Joseph Stromberg

This timeless article first appeared on February 20, 2001. COLD WAR IMPERIALISM, OR ‘LEADERSHIP OF THE FREE WORLD’ With the ritual bombing of Iraq taking on symbolic importance as the first foreign policy act of any incoming US administration, it is astounding that our wonderful “free press” can never bothered to admit, much less discuss, … Continue reading “An Anti-Imperialist’s Reading List: Part Two”

This timeless article first appeared on January 30, 2001. GOING ALL PEDAGOGICAL I thought that this week I would sketch out a reading list for those wishing to pursue the themes dealt with in this column and at antiwar.com generally. Some of the works listed are popular, some are scholarly, but all contribute to building … Continue reading “An Anti-Imperialist’s Reading List: Part One”

This timeless article (see Part I) first appeared on June 20, 2000 I promised last week to go further into what the late Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) teaches us about foreign policy, peace, and war. Those who keep up with such things will have noticed that there exists a colossal and ever-growing body of writing on … Continue reading “Murray N. Rothbard on States, War, and Peace: Part II”

This timeless article first appeared on June 12, 2000 The sheer amount of writing done by the late Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) continues to astound. The quality of his work accounts for the impact it has had, and the attention it now draws, but its volume cannot have hurt, either. Rothbard spread the word about … Continue reading “Murray N. Rothbard on States, War, and Peace: Part I”

THE SETTING Toby Dodge’s Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied 1 (03) constitutes a very interesting guide to the British period in Iraq – or Mesopotamia, as it was then called. The period began, naturally enough, in World War I. Like their counterparts in the Central Powers, British policymakers were … Continue reading “Inventing Iraq – Yet Again?”

I. IDEOLOGICAL POWER REVISITED I have alluded at times in this space to John A. Hall’s division of power into three types – ideological, political-military, and economic.(1) I have also suggested, over the past several years, that in our time, the first of the trinity, ideological power, has risen in importance. It is not that … Continue reading “Kantians With Cruise Missiles: The Highest Stage of ‘Liberal’ Imperialism”

Lately, we have been hearing quite a lot from our Cousins across the water. All eaten-up with post-imperial malaise and envy of US leaders’ apparent good fortune, the Cousins are hard at work handing out friendly advice on how best to rule the world. They gave us a lot of advice just after 1763, if … Continue reading “The ‘Necessary’ Hegemon Revisited”

Whence comes the asserted power of the current President and his new Sicherheitsdienst to inspect, search, spindle, mutilate, etc., everything and everyone found within the generous bounds of their authority? Leave aside the claim of these people that US law prevails, or ought to prevail, everywhere in the galaxy, and just focus on the “internal” … Continue reading “A Homeland So Secure We Wouldn’t Want To Live There”

In 1967, as the War in Vietnam dragged on and on, Carl Oglesby, then President of Students for a Democratic Society, commented on how the Right Wing saw that war. Most of the Right, he noted, “accepts the political description” of the war and, therefore, “wants it the war to be more fiercely waged.”(1) In … Continue reading “Asymmetric Politics”

One of the noteworthy features of the very late 20th and very early 21st centuries is the way in which everything that was once an historical accusation has become a defense. Thus, if on the evidence, FDR had a really good idea where the Japanese fleet was and where it was going in early December … Continue reading “Truman, Treaties, and the Bricker Amendment”