LESSONS IN FAILING INTERVENTIONS

The flap over Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui's comment that Taiwan's relations with mainland China should properly be viewed as "country-to-country, or at least as special state-to-state" relations has been curious and amusing at one level. After all, it...

read more

KASHMIR: WILL BILL AND MADDIE INTERVENE?

The war in Kashmir between India and Pakistan seems to have calmed down for the moment, but it could still present rich opportunities for the United States to do the wrong thing. President Clinton casually – almost cavalierly? – meddled at an early stage of...

read more

CAUSES – LOST AND OTHERWISE

It has been said that "there are no lost causes because there are no gained causes." Whether this is true or not will not detain us here. Matthew Arnold called Oxford University "the home of lost causes," referring in particular, one assumes, to...

read more

KOSOVO: LEARNING THE WRONG LESSONS (MOSTLY)

Many of the Kosovo war's most active cheerleaders are having second thoughts now that the bombing phase of the war has ended, the "rebuilding" phase has begun and the general uselessness of the campaign has become increasingly apparent. Some of the second thoughts are...

read more

George Dubya and “American Leadership”

One shouldn't read too much into deviations from prepared texts, and in fact the prepared text of Texas Gov. George W. Bush's remarks distributed to newsies during his California fundraising swing this week carried a warning right at the top "[Note: Governor Bush...

read more

Serbs Out . . . KLA In

Brit Secretary of State for Defense George Robertson summed up his country's war aims succinctly and, as it turned out, all-too-accurately: "Serbs out, NATO in, refugees back." Tens of thousands of Serbs are fleeing "liberated" Kosovo, as the KLA...

read more

Murray Rothbard On War

These edited extracts, from an interview in the February 1973 issue of Reason magazine, first ran in the June 1999 issue of The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, published by the Center for Libertarian Studies. The introduction is taken from "Murray N. Rothbard: A Legacy...

read more

Allied Farce: A Wartime Diary

On the first anniversary of the start of the Kosovo war, I present below my first column – then called "Wartime Diary." It preserves, I think, the sense of outrage I felt at the time – and still feel – while at the same time giving the reader a sense of...

read more