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Although on the wrong side of 70, I still get excited about Christmas. It used to mean family holidays, trips, and getting out of boarding school. Now it still means good things, like parties and getting together with my children. And there’s always church and time to give thanks for all the goodies in life. [...]
On Oct. 31, the U.N. Population Fund marks the arrival of the 7 billionth person on Earth and raises the population estimate for the planet at mid-century to 9.3 billion people. There is a possibility, says the United Nations, that, by century’s end, world population may reach 15 billion. What does this mean for Western [...]
Friday morning, Predator drones operated by the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command rendezvoused over Yemen and launched Hellfire missiles that blew to pieces the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. A declared enemy in the war on terror was eliminated. Yet Awlaki was a U.S. citizen. Reps. Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul denounced the action. Kucinich [...]
Filed under: Foreign policy, History, War
In June 1967, with ex-Vice President Richard Nixon, this writer toured an Israeli military hospital full of wounded Egyptian soldiers. An Israeli officer told us that in the hospital was an Egyptian officer he had captured in the 1956 Sinai campaign, and that he had asked the Egyptian: “We have fought three times now, and [...]
If we continue to let 9/11 haunt America’s collective memory, and thus define its sense of purpose and orientation to the world, we should expect the next ten years to resemble the last. That may be the lesson of one of the better reflections on the 9/11 commemorations by David Rieff (for some time out on newsstands, [...]
In Cairo in 1943, when the tide had turned in the war on Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, who had embraced Joseph Stalin as an ally and acceded to his every demand, had a premonition. Conversing with Harold Macmillan, Churchill blurted: “Cromwell was a great man, wasn’t he?” “Yes, sir, a very great man,” Macmillan replied. [...]
In the early morning hours of Sept. 1, 1939, 72 years ago, the German army crossed the Polish frontier. On Sept. 3, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, having received no reply to his ultimatum demanding a German withdrawal, declared that a state of war now existed between Great Britain and Germany. The empire followed the mother country in. The [...]
You need only mention outmoded concepts like “original sin,” to get folks really riled up. Over at the Daily Dish, Chris Bodenner posts anonymous reader feedback on my recent account of a sesquicentennial civil war reenactment. The reader was apparently involved in reenactments as a teenager, but after a few years had a conversion and quit the reenactor [...]
America’s custodian of the virtues, William J. Bennett, is as prolific as ever. The former secretary of education and drug czar will soon release another chapter of his magisterial history of the United States, the multi-volume series entitled America: The Last Best Hope. Used as a textbook by right-leaning schools and homeschooling families across the country, [...]
I have a new article in Reason where I review two books on the great empires of history and explain that imperialism does not make the conquering nations any richer or safer. Moreover, decentralized societies are safer than consolidated empires because would-be conquerors cannot take existing administrative systems and technologies and use them for their own ends. [...]
Filed under: Books, Decentralism, Foreign policy, History, Ideas, War