Posts classified under: Foreign Policy

Mainstream academics are accustomed to viewing the moral-spiritual and cultural dimensions of the problem of war and peace as esoteric and insignificant. Studying these dimensions is actually indispensable to a full-bodied realism.

Only the nation, outlasting the life of individuals and private companies now present, is the proper vehicle for conserving the general welfare.

Women’s liberation is a concept that is almost always found at the heart of revolutionary thinking.

Tocqueville commented on the American characteristics of equality, democracy, individualism, restlessness, and enterprise, but he was not the first foreigner to do so.

Lurking in John Quincy Adams' famous foreign policy oration is a dangerous confidence about the trajectory of history.

Look—look at all this empirical proof that interventionist policy has disastrous results! The anti-interventionist persuasion business kicks into overdrive, but with little long-term effect.

Many who have heard Reagan's words have not really listened to them. They have taken away vague impressions of his rhetoric and have not fully understood the meaning and significance of what he actually said.

Even though Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump could not be more different, there has been a remarkable continuity in their approaches.

Washington's greatness stemmed from his being grounded in historical experience, his philosophical realism, and his refusal to conflate the things of God and the things of Caesar.

The imperial imagination has always been there. But it was checked. How was it checked?

Contrary to the belief of many in this age of radical presentism, much of what is in the past profoundly influences the present.

"Realism" and "Idealism" are not the only two ways to view world politics. Kissinger and Fukuyama are not our only options.

Like modern America, Republican Rome was nearly always at war: between 415 and 265 BC, fewer than 10 percent of its years did not have at least one recorded campaign.

According to the modern view, the task of the politician is not to minister—it is to administer. Can another vision be restored?

From President Truman’s initiation of war against North Korea in June 1950, presidents have exceeded constitutional and statutory authority in exercising the war power.

What we might learn from Thucydides today does not relate only to worries about the rise of China in its new role as Athens. The main lesson comes from Thucydides as an Athenian who reflects on his own city. Graham Allison and American policy makers need to be as self-reflective about America as they are about the rise of China.

It was an effective myth system that allowed the national security state to operate smoothly in the United States. This was not a “noble lie” on anyone’s part; it wasn’t a lie at all, let alone some grand, “deep state” conspiracy.

It is an understatement to say that the American intervention in Iraq in 2003 will have broad and decisive implications for how the administration of former President George W. Bush will be evaluated by historians.

A revolt against the dual tradition of Christian and humanistic self-discipline, and the substitution of a new basis of morality, lies at the heart of the breakdown of internationalism.

Sixteen hundred years ago, St. Augustine warned against the inherent idolatry of empire. To assign to one’s earthly nation the mission that by right belongs only to the Kingdom of Christ is to be guilty of the worst of disordered loves.

Sides for or against the new order were taken for millenarian and not simply economic reasons.

How can people of ostensibly sound mind tender their support for the longest-running dictatorship in the world?

Herder’s philosophical work forces us to reexamine the objections made against nationalism from a philosophical point of view.

The United States Government was fully warned, almost prophetically, by its diplomats who had studied the Soviet Union and understood what recognition entailed.

Reflection on the Old Testament diplomatic traditions could provide the starting point for a return to a more sober foreign policy.

The respective governments, in Budapest and Bucharest, may sign many friendship treaties: still they will not be friends, allies, cousins.

When and why did I begin to bristle under the rigid codes of belief and behavior imposed by American politics, academics, and culture?

During his recent visit to England, President Bush enunciated a “forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East.” He pledged, “We will consistently challenge the enemies of reform and confront the allies of terror.”

Ever since 9/11, the president of the United States has been urging the use of American power to spread the allegedly universal principles of “freedom and democracy” throughout the world.

The mainstay of the Turkish modernization project in the twentieth century has been relegating religion to the private sphere. To…

It is upon small-scale values and practices—not the abstractions of cosmopolitanism or “global thinking”—that the literal survival of the world depends.

What is at issue is the meaning of greatness. Our first president chose a modest path, the greatness of Cicero and Cato.

Kennan’s gifted use of the English language makes manifest the great advantages of the historical mind: clarity, elegance, and concreteness.