Foreign Policy & War

Ron Paul Was Right about Ukraine

by Laurence M. Vance February 16, 2022

The Cold War is over. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, or Soviet Union) is no more. The Berlin Wall has been dismantled. East and West Germany are united. Yugoslavia is now the independent republics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. Czechoslovakia is now the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. The communist dictator ...

9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger February 1, 2022

Part 1 | Part 2 Prior to the 9/11 attacks, The Future of Freedom Foundation was publishing articles warning that the U.S. government’s deadly and destructive interventionism in the Middle East would likely end up producing a retaliatory terrorist attack on American soil. We weren’t the only ones. The noted analyst Chalmers Johnson’s excellent book Blowback: The Costs and ...

Boosting American Standing on the World Stage

by Laurence M. Vance January 1, 2022

What do a member of the left-leaning New York Times editorial board and a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute (AEI) have in common? Usually, not very much. But when it comes to how America can boost its standing on the world stage, they are in perfect agreement: The United States should give away more COVID-19 vaccines ...

Cuba and the Destruction of Conscience

by Jacob G. Hornberger October 1, 2021

Last summer, protests erupted in Cuba against the communist regime over poor economic and health conditions within the country. No doubt operating under pressure from the Pentagon and the CIA, President Biden used the Cuban government’s suppression of the protests as an excuse to strengthen the decades-old U.S. economic embargo against Cuba. Biden proclaimed that he was supporting the Cuban ...

Bring All the Troops Home

by John W. Whitehead August 31, 2021

“Let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad. This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to the rebuilding of our own nation. America must be restored to a proper role in the world. But we ...

Jacques Novicow, Sociologist of Peace and Freedom

by Richard M. Ebeling April 1, 2021

One of the most important classical liberal crusades of the nineteenth century was to at least tame, if not end, the death and destruction of war. From time immemorial, wars have been the scourge of mankind. Huge numbers of ordinary people have been uprooted from their homes and families to be the human sacrifices in battle to serve the ...

Should We?

by Laurence M. Vance January 19, 2021

Every president since George Washington has delivered an inaugural address. Beginning with William McKinley, the address has taken place after the swearing in of the new president instead of before. There have been some notable inaugural addresses. William Henry Harrison’s inaugural address in 1841 was almost two hours long. He delivered the address in freezing weather without a ...

Diplomatic Impunity

by Michael Tennant November 18, 2020

“An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country,” English diplomat Sir Henry Wotton was quoted as saying in a 1611 book by Caspar Schoppe. Four hundred nine years later, in a Defense One article by Katie Bo Williams, retiring U.S. diplomat Jim Jeffrey turned Wotton’s epigram on its ...

Will People Now Ask the Fundamental Question?

by Michael Swanson November 1, 2020

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew Bacevich (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020), 236 pages. Andrew Bacevich’s new book, The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory, examines the period of time between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the election of Donald Trump in 2016. ...

The Continuing, Poisonous Russia Obsession

by Ted Galen Carpenter October 1, 2020

For more than a decade, there has been pronounced animus toward Russia in the American news media and among hawks, especially congressional Democrats, in the political community. That hostility surged when Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014. Furious political leaders and Western media outlets slammed the Kremlin’s action as an outrageous case of unprovoked aggression, akin to the ...

The Korean War’s Forgotten Lessons on the Evil of Intervention

by James Bovard September 1, 2020

This year is the 70th anniversary of the start of the Korean War, a conflict from which Washington policymakers learned nothing. Almost 40,000 American soldiers died in that conflict that should have permanently vaccinated the nation against the folly and evil of foreign intervention. Instead, the war was retroactively redefined. As Barack Obama declared in 2013, “That war was ...

Free Trade, Liberalism, and Peace

by Richard M. Ebeling September 1, 2020

The classical liberals of the nineteenth century were certain that the end of the older mercantilist system — with its government control of trade and commerce, its bounties (subsidies) and prohibitions on exports and imports — would open wide vistas for improving the material conditions of man through the internationalization of the system of division of labor. They also ...