The National Interest articles from March 1994

The National Interest archives from March 1994

Out of control: the crisis in civil-military relations.
March 22, 1994... THE U.S. MILITARY is now more alienated from its civilian leadership than at any time in American history, and more vocal about it. The warning signs are very clear, most noticeably in the frequency with which officers have expressed disgust...

Asia's fate: a response to the Singapore school.
March 22, 1994... THE ECONOMIC SUCCESS of East and Southeast Asia challenges the verities of Western historical uniqueness. It shatters the ethno-centric notion, which even Asian writers accepted as late as the 1960s, that industrialization is a reward for...

A question of linkage: capitalism, prosperity, democracy....
March 22, 1994... THE SIMULTANEOUS explosion of economic growth in still-authoritarian China and economic collapse in increasingly democratic Russia rekindles an old debate concerning the relationship between democracy, capitalism, free markets, and economic...

O! What a fall was there: reflections on the decline of Britain.
March 22, 1994... NEARLY ONE hundred years ago, Brooks Adams published a short essay called "The Decay of England." Basing his views on the poor performance of the British army in the Boer War, the decline of English agriculture, a lack of entrepreneurial spirit...

Three comments. (comments on article by Anthony Hartley in this issue, p. 36)
March 22, 1994... Michael Elliott: ANTHONY HARTLEY'S essay is squarely within a school of modern British studies best called "Regrets Only." All the tell-tale signs are there: the supposed loss of purpose that followed the end of Empire, the lament about economic...

Nationalism: hymns ancient and modern.
March 22, 1994... IN WESTERN EUROPE, the unity of the EC seems to be unraveling. The Balkans are being rebalkanized. In the Middle East, "national" identity compounded by sectarian Islam asserts itself in wars that drag in the whole world. In Africa, the "nations"...

Birds of a feather. (U.S. foreign policy)
March 22, 1994... BOSNIA AND HAITI, Somalia and North Korea...The failure of the Clinton administration's foreign policy becomes ever more clear, even as the menacing reality of a Russia that Washington has indulged and deferred to becomes more difficult to deny....

Servants, masters, and the art of bantering.
March 22, 1994... ARISTOTLE, IN HIS Politics, mounts a spirited defense of slavery. "For that some should rule, and others be ruled, is a thing not only necessary but expedient, for from the hour of their birth some are marked for subjection, others for rule."...

Charles Beard, properly understood. (isolationism)
March 22, 1994... THE STORY OF how the United States emerged--reluctantly and belatedly--to lead the world has long since acquired the weight of a well-known parable. Like any good parable, this one aims chiefly to admonish, to warn against the recurrence of...

Islam's intramural struggle.
March 22, 1994... MANY WESTERNERS have speculated that a confrontation between Islam and the West is in the offing. For example, Samuel Huntington wrote in a recent, much noted article, that the centuries-old military interaction between these two civilizations...

The Most Powerful Bank: Inside Germany's Bundesbank.
March 22, 1994... THE BUNDESBANK is one of the wonders of the Wirtschaftswunder that was ushered in by Ludwig Erhard's great reforms of 1948. Before the establishment of the Bundesbank in 1957, the Bank Deutscher Lander, a creation of the allied military...

Harmonizing the Evolution of U.S. and Russian Defense Policies.
March 22, 1994... TO REALISTS, IT has always been axiomatic that one must deal with those who matter, even when they are least congenial. That paradigmatically realist institution, the nineteenth century Concert of Europe, not only treated war as a legitimate...

War and the Rise of the State.
March 22, 1994... MANY HISTORIANS and social scientists harbor a strong antipathy toward the serious study of war and its influence. Their dislike is based not only on understandable emotional and moral considerations, but also on intellectual ones. The history of...

Power and civilization.
March 22, 1994... UNTIL VERY RECENTLY, the concepts of "civilization" and "culture" have played a minor role in thinking about international politics. Realism, which has been the dominant theory of international politics for the last fifty years, allows no...