Category: The American Interest

In Sartre’s grim play No Exit, a man and two women are in Hell, which, in this case, is a brightly lit drawing room furnished in the style of deuxième empire.  At one point, the man, Garcin, famously quips that “hell is other people” (“l’enfer, c’est les autres”).  One of the women, Inès, eventually responds...

Abdul Rahman, an Afghan who faced the death penalty in his native country for converting from Islam to Christianity, was granted political asylum in Italy and arrived in Rome on March 29.  His release came after several weeks of intense pressure by the United States and other Western governments on Kabul to spare his life...

For the past two-and-a-half millennia, our civilization has cultivated tragedy as an art form that articulates some of the key problems of our existence.  Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III—these works speak timeless truths in an ever-contemporary language. In the case of Serbia’s former president Slobodan Milosevic, reality has proved equal to inspired imagination.  His life, which...

The U.S. State Department has effectively sided with militant Islam by condemning the decision of newspapers in Denmark, Norway, and elsewhere in Europe to publish cartoon drawings depicting Muhammad, the founder of Islam. On February 3, State Department press officer Janelle Hironimus told reporters, “Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable....

Gary S. Becker, a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago and a 1992 Nobel Prize winner, cannot be accused of “racism.”  After all, he supports liberalizing immigration laws for educated professionals from around the world, especially India and China.  But his warning, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last December, that...

A year ago, the prospects for peace in Israel-Palestine appeared more promising than at any other time after Bill Clinton’s failed Camp David initiative in 2000.  Arafat’s death in November 2004 had removed a major cause of Palestinian corruption and incoherence, as well as the justification for Israel’s refusal to accept direct talks.  Mahmoud Abbas’...

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared on October 26 that “Israel must be wiped off the map.”  Invoking the words of Ayatollah Khomeini, he told an audience of 4,000 cheering students that a new conflict in Palestine would soon remove “this disgraceful blot from the face of the Islamic world.” The statement, made in the midst...

Almost 80 years ago, Julien Benda published his tirade against the intellectual corruption of his time, La Trahison des Clercs. The “scribes” in question are those who traffic in words and ideas. For generations before the 20th century, Benda wrote, members of the Western intellectual elite made sure that “humanity did evil, but honored good.”...

August 29, 2005, the day when hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, may have marked the beginning of the end of the American Empire.  Four years after the horrors in New York and Washington, D.C., showed the nation’s vulnerability to external attack, the Hobbesian free-for-all in New Orleans demonstrated just how fragile it is internally....

Having devoted a major part of my working life over the past four years to researching and writing about terrorism, I am alert to the possibility that there are a few people around me who would like to shut me up—for good, if at all possible.  The tragic end of Theo van Gogh, slaughtered in...

In early 1980, the Soviet Union appeared to be more powerful than ever before.  Its hold over Eastern Europe had been sealed in Helsinki five years previously.  Its presence or influence in the Third World was rising, while that of the United States was diminishing.  The notion of its eventual demise was dear to a...

The challenge that the rise of China presents to the United States is more pressing than any other global issue except for the ever-present threat of jihad.  Beijing is rapidly becoming a regional power of the first order, the Asian hegemon that will need to be contained, confronted, or, in some way, appeased.  Its ruling...

In last month’s American Proscenium, I focused on the news that Washington is reaching out to various Islamist activists opposed to the secularist regime of Bashir Assad, and notably to the supposedly “moderate” elements of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria.  The editorial, entitled “Aid and Comfort to the Enemy,” concluded that such policies reflect either...

Mahmoud Abbas’s convincing victory in the Palestinian presidential election on January 9 provided a piece of good news in an otherwise somber Middle Eastern landscape.  Often described as an old Fatah apparatchik with little charisma and popularity, Abbas managed to win 62 percent of the 775,000 votes cast in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and...

Having provided advice to a number of influential Balkan figures in my time, I know the sense of frustration when sound counsel is overruled in favor of proposals based on error or mendacity.  I have been proved right, but only when it was too late: Crown Prince Alexander Kara-djordjevic would have been better off had...

The announcement of President George W. Bush’s victory last November 3 was immediately followed by an outpouring of vitriol by a legion of European editorialists and op-ed columnists.  The Michael Moore wannabes ranted and raved while the “analysts” whined and wailed.  The tone of the former was set by a Fleet Street tabloid, the Daily...

Contrary to numerous optimistic assurances from high places, three years after September 11, the reach and operational capability of Islamic terror cells remain strong.  They are present in areas previously closed to the recruiters of future “martyrs”—notably in Iraq—and in countries where, only a decade ago, they did not have a significant presence (e.g.,  Indonesia). ...

