Radicals of the democracy-promotion movement embody the very thing they are fighting against—a closed-minded conviction that they represent the one true path for all societies and thus possess a monopoly on social, ethical and political truth.
The National Interest stands for realism in U.S. international relations, a conviction that foreign policy should be based upon real-world considerations—forces, pressures and passions emanating from factors of culture and geography.
It took Tony Blair one speech in 1999 to trap the Western world in an unending series of interventionist wars. We may care about the people of Tibet, Baghdad and Libya, but are we the knight-errant of the human race?
Antony Beevor’s The Second World War plunges the reader into the heart of darkness by rendering an intensely personal narrative of a war that stretched across several continents over nearly a decade.
For those who think we live in an age of unrestrained violence, think again. At least according to one Harvard psychologist, mankind has learned to rein in its inner demons. But is Pinker’s civilization-as-progress thesis too good to be true?
For the great historian Hugh Trevor-Roper—whose poison pen spared no ego and whose toxic overconfidence relegated him to a perpetual almost-ran—refusing to become the false prophet of a grand new theory of history was his greatest triumph.
