diana is dead. The sudden and gruesome death of a woman in her prime, especially the mother of adolescent children, is a sad event. With Princess Diana, it has the makings of a real tragedy. She was pushed into a public marriage with an unloving and eccentric man 14 years her senior. To make matters...
Madeleine Albright’s rendition this summer of Madonna impersonating Evita Peron (“Don’t cry for me, Argentinaaaa . . . “) was neither intrinsically interesting nor aesthetically pleasing. The venue was an aircraft—paid by you and me—en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Singapore; and according to an eyewitness, the only thing missing was a red orchid...
NATO has three new members: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The event has taken place at a time when Europe is as stable and unthreatened as it has ever been in history. The Russians—regardless of political persuasion—are profoundly disturbed at the shift eastwards of the limit of NATO’s Article 5 guarantee, which postulates that...
Our government is capable of swift and efficient action when it decides that the regime in a foreign country has outlived its usefulness, or has become a “threat” to what passes for national security inside the Beltway. Grenada, Panama, and Haiti all come to mind, but the methods deployed in this geographic area tend to...
Albania has descended into the Hobbesian state of utter anarchy, which seldom happens to a European country. Armed mobs have ransacked stores, unruly soldiers have stolen cars at gunpoint, foreign nationals have been evacuated by helicopter from embassy compounds, and rebels have stolen some 100,000 light arms from government arsenals. The sinking in March of...
So Deng Xiaoping has joined Saint-Just, Molotov, Himmler, Djilas, et al., in that niche of the nether regions reserved for the Unrepentant Accomplices of Ideology-Driven Mass Murderers. One hopes that the place is only a little less unpleasant than that inhabited by their bosses, Robespierre, Stalin, Hitler, Tito, and Company. The fact has been obscured...
Experience teaches us that dictatorial regimes are anything but indestructible. They are inherently irrational and therefore unstable. Sooner or later they collapse. To reach ripe old age and die in bed, like Tito, is exceptional for a dictator; to set his country on the steady road to democratic reform, like Franco, is unique. The method...
“A politician . . . one that would circumvent God.” —William Shakespeare The title gives the game away: David Owen, a failed British politician who was for three crucial years (1992-95) Europe’s chief negotiator on the issue of the former Yugoslavia, seeks to cast himself as a Homerian hero. After 400 pages of tedious and...
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once referred to the Cheka as “the only punitive organ in human history that combined in one set of hands investigation, arrest, interrogation, prosecution, trial, and execution of the verdict.” He was probably mistaken about “human history,” but his anger was just. What he chronicled was indefinite imprisonment without trial; investigations and indictments...
Holland has a dirty little secret. In the North Sea resort of Scheveningen, there is a prison where you can be indefinitely incarcerated without trial, or where you can be delivered on the orders of an ad hoc “court” that sometimes issues warrants only after politically motivated arrests have been made. The court is ten...