Prospect

George Wm Bush may be elected to a second term in 2004 but his re-election is by no means a sure thing. After all, Bush is the first president since Benjamin Harrison in 1888 to have obtained an electoral college majority while losing the popular vote. If Gore had carried his home state of Tennessee, Bush would not be president and the US and Britain would not be bogged down in Iraq. The US is still a "50-50" nation, with… more

When Lyndon Johnson was US president between 1963 and 1969, the world grew familiar with the "western White House" -- the Johnson ranch on the Pedernales river west of Austin, in the heart of his beloved central Texan hill country. Three decades later, newly elected president George W Bush began hosting foreign leaders at his own Texas ranch -- this one north of Austin in Crawford. Although Bush was ridiculed in the liberal press as a phony rancher -- and… more

Two individuals with the name Philippe Legrain appear to have written in response to my enthusiastic review of Ha-Joon Chang's defence of economic nationalism, Kicking Away the Ladder ("Free Trade Fallacy II," Prospect, February).

Legrain I agrees with Chang and me that both free trade and protection may be appropriate for different countries in different circumstances. According to Legrain I, "For sure, there is a respectable theoretical case for limited, and temporary, government support to infant industries..." Furthermore,… more

According to the Washington consensus which governed thinking about global economic development during the 1980s and 1990s, the only way for poor countries to catch up with the US, the EU and Japan was to adopt policies of free trade and free investment. This prescription, however, produced rather discouraging results.

In the months since my essay "The Israel lobby" appeared (Prospect, April 2002), US foreign policy has been aligned with-if not subordinated to-that of Ariel Sharon's Israel to a degree that nobody could have imagined last spring. To the dismay of moderate Israelis and our European allies, President Bush has endorsed Sharon's policies of reoccupation, the repudiation of the Oslo negotiations, the dismantling of the Palestinian Authority, and the diplomatic isolation of Arafat, while announcing unrealistic conditions for Palestinian statehood… more

Until recently, America's middle east policy was a peripheral part of its global strategy, which focused on preventing the Soviet Union from intimidating US allies in western Europe and east Asia. Britain was the dominant western power in the middle east until the 1960s, and US influence was countered in much of the region by the Soviet Union until the end of the cold war. The indifference of much of the national security elite and the public to the region,… more

Dear Mike 3rd November 2001

Universal values exist, but it does not follow that the world ought to contain only liberal regimes. The sad fact is that universal values conflict with one another. There will always be a variety of legitimate regimes, liberal and non-liberal, because there is no single right way of resolving these universal conflicts. The last thing we need now is another liberal crusade. Instead, we should be thinking with some urgency about rules of… more

Since 11th september, political leaders have struggled to define the sides in what is clearly a kind of war. Is it a war between radical Muslims and the US? Is it a war between the Christian west and Islam? Or is the conflict an even larger one -- between secularism and fundamentalism around the world?

The most influential attempts to define the post-cold war world have been those of Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the… more

The United States, it is said, has been violently inducted into membership of the rest of the world. Some commentators have noted with satisfaction that at last US decision-makers will appreciate the experience of-depending on their sympathies-Israelis, Belgraders, Nicaraguans or the residents of Baghdad. Kinder commentators reflected that terrorism is a fact of life in Britain, India, Turkey and elsewhere and that Americans would have had to lose the illusion of invulnerability sooner or later-if not so suddenly and horribly.… more

Dear Mike 2nd April 2001

Supporters of space exploration have too often tried to make their case with carrots, when they should have been waving sticks. … more