Anti-interventionists allege our leaders traded a strong, austere republic for a weak and sprawling empire predicated on a military might that could not match our own ambitions. This narrative negates real threats and real victories.
Counterinsurgency is not a cure-all. Local allegiances will always trump the might of the invader. Washington’s insistence that the troops turn Kabul into a functioning democracy will only erode the military's fighting spirit.
America has at times oriented itself to the East, at others to the West. But what we have always had is a sense of our manifest destiny. And now the ideals of California—nihilism with a suntan—seem to be our primary ideological export.
As Europe secularized and the global South becomes the new market for potential converts, Christianity is undergoing a painful evolution.
Scholars of international relations have only recently begun to appreciate the power of religion. Their next step is to get religion right. No longer mysterious and magical, modernity has demystified the Higher Power.
Who doesn’t want to know whether the Dow will close above ten thousand at year’s end, whether the Saudis can maintain their oil production, whether China will rise and Russia will fall, or whether a new dictator lurks in the Middle East?
Nowadays, history is regularly written by the victims, usually in service of a political agenda. Long-remembered slights poison political debate, often with violent consequences.
Stopping torture and changing the policies of the Bush administration may not be enough. With a whole new type of terrorist bred from extraordinary rendition and torture, the last eight years may well prove inescapable.
Morris turns to the origins of the one-state and two-state conceptions. It helps explain how the Israelis and Palestinians got themselves into this intractable conflict in the first place.