Grand Strategy

In recent months, leading analysts in the United States have begun making comparisons between the United States and the Roman empire. On the right, conservatives like Max Boot of the Wall Street Journal editorial page have openly called for "benign" American imperialism.

Meanwhile, on the center-left, some "humanitarian hawks" are as eager as many conservatives to use U.S. military force in wars to pre-empt threats and topple hostile regimes.

In the past, parallels between Imperial Rome and… more

Every politician in Washington has a recipe for "improving" President George W. Bush's proposal for a Department of Homeland Security.

Yet it's unlikely that all these cooks will spoil the broth, because the idea is so popular and the need is so obvious. And thus the American political system works, in its own muddling- through manner. Less than a year after Sept. 11, the nation is rallying to its own defense. Indeed, the whole of the West is taking similar… more

In retrospect, George W. Bush's Middle East policy appears to have been based on two goals supported by the President -- if not by every member of his administration. The first goal was informal U.S. control of Middle Eastern oil supplies. This goal was to be realized by means of alliance with friendly Arab tyrannies (Saudi Arabia and a post-Saddam dictatorship in Iraq).

Giving the Israelis free reign

The second goal was to give Israel's right wing… more

Earlier this month, a group of sixty American public figures issued a statement on the attacks of September eleventh and the conflicts that have followed it. Titled What We're Fighting For, the document was a measured defense of the American war against Al Qaeda and, by implication, its Taliban allies. What we are fighting for, the authors declared, are American beliefs that are also the universal principles of modern societies: all individuals possess equal intrinsic dignity; there are… more