Foreign Policy & War

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 ...

The Tortured Legacy of the Mexican-American War, Part 6

by Danny Sjursen September 1, 2020

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4  | Part 5 | Part 6 But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.… the fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.… She might become the dictatress of the world.

NATO’s “Unified Front” at Breaking Point

by Danny Sjursen August 14, 2020

Last month, a Turkish warship came one step away from firing missiles at a French naval vessel off the coast of Libya. In response, Paris suspended its involvement in Operation Sea Guardian — a multinational maritime effort to provide security in the Mediterranean Sea and halt the arms trafficking fueling Libya’s ongoing civil war. Initially, only eight ...

The Tortured Legacy of the Mexican-American War, Part 4

by Danny Sjursen July 1, 2020

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4  | Part 5 | Part 6 Our militia & volunteers, if a tenth of what is said to be true, have committed atrocities — horrors — in Mexico, sufficient to make Heaven weep, & every American, of Christian morals, blush for his country. — Gen. Winfield ...

The Tortured Legacy of the Mexican-American War, Part 3

by Danny Sjursen June 1, 2020

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory, and shed American blood upon American soil. War exists, and notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it, exists by the act of Mexico herself. — ...

Trump: I Can and Will Start Wars Whenever I Please

by Michael Tennant May 26, 2020

President Donald Trump’s May 6 veto of a Senate resolution that would have required him to seek congressional approval for any further military confrontations with Iran demonstrates that, despite his occasional feints toward scaling back foreign intervention, Trump is as much a warmonger as anyone else in Washington. Worse still, his explanation for his veto indicates that he believes ...

The Tortured Legacy of the Mexican-American War, Part 2

by Danny Sjursen May 1, 2020

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 The Constitution was, and is, emphatic on one matter, at least: only Congress possesses the power to declare war. In the 1840s, an era of legislative preeminence, even the high-risk Tyler blanched, aware that the agreement exceeded his authority. ...

Impeachment Reminder of Our Toxic Foreign Aid

by James Bovard April 1, 2020

Foreign aid to Ukraine helped spur the Democrats’ effort to impeach and remove President Trump earlier this year. Ukraine was supposed to be on the verge of great progress until Trump pulled the rug out from under the heroic salvation effort by U.S. government bureaucrats. Unfortunately, Congress has devoted a hundred times more attention to the timing of aid ...

The Tortured Legacy of the Mexican-American War, Part 1

by Danny Sjursen April 1, 2020

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 I had a horror of the Mexican War ... only I had not the moral courage enough to resign. — Ulysses S. Grant (1879) The phrase “regime change wars” has, of late, taken on profound meaning and stoked massive controversy. ...

The Impeachment Hearings Inadvertently Show the Insidious Nature of U.S. Foreign Policy

by Laurence M. Vance February 11, 2020

Although many Americans may not know what a quid pro quo is, any American would have to be living under a rock not to know that House Democrats impeached President Donald Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress stemming, they alleged, from his temporarily delaying the release of U.S. military aid to Ukraine to pressure the Ukrainian ...