Articles and Op-Eds: 2000

When I was in Air Force Officers' Training School, we briefly hosted cadets from the Air Force Academy. We didn't get along well. Capping off the visit, we played a very strange baseball game. Both sides kept cheering, "Go Air Force!"

After enjoying near-princely status throughout the last decade, IT professionals are suddenly on the defensive. Fueled by the tech-stock collapse and the apparently related national economic slowdown, emboldened skeptics are sparking a backlash against all things virtual. "Dot-com" is now an investment epithet. Unlimited IT resources and skyrocketing salaries are no longer assured.

George F. Kennan has had two careers. The first was as a diplomat. A conservative realist who was the first head of the State Department's policy planning unit in 1947, Kennan coined the word "containment" for American strategy toward the Soviet Union. But his principled criticism of what he considered an overambitious foreign policy reduced his influence in government from the mid-1950's onward, while giving him a new audience among the intellectual left.

Even before his historic election to Mexico's presidency in July, Vicente Fox startled U.S. observers when he vowed to govern on behalf of 118 million Mexicans--the 100 million in his country and the nearly 18 million of Mexican descent in the United States. Not surprisingly, the promise, along with Fox's vision of a more open U.S.-Mexico border, heightened anxieties that Mexican immigration poses a threat to U.S. national integrity.