It is hardly possible to envisage an orgy of terrorist savagery more depraved than that staged by Chechen jihadists and their foreign cohorts, who butchered, tortured, and raped hundreds of Russian children in the town of Beslan last September.  The bloodbath at School No. 1 came at the end of a week in which two...

Many Central Europeans who are now in their late middle age or older have fond memories of American soldiers in their midst.  In France in 1944, nylon stockings and chocolates were the tools of seduction, resented by men and welcomed by ladies.  In Germany in early 1945, the G.I. came to be seen as liberator,...

The European Union underwent a major transformation last May.  It was enlarged to 25 states when eight former communist countries—Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, and three Baltic republics—were formally admitted, as well as Malta and Cyprus.  The union is now a political and economic giant of 450 million people, the largest single market...

The Soviet Communist Party used to devote a lot of attention to the problem of inefficient agriculture.  The party’s Agrarian Policy Commission debated endlessly, throughout the final quarter-century of the Soviet state’s existence, how to improve the system.  Should the state farm (sovkhoz) be made self-financing?  Should the collective farm (kolkhoz) have its own heavy...

If, as appears certain, Islamic terrorists planted the bombs that killed over 200 commuters and wounded 1,400 others on Madrid’s trains on March 11, the operation was singularly successful in achieving its political objectives. Until that morning, the Popular Party (PP) government of the former prime minister José Maria Aznar looked poised to win the...

In a speech at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., on February 11, President Bush warned against the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and suggested measures to dismantle a growing black market in nuclear fuel and technology.  He called the possibility of a sudden attack by weapons of mass destruction “the greatest...

A chain is as strong as its weakest link.  In President Bush’s “War on Terror,” that weak link is not in the Middle East or North Africa or the Subcontinent but in Europe.  For years, Chronicles has been warning that flawed pro-Muslim Western policies would turn the Balkans from a “protectorate of the New World...

It is reasonable to assume that a country’s foreign policy is conducted in the interest of that country’s security and well-being and that those entrusted with its formulation and conduct will act in a coherent and rational manner.  At the end of 2003, the foreign policy of the United States was neither coherent nor rational. ...

In 1980, Ayatollah Khomeini told Oriana Fallaci that Western music dulls the mind.  “It involves pleasure and ecstasy, similar to drugs,” he explained; it does not exalt the spirit but puts it to sleep, and “it distracts our youth who become poisoned by it.”  “Even the music of Bach, Beethoven, Verdi?” Fallaci asked.  “I do...

For 200 years, the Balkan states have been manipulated by the powers of “Old Europe” to slow and control the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.  They were created, enlarged, and shrunk as the need arose.  During the two world wars, the territories inhabited by southern Slavs were used as bargaining chips in constructing alliances, while...

Another futile round of the six-nation talks on North Korea’s nuclear program ended in Beijing last September.  The communist authorities in Pyongyang subsequently declared that further negotiations involving both Koreas, China, Japan, Russia, and the United States were pointless, but China said it was working to arrange a second round of talks. For once, I...

On August 25, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that he would look into ways to strengthen U.S. combat power without increasing the size of the military.  While the “end-strength” of 1.4 million should stay the same, he intends to rebalance the active and reserve components, sending underutilized active-duty personnel to the reserves and moving...

But for the death and suffering it has caused to thousands of innocents, the Liberian imbroglio would have an almost farcical quality—Graham Greene meets Lehar.  On one side, there was the LURD (Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy), a ragtag army of heavily armed but poorly trained and undisciplined rebels.  They nevertheless have the upper...

It is sometimes necessary for a great power to keep a distant small country under military occupation—if need be, for a very long time.  The Romans could not contemplate an “exit strategy” from Palestine in the first century A.D.—or from a few other hotspots around the empire’s outer perimeter—without compromising their status as the world’s...

There have been strong empires with weak currencies, but not often and not for long.  The Soviet Union, Spain after Philip II, the Ottoman Empire after Suleiman, and an impoverished Britain after Versailles all come to mind.  That financially fragile states cannot support ambitious political and military ventures is obvious to common sense and confirmed...

In the aftermath of the war in Iraq, its most determined advocates predictably claimed that the United States should proceed with her alleged mission of bringing democracy to the Middle East.  The advocates of this approach seek to push the Israeli-Palestinian issue into the background, to subordinate it to whatever their agenda may be in...

