The National Interest articles from December 1999

The National Interest archives from December 1999

Present Laughter or Utopian Bliss?
December 22, 1999... WHEN THE Democrats captured the White House in 1992, after a dozen years in exile, foreign policy was not at the top of their agenda. Many observers felt this a blessing, because clear and mature thought on the subject had not been one of the...

The Folk Who Live on the Hill.
December 22, 1999... WHEN Theodore Roosevelt ushered in the American Century as the nation's youngest president in 1901, he promptly rallied the Republican Party behind his unique brand of foreign affairs activism. In short order, the former Rough Rider and hero of...

Kofi's Rule.
December 22, 1999... Humanitarian Intervention and Neocolonialism KOFI ANNAN was once a solid bureaucrat who could count on the loyalty of a so-called "African Mafia" among UN officials. He systematically promoted the career interests of the many Africans who...

Moralpolitik: The Timor Test.
December 22, 1999... ON AUGUST 30, 1999, the United Nations Mission in East Timor (UNAMET) held a referendum on the territory's future. Voters were asked whether they wished their homeland to remain inside Indonesia. The government of President B.J. Habibie in...

Affluence and Influence.
December 22, 1999... The Conceptual Basis of Europe's New Politics THE EUROPEAN Union may, with profit, be regarded as a qualitatively new type of security organization, one that seeks to create cooperation and harmony through a high level of economic and...

Paradise Lost.
December 22, 1999... The Ordeal of Kashmir IN KASHMIR, this year's "annual spring exercises"--as the more worldly local commentators like to joke--escalated into the most severe and sustained bout of fighting since 1971, when India and Pakistan clashed for the...

Did Western Civilization Survive the 20th Century?
December 22, 1999... THE VERY FACT that the question posed above might reasonably be asked is in itself alarming, though it should not be. The West, in its various incarnations, has feared the end of its own civilization almost from the beginning. We do ourselves...

Self-Inflicted Wounds.
December 22, 1999... THE GLOBAL financial crisis that began with the collapse of the Thai baht in mid-1997 was fundamentally one of information mismanagement--that is, banks failed and markets collapsed mainly because crucial information was not collected and...

The Way It Ought To Be.
December 22, 1999... THE KILLER ANGELS, Michael Shaara's immensely popular novel of the Civil War, recounts the Battle of Gettysburg from the point of view of those who fought there, artfully blending history and imagination. On the Union side, Shaara tells his...

NATO and Kosovo.
December 22, 1999... Ivo H. Daalder takes issue with Layne and Schwarz: DURING the early weeks of the Kosovo war, critics of the Clinton administration were appalled by NATO's lack of planning. NATO, after all, had gone to war for the ostensible purpose of...

China's Military, Take 3.
December 22, 1999... LET US BEGIN BY thanking Ambassador James Lilley and Carl Ford for driving home an important point in their article, "China's Military: A Second Opinion" (Fall 1999): any conflict over Taiwan would be of the utmost seriousness regardless of...

The Arithmetic of Atrocity.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Stephane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. Jonathan Murphy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1120 pp., $37.50. TWO YEARS AGO a group of French intellectuals published The Black...

Leaders Count.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Patrick Tyler, A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China, An Investigative History (New York: Public Affairs, 1999), 476 pp., $27.50. MY LARGELY favorable assessment of A Great Wall is not one to which I was initially predisposed, having first...

You Had To Be There.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999), 509 pp., [pounds]20. THE CONGRESS for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was founded at a big public meeting of intellectuals in Berlin, in the...

Letters.(Review)(Letter to the Editor)
December 22, 1999... North Korea: Nicholas Eberstadt's article ("The Most Dangerous Country", Fall 1999) should have been required reading for former Secretary of Defense William Perry and his team before they issued their Report on United States Policy Toward...

A Year of Debating China.
December 22, 1999... IT IS NOW widely believed that I the most serious challenge to America's primacy will come from China. If indeed this turns out to be right, there is some cause for concern, for over the years Americans have had great difficulty thinking...