Category: The American Interest

In 1935 the Nazi regime was two years old, fully consolidated at home, and increasingly assertive abroad. It enacted the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws and announced that Germany would start a massive rearmament program, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Meanwhile, Britain and France were focused on condemning Mussolini’s intervention in Ethiopia and on punishing...

“Rule One, on page one of the book of war, is: ‘Do not march on Moscow,’” Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery told the House of Lords in 1962. “Various people have tried it, Napoleon and Hitler, and it is no good.”   The victor of El Alamein made an understatement. Napoleon’s invasion in June 1812 took...

Today’s commentariat is prone to ignore history, or to simplify past events to make them fit their current ideological preferences. The discourse of regime-approved conservative intellectuals and their mass media cohorts—such as Victor Davis Hanson and the tedious George Will—remains liberally optimistic and upwardly linear. The notion that our civilization is on a downward course...

The tectonic change in the Indo-Pacific region is the most important geopolitical event of 2021. The countries along its shores account for roughly two-thirds of the world’s population. They produce the largest share of global gross domestic product, possess the most powerful military forces, and depend on the world’s busiest shipping lanes. It is also...

The latest episode in an ironic reversal of the roles of the foreign powers that have tried their luck in Afghanistan is unfolding before our eyes. Britain’s profitless involvement (1839-1919) is ancient history, but more recently the Soviet intervention (1979-1989) and America’s subsequent “longest war” (2001-2021) have both ended in strategic failures. Because the United...

Events are the building blocks of history. Narrative historians, starting with Thucydides, have focused on what they regarded as significant occurrences in order to present and evaluate the past.   The import of some events can be recognized by astute observers almost as soon as they occur. Edmund Burke’s 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in...

Behemoth and Leviathan, the biblical chaos-monsters, are how Carl Schmitt described terra firma and the oceans in his 1942 masterpiece Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation. World history, he noted, is composed of land and sea powers warring against each other. Schmitt was not the first to note this phenomenon. It has been well-documented since...

April 18 marked the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Paris, which established the European Coal and Steel Community. The leaders of France, West Germany, Italy, and the three Benelux countries thus laid the foundation for European integration. It was primarily meant to facilitate economic recovery, but also to help overcome old...

All recorded history can be viewed as a long record of the use of force, or threats of force, in relations between human communities. This applies to all epochs, civilizations, and geographic spaces. Violence is immanent to man. Its constant presence is indicative of the immutability of his nature, regardless of the cultural context or...

The Biden regime’s frantic moves in recent weeks to escalate tensions with Russia—at a time of China’s continued economic and military rise—are irrational, inexplicable by any standard method of foreign policy analysis, and perilous to this country’s security interests. Mr. Biden’s decision less than two weeks after his inauguration to move B-1 bombers to Norway “to...

In the first week of September 1792 the French Revolution entered its openly terroristic phase with the massacre of some 1,600 prisoners in Paris. It was an outrage euphemistically called les Journées du Septembre (or the September Days). It was justified by the claim that the country was in danger from foreign enemies and domestic...

People are policy and Joe Biden has 2,000 of them. That is, according to reporting in Foreign Policy magazine that his team of foreign policy and national security advisors has swelled to more than that number. A contingent of that size could be expected to produce a torrent of interesting ideas and fresh proposals, from the fundamentals of...

A major border clash took place between Indian and Chinese troops mid-June in the Western Himalayan region of Ladakh, on the disputed “Line of Actual Control” dividing the two Asian giants. Twenty Indian soldiers died, including a senior officer, and there were 43 reported casualties on the Chinese side. This was the bloodiest in a series...

The United States finds itself at a geostrategic crossroads. The moment is comparable to the period between the dispatch of George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” from Moscow in February 1946 suggesting a new strategy for relations with the USSR, and the announcement of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947, pledging U.S. political, military, and economic assistance to...

At the end of the ongoing global melodrama’s first quarter, it seems reasonable to predict that this will be a two-act play with the final curtain coming down in July. It will end as a tragedy, not because the outcome was preordained in a world impervious to human choices, but because men have free will....

“Nothing will ever be the same again!” The cliché is invoked whenever people think they are facing an event of metahistorical significance. Sometimes its use is justified: Sarajevo 1914, the Bolshevik Revolution, Hiroshima, and the fall of the Berlin Wall fit the phrase. More often it is not. Versailles 1919, JFK’s assassination, Neil Armstrong’s “giant...

An Arab-Israeli peace agreement is like a moderate Syrian rebel or rational leftist: It is possible to visualize, but producing one is daunting. Every attempt has failed. President Donald Trump’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan will be no exception. Hardly the “deal of the century,” it proposes the establishment of a disconnected, truncated Palestinian state with...

During the Second World War the German High Command issued regular bulletins about the situation on various fronts. They had a triumphalist tone in 1940, when France fell, and in 1941, when it looked like the Red Army would collapse, but the core information remained reliable throughout the war. These Wehr machtberichten adopted a sober...

In his 1968 essay “Bureaucracy and Policy Making,” Dr. Henry Kissinger argued that there was no rationality or consistency in American foreign policymaking. “[A]s the bureaucracy becomes large and complex,” he wrote, “more time is devoted to running its internal management than in divining the purpose which it is supposed to serve.” There is only...

As we approach the last year of this century’s second decade, the United States is still the most powerful state in the world, safe from direct threats by foreign state actors. Two oceans separate America from actual or potential hot spots on other continents, while its neighbors to the north and south are harmless and...

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall it is not a matter of dispute that the removal of that evil edifice was a good thing. It should be equally uncontentious that its collapse was primarily the result of the Russians themselves trying to overcome the impasse of their tragic 20th-century history. In the...

President Donald Trump on September 7 abruptly cancelled secret meetings with unnamed Taliban representatives and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. Citing a deadly bombing in Kabul a few days earlier, Trump also said he was cancelling the talks with the Taliban that started a year ago in Qatar. Those talks focused on four key issues: a...