Foreign Policy & War

TGIF: Trivial Dispute: Obama versus the Interventionists

by Sheldon Richman May 30, 2014

American politics is largely a series of debates over unimportant details. These debates are conducted far above the fundamental level because the supposed contenders share the same premises. Where they disagree is at the level of application, and so the disagreements end up being fairly minor, especially if you think the premises are wrong. This is an especially pronounced feature ...

The Danger Is Intervention, Not “Isolation”

by Sheldon Richman May 29, 2014

A lot of people are warning against America turning “isolationist.” We can dismiss the warnings—special pleadings, really—emanating from other countries, where people have free-ridden on American taxpayers for decades. If Europeans are worried about defending themselves, why are they cutting their military budgets? Not that we should mind if they do, but they should not look to us to ...

More U.S. Intervention in Libya?

by Sheldon Richman May 22, 2014

Except for the 2012 deadly attacks on the U.S. diplomatic mission and CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya has dropped out of American news coverage since President Obama and NATO’s so-called humanitarian intervention in 2011. The American public has been led to believe that except for that terrorist outburst, things have been going pretty well in the country formerly ruled ...

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 ...