Foreign Policy & War

George McGovern Reconsidered

by Tim Kelly October 31, 2012

The late George McGovern will probably be most remembered as the man who suffered the worst defeat of any presidential candidate in United States history. In 1972, he lost 49 states, including his home state of South Dakota, to the incumbent Richard M. Nixon. The electoral drubbing would make McGovern the butt of more than a few political jokes, and ...

Americans Should Reject Obama-Romney Foreign Policy

by Sheldon Richman October 26, 2012

If we needed evidence of the impoverishment of American politics, the so-called debate between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney gave us all we could ask for. We normally expect a debate to highlight some disagreement, but in American politics disagreement is reserved for minor matters. The two parties — actually the two divisions of the uniparty that represents the ...

Pretexts and Provocations

by Tim Kelly October 18, 2012

Patrick Clawson, Director of Research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), attracted some attention last month for his remarks during a briefing on U.S. policy toward Iran. Clawson said, I frankly think that crisis initiation is really tough, and it’s very hard for me to see how the United States president can get us to ...

Reading List for Attendees at FFF/YAL College Civil Liberties Tour

by Future of Freedom Foundation October 5, 2012

  Prepared by: Jacob Hornberger — President, The Future of Freedom Foundation Books Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic by Chalmers Johnson Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope by Chalmers Johnson American ...

A Militarist Foreign Policy Means More Death and Destruction

by Gregory Bresiger September 19, 2012

“A feeling has been growing for a long time — even before Viet Nam — that the presidency was somehow out of hand. The White House has been building to some kind of smash.” — George Reedy, former aide to President Lyndon Johnson “More and more it appears that the art of governing is the art of deceiving on ...

The MAD Myth

by Tim Kelly August 10, 2012

Cold War dogma asserts that mutually assured destruction, however troubling, has worked in averting a nuclear war between the United States and Russia. Lending superficial credence to this idea is the fact the world has not yet been incinerated in a nuclear conflagration. This fact has been cited as vindication of the U.S. government's decision to amass a huge stockpile ...

Obama’s Logic of War

by Sheldon Richman June 29, 2012

Despite the alleged difference between Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Iran, both embrace a position that logically commits them to war. If war is to be avoided, as Obama says he wishes, he will have to abandon his current stance. The difference between Obama and Netanyahu is more apparent than real. Both say Iran’s possession of ...

I Was Fooled by the War-Makers

by Thomas E. Woods Jr. June 24, 2012

Twenty years ago, as I was completing my freshman year in college, I was a full-blown neoconservative. Except I didn’t know it. Having concluded that I was not a leftist, I simply decided by process of elimination that I must be a Rush Limbaughian. Like most people, I was unaware that any alternative to those two choices existed, or that ...

The Myths of NATO

by Tim Kelly May 30, 2012

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was cast into the national spotlight last week when the 63-year-old alliance held its 25th summit in Chicago. While the thousands of anti-NATO protesters and the government’s heavy-handed security measures attracted most of the media’s attention, important questions regarding the Cold War–era organization went largely ignored. According to Cold War orthodoxy, the United States ...

No More Entangling Alliances

by Laurence M. Vance May 22, 2012

Would the United States go to war over marine life illegally harvested in the South China Sea? The very thought of such a thing sounds ludicrous. But under the U.S. Mutual Defense Treaty with the Philippines, it is a possibility. For the past month, China and the Philippines have traded threats over a disputed area in the South China Sea ...

The Road to the Permanent Warfare State, Part 13

by Gregory Bresiger May 5, 2012

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 |Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 |Part 12 |Part 13 Well, when the president does it that means it is not ...

Florida Doubles Down on Cuba Restrictions

by Laurence M. Vance May 1, 2012

It is not just the federal government that violates Americans’ liberties; state governments can be just as tyrannical. From the Alien and Sedition Acts in the eighteenth century to the USA PATRIOT Act in the twenty-first century — and many other things in between — the U.S. federal government has ignored its own Constitution and sought to weaken or destroy ...