The National Interest articles from December 2004

The National Interest archives from December 2004

Realism's shining morality: the post-election trajectory of U.S. foreign policy.(The Realist)
December 22, 2004... WE ARE PLEASED that President George W. Bush achieved an impressive victory over Senator John Kerry--but we do not believe that the president received a clear mandate for conducting foreign policy. Indeed, it was unfortunate that there was no...

Friends in need?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 22, 2004... I would like to offer a point of clarification regarding Nikolas K. Gvosdev's and Travis Tanner's "Wagging the Dog" (Fall 2004). The authors stated: "The United States has on many occasions demonstrated its resolve to Beijing through weapons...

Working in theory.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 22, 2004... As a life-long student of international relations with a penchant for theory, I feel challenged to comment on the theoretical portion of Clifford Kupchan's "Real Democratik" (Fall 2004)--in particular the prediction that "the contemporary...

That magic moment.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 22, 2004... Francis Fukuyama's critique of Charles Krauthammer's doctrine of a unipolar America ("The Neoconservative Moment", Summer 2004), properly scolds Krauthammer for ignoring clearly unfortunate "facts on the ground." For Krauthammer does not just...

Nobody's fault but mine.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 22, 2004... Neil McInnes's remarkable account of the rise and fall of "Australian genocide" ("Requiem for a Genocide", Summer 2004) is a case study in one of the more striking Western pathologies of recent times: that of the volunteer scapegoat. The...

Fueling debate.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 22, 2004... The article "The New Geopolitics of Oil" (Special Energy Supplement, Winter 2003/04) by Joe Barnes, Amy Jaffe and Edward L. Morse, unfortunately contains a good deal of old, in-the-box thinking, as well as a strange fascination with what they...

No enemies on the right: conservative foreign policy factions beyond Iraq.
December 22, 2004... CONSERVATIVES dodged a bullet on November 2. Squabbling bitterly over Iraq, they contributed to the possible unseating of an incumbent conservative president in wartime. Realists or traditional conservatives attacked neoconservatives for...

Individualism & world order.
December 22, 2004... DISAGREEMENT about world order is a continuation of disagreement about domestic order. At its heart are the same questions. How much power should be given to centralized decision-making as opposed to decentralized decision-making and markets?...

Putin and his enemies.
December 22, 2004... WILL RUSSIA remain a democracy or will it slowly evolve into authoritarianism, or even dictatorship? This is the question most often asked in the West. But let us put forward an alternate question: Was Russia a democracy before Putin? At...

Close, but no democracy.
December 22, 2004... SEPTEMBER 11 and its aftermath caused many American policymakers, both Democrats and Republicans, to re-evaluate Washington's traditional emphasis on promoting "stability" in the Middle East, even at the expense of democratization. Support for...

Silk road to success.
December 22, 2004... AFGHANISTAN'S October elections left many experts with egg on their faces. Armed with impressions gleaned from a few days in Kabul, and often not even that, they assured the public that the elections were doomed, and that reckless U.S. policies...

Jihad archipelago.
December 22, 2004... IT'S ALWAYS perplexing in Washington, as in most Western capitals, that when one attends a seminar about Islam, it is generally focused on the Middle East, with perhaps an occasional nod to Pakistan and the Islamic bomb. Indonesia, the...

Enforcing nuclear disarmament.
December 22, 2004... EVER SINCE I was a student in the early 1950s, I have been told that world government is a dream of starry-eyed idealists. But a form of world government is coming into being, although not the one that Immanuel Kant, Bertrand Russell or the...

Thinking outside the tank.
December 22, 2004... THE AGE OF sacred terror dawned on September 11, 2001. (1) Yet the United States still has no satisfactory grand strategy for neutralizing a stateless, religiously inspired network of militants who seek to bring down great powers by acts of...

Towards an optimal governing area.(Business & Economics)
December 22, 2004... THE WORLD is getting smaller. The Internet, cheap transportation, the spread of free and open markets, and surging education of the masses are steadily eroding the last vestiges of economic autarchy. This increased integration presents a...

Red sun rising.(Business & Economics)
December 22, 2004... IN 2002 I stood almost alone among international observers of the Japanese economy in predicting that Japan's future was still bright--and that three percent economic growth was quite attainable over the next few years. Some, especially the...

Mismanaging Iraq: the economics of insurgency.(Business & Economics)
December 22, 2004... HOW CAN we best understand developments in Iraq? The picture emerging from journalistic and official reports suggests that senior-level civilians in the White House and Pentagon were guided by a mix of ideology and the desire to have their...

Banking on Turkey.(Business & Economics)
December 22, 2004... BARRING A LAST-minute crisis, the Council of Ministers of the European Union appears likely to invite Turkey to begin membership negotiations in 2005 after its summit meeting this December. The European Commission's explicit positive...

Dreaming Europe in a wide-awake world.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... Timothy Garton Ash, Free World: America, Europe and the Surprising Future of the West (New York: Random House, 2004), 286 pp., $24.95. Thomas P. M. Barnett, The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (New York:...

Neo-conspiracy theories.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Penguin, 2004), 426 pp., $16. Patrick Buchanan, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush...

Night and fog: Alan Furst and the literature of espionage.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... Alan Furst, ed., The Book of Spies: Anthology of Literary Espionage (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 374 pp., $14.95. Alan Furst, Dark Voyage (New York: Random House, 2004), 256 pp., $24.95. Blood of Victory (2003), 272 pp., $12.95....

Black sea blues.(Reporter-at-Large)(Interview)
December 22, 2004... MAXIM GUNJIA sits down in an armchair opposite a plush couch. His spacious office is filled with abstract art. He recalls his time in Washington, which he visited while studying in the United States. "I like Georgetown", he says in unaccented...