The Alternative to Dominance

from James Dobbins at The WSJ, American Retrenchment Is a Golden Oldie But we don’t know how the country will respond to the next crisis. It took the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, nine months after Luce’s call to arms, to push the U.S. into World War II....

Carter and Israel

from National Review in 2002, Jay Nordlinger wrote Carterpalooza excerpts:  No one quite realizes just how passionately anti-Israel Carter is. William Safire has reported that Cyrus Vance acknowledged that, if he had had a second term, Carter would have sold Israel...

Sacrificing the Bad for the Worse

“In any event, Richard Nixon was gone, and the doctrine bearing his name was not about to be disinterred by a president who saw no need for it and even thought that the United States would be better off without allies like the Shah. And so—in what would seem in...

Ethnocentric Diplomacy

  Foreign affairs is the most difficult area of government policy.  To be effective it requires a continuity and consistency that transcends presidential terms.  Impatience serves us well as an entrepreneurial economic growth engine, but it is our Achilles heel...

Hebron, Shiloh, and Bethlehem

During one of Menachem Begin’s initial meetings with Jimmy Carter, the subject of Israeli settlements in the West Bank inevitably arose and it was a major sticking point in their relationship. He (Begin) took out a piece of paper from his inside pocket, adjusted his...