The Libertarian Angle: Washington Post Editorial on Foreign Policy by Future of Freedom Foundation May 5, 2014 FFF president Jacob Hornberger and FFF vice president Sheldon Richman discuss U.S. foreign policy. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly. Go to the podcast.
Broken by Matthew Harwood May 1, 2014 They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars — The Untold Story by Ann Jones. (Haymarket Books/Dispatch Books 2013), 191 pages. Members of the American armed forces are props. They wave from convertibles as Independence Day parades make their way down Main Street U.S.A. They are trotted out at football games to bless the proceedings as some ...
Foreign Aid Clobbers the Third World by James Bovard April 1, 2014 The U.S. government loves to preen about its generosity to the world’s downtrodden. However, a long series of presidents and their tools have scorned the evidence that their aid programs perennially clobber recipients. Nowhere is this clearer than in the sordid history of U.S. food aid. Food for Peace was devised in 1954 to help dump abroad embarrassingly huge crop ...
The Death of Empires by Martin Morse Wooster April 1, 2014 Balance: The Economics of Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern America by Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane. (Simon and Schuster 2013), 296 pages. One of the perennial questions historians address is why empires fell. In his 1987 bestseller, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Yale historian Paul Kennedy theorized that every empire reaches a tipping point ...
Sheldon Richman on Declare Your Independence with Ernest Hancock by Sheldon Richman March 27, 2014 2014-03-21 Hour 2 Sheldon Richman from Ernest Hancock on Vimeo.
The Iranian Threat That Never Was by Sheldon Richman March 26, 2014 If you take politicians and the mainstream media seriously, you believe that Iran wants a nuclear weapon and has relentlessly engaged in covert efforts to build one. Even if you are aware that Iran signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and is subject to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections, you may believe that those who run the Islamic ...
TGIF: The American Disease by Sheldon Richman March 21, 2014 If the purpose of U.S. intervention in the affairs of other countries is really to help suffering people, the program has a fatal flaw. (This should surprise no one familiar with other government programs.) The flaw is that the U.S. government does opposition movements no favors when it gives credibility to the charge that those movements are tools of ...
Did Team Obama Blunder or Conspire in Ukraine? by Sheldon Richman March 20, 2014 While no one ever lost money overestimating the capacity of the U.S. government to blunder, we cannot rule out that American officials knew exactly what they were doing when they helped provoke the crisis in Ukraine. It is hard to believe that all these officials are so ignorant of Russian history that they could not anticipate how President Vladimir Putin ...
TGIF: Empire on Their Minds by Sheldon Richman March 14, 2014 The conflict in Ukraine has prompted several level-headed commentators to point out that, of all governments, the U.S. government is in no position to lecture Russia about respecting other nations’ borders. When Secretary of State John Kerry said on Meet the Press, “This is an act of aggression that is completely trumped up in terms of its pretext.… You ...
How Americans Can Help Ukrainians by Sheldon Richman March 13, 2014 It can’t be easy living in Russia’s shadow, and I envy no one in that position. Given its long history and, consequently, the temperament of its leaders (and a good part of its population), Russia for the foreseeable future will be a regional power with an attitude. Thus it will ever be concerned with what happens on its ...
The Libertarian Angle: NATO and Ukraine by Future of Freedom Foundation March 10, 2014 The Libertarian Angle: NATO and Ukraine. FFF president Jacob Hornberger and FFF vice president Sheldon Richman discuss the recent events in the Ukraine. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly. Go to the podcast.
American Hawks Risk Escalating the Ukrainian Crisis by Sheldon Richman March 5, 2014 With Russia and the United States confronting each other over Ukraine, the world is at a dangerous juncture. While the chances of war between the two behemoths seem small — these are, after all, nuclear powers that have avoided war for over 60 years — nothing can be taken for granted. No one wanted the Great War that began ...