I conclude here my look at Martin Van Creveld’s analysis of the relationships between states and war in The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). ENTER THE AMERICANS Van Creveld’s views on the rise of the American...
It’s January 2001, and George "Dubya" Bush has just been sworn in as president. The neocons are in charge of foreign policy, and one of the top items on their agenda is in the war-torn, ex-Soviet region of the Caucasus, where the Russians are resurgent....
What got me started was a book review in the conservative magazine National Review of yet another of those books by sons of World War II-era fathers glorifying their participation in the "good war." This one was by the son of one of those who raised the...
There follows extracts from a conversation with someone who has recently observed the Hague Tribunal at close quarters. The person's name and the proceedings observed have not been revealed. As the following article makes clear, no one who has had any dealings with...
Congress flirted earlier this year with taking a more assertive role in determining U.S. policy in Kosovo and the other countries in the Balkans, but ultimately chose to stick with the pattern that has characterized most of the last several decades: Congress grumps...
GETTING BACK TO THE SUBJECT… To recur, in a concrete way, to the relationship between war and heightened statism, let us now look at things from the standpoint of Martin Van Creveld's The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,...
The worst news of the week from a substantive perspective was the U.S. Senate's approval of the vast bulk of the Clinton administration's request for more money to conduct the misbegotten and unwinnable "drug war" in Colombia. The worst news from the...
In my last two columns on Murray Rothbard, I named a couple of books as important contributions to a Rothbardian analysis of the connections between statism and war. One is Martin Van Creveld's The Rise and Decline of the State (1999), around which the Ludwig von...
To be sure, viewing last week’s meeting between President Kim Dae jung of South Korea and Kim Jong il, the dictator of North Korea as historic, heartening and a possible breakthrough for peace must be somewhat conditional. Mutual hostility stretching over 50...
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 "what Marx...
