Bill Gates and Ersatz Virtue

May 30, 2021
Why help people near you when you can help people far, far away? Be kind to your wife who is standing right in front of you? No, that is too hard. Instead, write a check and send it to sub-Saharan Africa.
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The American Mess in the Ukraine

April 9, 2021
There is great irony in Biden administration officials trying to get ahead of a potential crisis that was largely caused by Biden’s nominee for undersecretary of state for political affairs, Victoria Nuland.
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Why Diplomacy Has Not Returned

April 2, 2021
American elites have come to believe themselves as humanitarians without peer on the world stage. Pushy hectoring of other nations is a common feature of American “diplomacy.”
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The Erosion of America’s Professional Officer Corps

February 2, 2021
As with the now-discarded tradition that former presidents should generally avoid partisan politics, it is now clear that a certain professional culture that had previously been embraced by military leaders is also breaking down.
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So Much for Diplomacy

January 25, 2021
There is an inherent contradiction in the hubristic assertion that the United States is the world’s chief protector of universal values and the belief that this mighty and virtuous emperor will take seriously the opinions of other nations.
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When ‘Human Rights’ Become a Menace

December 23, 2020
Grandiose gestures to “protect human rights” can sometimes result in wholesale violations of human rights, as our actions in Iraq, Libya, and Syria have all demonstrated.
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The Foreign Policy Choice This November

October 22, 2020
Whether possessing four or 40 years of foreign policy experience, neither septuagenarian is apt to reorient America’s role in the world, regardless of what the voters want.
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Defund CENTCOM

October 12, 2020
Put CENTCOM out of its misery and spend that money on higher priorities with better likelihoods of success.
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Why the Blob Needs an Enemy

September 10, 2020
Reforming and rehabilitating the U.S. foreign policy establishment will require more than policy prescriptions and comprehensive reports: it needs generational change.
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Towards a Catholic Foreign Policy

August 2, 2020
Just war doctrine is more than a legalistic checklist. Intemperance in the soul, not incorrect reasoning, is the true origin of unjust wars.
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Definitions, Please!

July 26, 2020
What may seem to political practitioners to be hair-splitting philosophical distinctions can have enormous practical significance.
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Time to Break up the FBI?

May 18, 2020
They see themselves as guardians of the American Way, intervening whenever and wherever they see democracy in danger. No healthy republic should have a national police force with this kind of culture.
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Catholics in Crisis

March 19, 2020
Rules and principles will not steer people right if will and imagination are pulling them in a different direction.
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The New Social Contract We Must Reject

May 2, 2019
If we allow this new social contract to become our national norm, we will no longer be Americans in any meaningful sense. We will descend from a self-governing people into the subjects of social democratic elites.
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The Moral Path to Peace

February 10, 2018
Humanity faces no greater challenge in the 21st century than averting conflict among peoples and civilizations.
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Can America’s Foreign Policy Be Restrained?

December 20, 2017
“How is it that the national security managers get away with it?” historian and foreign policy intellectual Andrew Bacevich asked at a recent event at Catholic University (CUA) in Washington, DC.
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Samuel Huntington Was Not Like Steve Bannon

September 8, 2017
Contrary to the caricatures of his ideas, Huntington did not cheer on a “clash of civilizations.” He recommended that we simply recognize the reality of such a clash and develop strategies for maintaining peace within it.
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