Four weeks before the latest war against Iraq, President George W. Bush declared that it would be motivated by a “vision” of democracy and liberation for the entire Middle East.  A U.S.-sponsored regime change in Baghdad, he proclaimed, would “serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region.” Only...

On November 21, 2002, NATO leaders meeting in Prague invited seven ex-communist nations to join their ranks in an expansion termed “historic.”  The three Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (the alliance will, for the first time, include former Soviet territory), as well as Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Rumania are expected to become full...

As the first contingent of U.N. weapons inspectors arrived in Iraq last November, U.S. government sources leaked a disturbing story about one of our key “allies” in the War on Terror.  Pakistan apparently has been helping North Korea with her nuclear-weapons program for years, in return for missile technology that would strengthen her own hand...

On November 3, Islam triumphed politically in Turkey, rendering the entire U.S. strategy in the Middle East tenuous and causing dismay in Europe.  Recep Tayyip Erdogan, barred from public office for Islamic agitation, led his Justice and Development Party (AKP) to a landslide victory over his secularist opponents in NATO’s only Muslim nation.  Muslims will...

Last October, North Korea announced that it has a nuclear-weapons program.  Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld confirmed that North Korea already has a “small number” of nuclear weapons, and a Pentagon official later added that the United States thought Pyongyang had two nuclear bombs. The stunning revelations sent shockwaves around the world, but the White House...

The current president of the soon-to-be-defunct Yugoslav Federation, Vojislav Kostunica, has won the initial stage of Serbia’s presidential elections, the first held since the fall of Slobodan Milosevic almost exactly two years ago.  Kostunica garnered 31 percent of the vote, with Miroljub Labus—the “pro-Western, reformist” candidate supported by the “international community”—coming in second at 28...

In the final years of the Soviet Union, as glasnost broadened the scope of permissible public debate, it was still deemed advisable to precede any expression of controversial views with a little disclaimer.  For example, “While I hold no brief for the Islamic dushmans terrorizing the people of Afghanistan, I think we should withdraw from...

The ongoing turmoil in America’s stock markets and a series of corporate scandals have attracted considerable attention from commentators and editorialists all over the developed world, who fear that economic instability in the United States may plunge the world’s top businesses into a vicious cycle of doubt and deferred capital investment.  With the world’s stock...

On June 24, President George W. Bush delivered his long-awaited speech on the Middle East.  Most of his 15-minute statement was devoted to harsh criticism of the Palestinians, including the assertion that “peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership . . . not compromised by terrorism.”  In addition to ditching Yasser Arafat and ending...

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, Europe was closer to America, politically and emotionally, than at any time since World War II.  For a moment, the threat of Islamic terrorism had rekindled a dormant awareness on both sides of the Atlantic of just how much the Old Continent and the New World have in...

When I first met General Alexander Lebed, shortly after he was forced to retire from his military career in 1995, he was a crusty soldier with great political ambitions, itching for action but visibly uncomfortable in mufti.  His tie knot was too wide and his parade-ground bass sounded coarse and unmodulated.  His face, with more...

There are contests in which a decent person prefers not to take sides, such as the bloody wars between Mafia families or Stalin’s disputes with Trotsky and Tito.  The war between Khomeini’s Iran and Saddam’s Iraq also comes to mind, or the family feud between Pol Pot and the Vietnamese communists.  It is tempting to...

President Bush’s recent State of the Union Address was an historic occasion.  His speechwriting staff went through nearly 30 drafts and finally presented him (and the rest of us) with a mature ideological framework that reflects the balance of outlooks within the present administration.  The preceding debate may have been the last chance for any...

In the aftermath of September 11, the chairman of the House International Relations Committee noted that the war on terrorism has revealed the need to overhaul U.S. foreign policy.  “Can anyone doubt that the sum of our efforts has been insufficient?” asked Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL) on October 10, opening a hearing into the role...

It is not necessarily a bad thing for a national leader to remain at the helm for a very long time, provided that he is successful.  Otto von Bismarck’s 28 years as Prussia’s and then the Reich’s chief minister were marked by unification and consolidation internally, nifty diplomacy and overall stability of the European balance-of-power...

Writing in the New York Times on September 26, Paul Krugman insisted that the war against Afghanistan would not be “a war on behalf of the oil companies; not even a war on behalf of SUVs and McMansions.”  It was, though, going to be a war “over a natural resource that is more vital than...

In the aftermath of September 11, you have done a reasonably good job managing the crisis, symbolizing the nation’s unity, restraining the laptop bombardiers, and preparing a military response that was neither hasty nor disproportionate. Now that two months have passed, you have more time to reflect on the long-term significance of that event and...