Foreign Policy & War

Bob Dole Should Rediscover a Better Republican Tradition

by Sheldon Richman July 1, 1996

Bob Dole is playing the defense card. He has undoubtedly calculated that President Clinton is vulnerable on defense and that Dole, a badly wounded World War II veteran, thus has the advantage. Well, maybe. But if Dole really wants to demonstrate his bona fides as an advocate of small, unintrusive government, he would be advised to examine ...

The Union: Worth a War?

by Doug Bandow March 1, 1996

What a difference a century makes. Secession is now much in vogue and U.S. officials regularly inveigh against other governments, like Ethiopia, Nigeria, Russia, and Yugoslavia, which attempt to forcibly hold their nations together. Yet most American history books admit of no doubt regarding what happened in the United States in 1861. The conventional wisdom is that the Civil War ...

Covering the Map of the World — The Half-Century Legacy of the Yalta Conference, Part 9

by Richard M. Ebeling November 1, 1995

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 The Yalta Conference formalized the configuration of the post-World War II era for almost half a century. It codified the division of Europe into East and ...

Covering the Map of the World — The Half-Century Legacy of the Yalta Conference, Part 8

by Richard M. Ebeling October 1, 1995

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 On March 1, 1945, after returning to Washington from his meeting with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin at Yalta, President Franklin Roosevelt delivered an address before ...

Repatriation — The Dark Side of World War II, Part 7

by Jacob G. Hornberger September 1, 1995

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 What purpose does it serve to talk about wrongdoing of fifty years ago? What relevance does the past have to us to today? So what if Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill, and Stalin cooperated in the ...

The War Crimes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

by Jacob G. Hornberger September 1, 1995

When U.S. military forces dropped atomic bombs on Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 275,000 men, women, and children were killed. Ever since, the killings have been justified by the claim that the bombings shortened the war and, therefore, saved the lives of American servicemen. Actually, the bombings constituted war crimes for which the perpetrators should have been tried and ...

Covering the Map of the World — The Half-Century Legacy of the Yalta Conference, Part 7

by Richard M. Ebeling September 1, 1995

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 Franklin Roosevelt was fascinated by the communist experiment in Russia. In a conversation with Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins in 1933, FDR admitted: "I don't understand ...

World War I and the Great Departure, Part 2

by Wesley Allen Riddle September 1, 1995

Part 1 | Part 2 During World War 1, the persecution of Germans in American society was so pronounced that Germans were forced to abandon their language and customs, at least in public. German books were burned outside numerous libraries, while Beethoven was banned from symphonic repertories. The atmosphere was such that Germans hid the fact they were German ...

Conserving and Destroying

by Joseph Sobran September 1, 1995

In my thesaurus, "conserve" and "destroy" are antonyms. Why is it, then, that so any conservatives seem to relish war? I have known conservatives who have joked pleasantly about "nuking the chinks" or flattening Tehran. Jokes are jokes, but some conservatives took an actual delight in the Gulf War; there was some loose talk of bombing, and even nuking, ...

Dresden: Time to Say We’re Sorry

by Simon Jenkins September 1, 1995

As the U.S. Fifth Army inched its way up Italy in 1944, its command constantly pondered which towns should be spared bombardment. Monte Cassino was destroyed. The centers of Rome and Florence were saved. The Pieros of Sansepulcro were reprieved at the last minute (I believe by an art-loving gunner). These decisions were taken out of respect for the ...

Killing Noncombatants

by Sheldon Richman September 1, 1995

In May 11, 1940, Great Britain made a fateful decision in its approach to fighting the second world war. On that night, eighteen Whitley bombers attacked railway installations in the placid west German province of Westphalia, far from the war front. That forgotten bombing raid, which in itself was inconsequential, has been called "the first deliberate breach of the ...

Repatriation — The Dark Side of World War II, Part 6

by Jacob G. Hornberger August 1, 1995

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 The U.S. government's cry to the American people during recent wars has been: "Support the troops." A person might disagree with the war itself. Or the president may have failed to secure the constitutionally ...