The National Interest articles from December 1996

The National Interest archives from December 1996

Secularism in retreat.
December 22, 1996... A few years ago the first volume coming out of the Fundamentalism Project landed on my desk. The Fundamentalism Project was generously funded by the MacArthur Foundation and chaired by Martin Marty, the distinguished church historian at the...

China: what engagement should mean.
December 22, 1996... The United States enjoyed a united policy toward China for two decades. That unity ended with Tiananmen Square. But the challenge of an ascendant China now requires a consistent, steady, long-term view. The United States must rebuild a bipartisan...

The third side of the triangle: the China-Japan dimension.
December 22, 1996... Of all the relationships in the world that do not directly involve the United States as one of the parties, the one between China and Japan is likely to have the greatest effect upon us in the first half of the twenty-first century. Indeed, it...

Africa's murderous professors.
December 22, 1996... In his much-praised History of the Jews, Paul Johnson reminds us that through the ages European "anti-Semitism was fueled not just by vulgar rumor but by the deliberate propaganda of intellectuals." This was a pattern that reached its apogee in...

Dayton, Bosnia, and the limits of law. (Dayton Accord)
December 22, 1996... In an attempt to create an American-style, multi-ethnic democracy in the Bosnia-Herzegovinian rump of the formerly multi-ethnic dictatorship of Yugoslavia, American negotiators brokered a complex series of formal undertakings known collectively...

Volkogonov's journey. (Russian biographer Dmitri Volkogonov)
December 22, 1996... The "park of fallen heroes" is the ironical name Muscovites have given to the patch of waste land across Krymsky Val from Gorky Park, where the statues of Soviet leaders are dumped. Here lies a Stalin in polished red granite that once stood...

Corridors of silence. (Rome's former political powers)
December 22, 1996... When I was a correspondent in Rome in the early 1980s I regularly did the rounds of four centers of political power. First stop was usually the Christian Democrat Party headquarters in Piazza del Gesu, across the square from Giacomo della Porta's...

The new Mandarins. (Mandarin Chinese as the next business language of the Pacific Rim)
December 22, 1996... A prim twenty-one year-old with a perpetual smile, Yumi is quick-witted, energetic, and thus, one would think, eminently employable. But the Japanese job market, tough for a young woman in the best of times, has been downright forbidding in the...

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
December 22, 1996... There is a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Samuel Huntington. He is perhaps the most brilliant, articulate, versatile, and creative living political scientist. He has written the most authoritative work on the consequences of social change on...

The Dawn of Peace in Europe.
December 22, 1996... "We must fulfill the promise of our time: an undivided Europe of free nations. . . . NATO enlargement is on track and it will happen." - Warren Christopher, March 20, 1996 in Prague "The process of NATO enlargement has begun. . . . It is...

Reflections of a Cold Warrior.
December 22, 1996... The late Richard Bissell was a career intelligence officer known for his most colossal failure - the management of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. At the time he had already devoted nearly a quarter century to government service, yet...

A Fez of the Heart.
December 22, 1996... Is the west "losing" Turkey? The question has been prompted by the accession to power in Ankara in June 1996 of a coalition government in which the Islamist Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, or RP) is the senior partner, with its leader, Necmettin...

Dervish: The Invention of Modern Turkey.
December 22, 1996... Is the west "losing" Turkey? The question has been prompted by the accession to power in Ankara in June 1996 of a coalition government in which the Islamist Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, or RP) is the senior partner, with its leader, Necmettin...

NATO enlargement: what's the rush? (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)
December 22, 1996... The question of enlarging NATO has occasioned the most important foreign policy debate in the United States since the end of the Cold War, and rightly so. The issue is integral to determining America's future role in Europe, still a very...