Foreign Policy & War

The Empire versus Little America

by Bill Kauffman May 1, 2016

Former Arkansas Sen. William Fulbright said in 1967, “The price of empire is America’s soul, and that price is too high.” War, expansion, the maintenance of a large standing army: these corrupt a country, as poets from James Russell Lowell to Wendell Berry have tried to tell us. The Vietnam or Iraq War may level villages across the sea but ...

The CIA, Terrorism, and the Cold War: The Evil of the National Security State

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 2016

The following is Chapter 1 of The Future of Freedom Foundation’s newest ebook, The CIA, Terrorism, and the Cold War: The Evil of the National Security State by Jacob Hornberger. Purchase the book for $1 here. The two most important words in the lives of the American people for the past 60 years have been “national security.” The ...

Welcome to Base Nation

by Matthew Harwood April 1, 2016

Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015), 432 pages. There is much in U.S. history that Americans should not be proud of. Chattel slavery. The genocide of indigenous populations. Jim Crow. The U.S. war on terror currently under way and still with no end in sight. But few ...

The Inanity of the Cold War

by Jacob G. Hornberger December 1, 2015

There were many inanities that came with the Cold War, the 45-year period of tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. In fact, one might easily argue that the entire Cold War was an exercise in inanity. U.S. officials, of course, have always maintained that the Cold War was necessary to prevent the Soviet Union from imposing communism ...

War of Pure Defense: A First Sketch

by Joseph R. Stromberg December 1, 2015

Few thinkers have ever set forth (much less developed) the rather straightforward idea of purely defensive war, i.e., war limited to repelling invaders — and otherwise doing nothing at all. The term “defensivism” would suit the case, but since philosopher Eric Mack put it (in my view) to different and rather conventional use almost forty years ago (“Permissible Defense,” ...

To France from a Post-9/11 America: Lessons We Learned Too Late

by John W. Whitehead November 18, 2015

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” ― Benjamin Franklin “Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the ...

War, Big Government, and Lost Freedom

by Richard M. Ebeling November 4, 2015

We are currently marking the hundredth anniversary of the fighting of the First World War. For four years between the summer of 1914 and November 11, 1918, the major world powers were in mortal combat with each other. The conflict radically changed the world. It overthrew the pre-1914 era of relatively limited government and free market economics, and ushered ...

The Political Economy of “Exporting” Democracy

by Christopher Coyne October 1, 2015

In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson justified the American entry into World War I on the ground that it was necessary to make the world “safe for democracy.” Since that time, U.S. presidents have used this same line of reasoning to justify military interventions around the world. More than eight decades after Wilson’s decree, George W. Bush stated that “it ...

The Libertarian Angle – Ron Paul and the Battle for Liberty

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 16, 2015

Each week, FFF president Jacob Hornberger discusses the hot topics of the day. This week, Jacob and special co-host Daniel McAdams, Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, discuss the importance of a non-interventionist foreign policy and the dismantling of the welfare state. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly. Go to the ...

Empire, Security, and the War State

by David S. D'Amato June 1, 2015

The War State: The Cold War Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex and the Power Elite, 1945–1963 by Michael Swanson (CreateSpace 2013), 430 pages. In the October 1958 issue of The New Yorker, near the high-water mark of McCarthyism, the novelist and literary critic Mary McCarthy famously wrote, “Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.” ...

The Libertarian Angle – Dying for Empire and Hegemony

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 27, 2015

Each week, FFF president Jacob Hornberger discusses the hot topics of the day. This week, Jacob talks about Memorial Day and motivation behind U.S. foreign policy. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly. Go to the podcast here.

The Libertarian Angle: Iraq and Other Foreign-Policy Disasters

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 6, 2015

Each week, FFF president Jacob Hornberger discusses the hot topics of the day. This week, Jacob and guest co-host Scott Horton discuss the folly of U.S. foreign policy. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly. Go to the podcast here.