Foreign Policy & War

Wrong Again, Mr. President

by Sheldon Richman September 1, 1999

Leave it to President Clinton to do the right thing in the wrong way. Last week the President announced that he would forgive, with Congress's consent, more than $5 billion in loans that 36 poor nations owe the U.S. government. This in itself is entirely proper for one simple reason: the governments ...

A Libertarian Visits Cuba, Part 3

by Jacob G. Hornberger August 1, 1999

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Even though I knew that it is a serious criminal offense to criticize Cuban socialism, I was determined to deliver a presentation of libertarian principles in the middle of Havana. I got my chance when one of the research centers I visited asked me to explain libertarianism to its staff. I ...

NATO’s Balkans Disaster and Wilsonian Warmongering, Part 2

by Doug Bandow August 1, 1999

Part 1 | Part 2 The Founders vested the power to declare war in Congress because they feared presidents would do precisely what they are doing today — regularly taking the nation into overseas conflicts. It is all too easy to loose the dogs of war; it is impossible to control where they go afterwards. The administration launched an unprovoked ...

A Libertarian Visits Cuba, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger July 1, 1999

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 My trip to Cuba last spring entailed talking primarily to two groups of people — those in research centers at the University of Havana and people whom I encountered in daily life in Cuba. The meetings with the research centers were arranged by the Cuban Interest Section in Washington, D.C., which ...

Clinton’s Quagmire

by Sheldon Richman July 1, 1999

"The man of system ... seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board; he does not consider that the pieces upon a chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, ...

NATO’s Balkans Disaster and Wilsonian Warmongering, Part 1

by Doug Bandow July 1, 1999

Part 1 | Part 2 When ethnic Albanian guerrillas originally rejected the Rambouillet peace settlement for Kosovo fashioned by the Clinton administration, a Clinton official raged, "Here is the greatest nation on earth pleading with to do something entirely in their own interest — which is to say yes to an interim agreement — and they defy us." With ...

A Bad Precedent

by Sheldon Richman June 2, 1999

Not to labor the obvious, but by now everyone surely knows to disbelieve anything the Clinton administration or NATO says about its war of aggression against Yugoslavia. Slobodan Milosevic may have accepted NATO's demands, which could lead to an end to the bombing. But that doesn't change the fact that this has been a dishonest and ...

Lies, Damn Lies, and the Clinton Administration

by Sheldon Richman June 2, 1999

What are we to do with a head of state who is responsible for the deaths of many innocent people, who has never been elected to office by a majority of citizens, and who rules by force and deceit? Will the war crimes tribunal at the Hague bring him to justice? It's unlikely, because the man is ...

Warfare-Welfare in Yugoslavia

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 1, 1999

More than 80 years ago, the United States entered World War I with the express purposes of making the world safe for democracy and making that war the one that would end all future European wars. The intervention was a radical departure from the foreign policy that George Washington had enunciated in his Farewell Address and which had been ...

Bill Clinton: World Cop

by Sheldon Richman June 1, 1999

In a major foreign-policy address delivered a few months back in San Francisco, President Bill Clinton solemnly affirmed that everything everywhere in the world is the business of the United States. If you ever entertained the thought that we Americans should be free just to live our lives, raise our families, and participate voluntarily in our communities — forget ...

Politics by Incantation

by Sheldon Richman June 1, 1999

Americans pride themselves on being modern and sophisticated, but in some important matters, we are no more advanced than primitive animists in southern Sudan. To see this, just witness so much of what passes for public affairs. Leaders and led alike behave as if words shape reality. Legislation is incantation. ...

FDR – The Man, the Leader, the Legacy, Part 7

by Ralph Raico June 1, 1999

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Table of Contents Two major grounds are put forward nowadays for the ...