The Great Defense Budget Black Hole

The Republican Party once claimed to oppose wasteful government spending. Republicans criticized Democrats for pushing ever more money for foreign aid and welfare, irrespective of results. When GOP candidates advocated increased military outlays during the Cold War,...

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Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary

Gao Wenqian, Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary (New York: Public Affairs, 2007) 345 pp. Mao Zedong became the symbol of the communist revolution in China. Leading the famed Long March, proclaiming the new People's Republic of China, sending forth Red...

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Misguided Meddling in Pakistan

For years the U.S. has attempted to mold Pakistan. The result is not pretty: an unstable, undemocratic state which possesses nuclear weapons, border provinces which offer safe haven to Taliban and al-Qaeda forces, and people who loath the American government. The...

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Michael Huckabee: Foreign Policy Moderate?

For a time former Arkansas Gov. Michael Huckabee appeared to be among the craziest of the GOP candidates, gung-ho for the Iraq war, disdainful of Congress' role in declaring war, and enthusiastic about torturing U.S. captives. But when he deviated slightly from neocon...

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The Forgotten Man

Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), 464 pp. Franklin Delano Roosevelt has two principal legacies: the New Deal and World War II. The latter would have occurred even had he never been elected...

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Embarrassed to Explain US Foreign Policy

I'm off in Norway today, the guest of some folks interested in U.S. foreign policy. They want me to explain what Americans think of international events and how policymakers formulate foreign policy. It's a daunting, or perhaps more accurately, an embarrassing,...

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Creating Crisis: Another War in the Balkans?

The Bush administration has made quite a botch of U.S. foreign policy. Initiating an unnecessary and needlessly bloody war in Iraq. Pushing a now discredited belligerent campaign against Iran. Creating more Islamic hostility and additional terrorists around the...

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Khrushchev’s Cold War

Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev's Cold War (New York: Norton paperback, 2007), 670 pp. Überhawks carelessly toss around the Hitler comparison – Ho Chi Minh was Hitler. Slobodan Milosevic was Hitler. Saddam Hussein was Hitler. Now Mahmoud...

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Interest Group Foreign Policy

Capitol Hill was recently roiled by an issue of no obvious concern to America: the World War I genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire against its Armenian population. But the tendency of Washington policymakers to concoct foreign policy to satisfy influential...

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Randolph Bourne Institute