On May 1, 2003, George W. Bush declared victory in Iraq while preening in a flight suit in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner. Three years later, the country he had invaded descended into a bloody civil war. Eight years after that, the northwest of Iraq was...
In Batman Vs. Superman, the intrepid reporter Lois Lane (played by Amy Adams), tries to expose a dastardly villain and gets herself into a deadly predicament from which Superman must save her. This has been the Lois Lane formula since 1938. But in this case, the...
In 1974, when Friedrich Hayek won the Nobel Prize in Economics, he used his acceptance speech to deliver a warning to the world. Do not again fall for “the pretense of knowledge,” he counseled. Hayek was singling out economic policymakers who presume to possess the...
What if a presidential candidate threw a political rally, and nobody came? What if a government held an election, and nobody voted? What if that same government started a war, and nobody participated, whether in body or in spirit? These questions are related. Election...
Stand-up comic Louis CK recently did this bit where he characterized America as “the world’s worst girlfriend”: “America is like a terrible girlfriend to the rest of the world. If someone hurts America, she remembers it forever. But if she does anything bad, she’s...
Following every Islamist terror attack on a Western soft target, like the recent one in Brussels, we hear the same refrain from certain corners: “Why won’t Muslims stand up to Islamic extremism?” The rhetorical question is meant to imply its own answer: that Islam is...
“Es un nuevo dia” and “Nowruz Mubarak.” The literal meaning of both phrases welcome the “new day” (nuevo dia, nowruz) in Spanish and Persian respectively (the latter is a holiday greeting for the Persian New Year). And President Barack Obama recently delivered these...
Peace is the keystone of liberty and prosperity. To completely understand why, it will be important to develop a theory of peace. Most arguments against war at least partially rely on empirical evidence. Anti-war literature tends to draw from past calamitous...
Many promoters of peace, while not necessarily supporting him, do hope that a Donald Trump presidency would curb or maybe even end the hyper-active militancy of the American empire. They see glimmers of promise in Trump’s foreign policy statements. For example, while...
I was intrigued by the 2015 release of David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. But it also reminded me of a 2014 book I had been wanting to read titled The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles,...
