The National Interest articles from December 2003

The National Interest archives from December 2003

Networking nation-states the coming info-national order.
December 22, 2003... THE EARLY 20th century was filled with predictions that the airplane, the automobile or the assembly line had made parliamentary democracy, market economies, jury trials and bills of rights irrelevant, obsolete and harmful. Today's...

Scoring the Iraq aftermath.
December 22, 2003... HOW CAN WE tell if we are making progress in Iraq or not? If you already know what answer you want, it is easy to find someone to provide it. If you oppose the war, locate a prominent Democrat; if you prefer good news, find a Bush...

Does the United States have a European policy?
December 22, 2003... SINCE THE earliest days of the European Union, at the outset of the Cold War, it has been an axiom of U.S. foreign policy that an integrated Europe is in America's global strategic interest. The central theater of world war twice in a...

Therapy's end: thinking beyond NATO.
December 22, 2003... THE IRAQ conflict ignited transatlantic tensions smoldering since the end of the Cold War. Although politicians in both Europe and America profess to regret the obvious split within the once-sturdy Atlantic Alliance, the United States and its...

The Bush strategy at war.
December 22, 2003... QUIETLY, and largely away from the public eye, a revolution has begun in American strategic thinking. The endeavor currently being pursued by the Bush Administration is breathtaking in scope, entailing a re-examination of virtually all the...

Confronting Hamas.
December 22, 2003... ON AUGUST 19, 2003, a member of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas detonated himself aboard a Jerusalem bus. In addition to killing 21 Israeli civilians and injuring over a hundred more, this attack ended the fragile cease-fire between the...

Selling America, short.
December 22, 2003... THERE WERE calls for an end to "U.S. warmongering." Washington had been overtaken by "a small clique of hate-mongers", claimed one speaker. American unilateralism was denounced. The United States itself had turned into "a state of holy...

Pirouettes and priorities: distilling a putin doctrine.
December 22, 2003... IN THE beginning of 2003, the Bush Administration was genuinely surprised by Moscow's handling of the Iraq issue. President Vladimir Putin's decision to oppose the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq alongside France and Germany was arguably his most...

Russia's new Europe.
December 22, 2003... A SPECTER IS haunting the new Europe, the specter of "Russian pragmatism." After a decade of ambiguity and uncertainty in Russian policy, Vladimir Putin's Kremlin has embarked on a coherent and rational plan to regain its influence over former...

Living with the unthinkable: how to Coexist with a Nuclear North Korea.
December 22, 2003... THERE IS A pervasive desire in the United States and throughout East Asia to prevent North Korea from becoming a nuclear-armed power, for the prospect of Kim Jong-il's bizarre and unpredictable regime having such a capability is profoundly...

Averting the unthinkable.
December 22, 2003... THE IMMINENT prospect of North Korea becoming a nuclear power is the most severe threat to the security of the United States and the rest of the Western world today. The anxiety that this prospect brings with it is compounded by the fact that...

The next Pope.
December 22, 2003... THE END IS near. Before long, the College of Cardinals will have to elect a successor to Pope John Paul II. His will be a tough act to follow. To begin with, the new man on Saint Peter's throne must be able to preach the Christian social ethic...

The Q-man.(Despot Watch)
December 22, 2003... I'M SAD to report that our favorite North African despot has turned a little jowly in recent years. He's lost that Neil Diamond Grecian-bust look he had going on in his revolutionary youth, and when he loads himself up with military sashes and...

The WTO's North-South conflict: a dangerous new (old) international economic order?
December 22, 2003... DEVELOPING country delegates, ranging from Brazil to India to the Philippines to South Africa, left the WTO Cancun Ministerial ebullient over the collapse of mid-term talks intended to advance the Doha Development Agenda. They reveled in the...

Design for trading.
December 22, 2003... THE EFFECTIVE collapse of the Doha round of trade talks in Cancun in September has left the world trade scene in chaos, with an increase in protectionism likely. Free trade, beloved by economists, has only a modest worldwide political...

Capitalism for everyone.
December 22, 2003... THE SECOND half of the last century seemed to have settled the debate over economic systems. Natural experiments like the one in Korea, where the South espoused capitalism and moved from underdeveloped to developed country status in a...

FDR's legacy.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003), 1360 pp., $40. THE LEGACY of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is crumbling. His great political gift to the Democratic Party--the extraordinary...

Revolutionary nepotism.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... Adam Bellow, In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 576 pp., $30. Frank K. Salter (ed.), Risky Transactions: Trust, Kinship and Ethnicity (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002), 288 pp., $79.95. THE UNITED States...

Waughior.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... William Deedes, At War With Waugh (London: Macmillan, 2003), 125 pp., 12.99 [pounds sterling] IT HAS long been one of the worst. kept secrets among that tight-knit community of those of us commonly deemed "war correspondents"; that is,...

Political correctness or, the perils of benevolence.(Essay)
December 22, 2003... All good people agree And all good people say, All nice people, like Us, are We And every one else is They. --Rudyard Kipling "We and They" THE TERM "political correctness" is such a familiar piece of moral...

More Latin, less America.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 22, 2003... I was delighted to see such significant treatment given by The National Interest to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (Fall 2003). Even so, the article is still problematic. President Clinton first mooted the idea of a hemispheric trade...

Taking stock.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 22, 2003... Dennis Ross is at some pains to scan the present Arab-Israeli situation without squarely confronting some hard truths (Fall 2003). It is a somewhat empty truism to say that no peace process will succeed without the Arabs. Ross's heavily clouded...

Realism: it's high-minded ... and it works.(Letter from the Publishers)
December 22, 2003... THE REALIST approach to foreign policy--to which The National Interest is largely but by no means exclusively devoted--has always met with a certain suspicion in the United States; it is variously viewed as too cynical, too European, and too...