Foreign Policy & War

Stupidity or Plan?

by Scott Horton July 1, 2013

Are America’s disasters abroad a result of stupidity or some elaborate plan? An observer of modern U.S. foreign policy can be torn on that one. It makes sense that generals, contractors, and other national-security state types will invent and follow a deliberate policy of divide and rule, as well as to create crises to move on to the next big job. ...

The U.S. Base on Diego Garcia: An Overlooked Atrocity

by Sheldon Richman June 4, 2013

The largest criminal organizations in the world are governments. The bigger they are, the more capable of perpetrating atrocities. Not only do they obtain great wealth through compulsion (taxation), they also have an ideological mystique that permits them uniquely to get away with murder, torture, and theft. The U.S. government is no exception. This is demonstrated by, among many other ...

TGIF: So What If Freedom Isn’t Free?

by Sheldon Richman May 31, 2013

“Freedom isn’t free.” We’ve all heard this glib line. It usually is uttered as an admonition to those who criticize some government imposition that is defended in the name of national security. The last time I heard it I had just condemned military conscription — the draft — as slavery. It’s also brought out to rebut those who refuse to ...

Obama’s Willful Foreign-Policy Blindness

by Sheldon Richman May 30, 2013

Republicans are upset about President Obama’s May 23 foreign-policy address, yet politics aside, it’s hard to say why. “We show this lack of resolve, talking about the war being over,” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Fox News Sunday. But four days later in his Memorial Day remarks, Obama said, “Our nation is still at war.” Why did the ...

TGIF: The Greatness of Peace Activist John Bright

by Sheldon Richman May 24, 2013

As we approach Memorial Day — or what I like to call Revisionist History Day — it’s fitting to contemplate the words of one of the world’s great peace activists, John Bright (1811–1889). Bright, a Quaker and Nonconformist, is best known for leading (with Richard Cobden) Britain’s Anti-Corn Law League, the organization that fought successfully to abolish ...

TGIF: No Intervention in Syria

by Sheldon Richman May 10, 2013

If after the debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya (dare I say Vietnam?) some people still want the U.S. government to intervene — further — in the war inside Syria (but fueled by outsiders), we must conclude, not that they can’t learn the lessons of recent history, but that they won’t because doing so would be contrary ...

National Defense, Foreign Policy, and Gun Control

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 1, 2013

One of the most popular mantras in the post–9/11 era involves praising the troops for “defending our nation” and “protecting our rights and freedoms.” But how many people ever really think about what those mantras really mean? Indeed, how many people ever give serious thought to what would happen to our nation and to our rights and freedoms if ...

Venturing into Mali

by Sheldon Richman May 1, 2013

Murray Rothbard once observed that it was getting harder and harder to use the reductio ad absurdum device to ridicule U.S. government policy. Things haven’t changed. Thanks to recent events, we may no longer use “Timbuktu,” a name associated with a far-off middle-of-nowhere location, in a reductio about U.S. interventionist foreign policy. The U.S. government has helped the French ...

What If the Tsarnaevs’ Motive Was Revenge for U.S. Foreign Policy?

by Sheldon Richman April 23, 2013

On the day of the Boston Marathon bombings, President Obama stood in the White House briefing room and said, “We will find out who did this; we’ll find out why they did this.” What motivated the murderous acts allegedly committed by Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarvaev is the question on everyone’s mind. We would be surprised if it were ...

Saber Rattling in Korea: Cui Bono?

by Tim Kelly April 11, 2013

North Korea has announced plans to restart a nuclear reactor that will enable production of weapons-grade plutonium. The announcement coincides with Pyongyang ratcheting up its rhetoric, issuing threats to wage atomic war against South Korea and Japan, and even to target American cities with long-range nuclear missiles it does not yet possess. For decades, North Korea has used its ramshackle ...

The Disasters that U.S. Intervention Created

by Sheldon Richman March 21, 2013

Americans have forgotten about the Iraq war, which began 10 years ago this week, and the Afghan war, the longest in American history, but the U.S. government is still throwing its weight around in both countries. The Iraq war, the pretext for which was nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, officially ended in 2011 with the withdrawal of virtually all of ...

I Am Sick of Veterans Who Wave the Flag and Send Others Off To Die

by James Glaser March 21, 2013

A World War II vet told me something once that I have found to be true: “If you walk into a VFW or American Legion Post bar and hear some guy telling everyone what a hero he was and how he fought the enemy so well, but at the end of the bar there sits a man alone not talking ...