The National Interest articles from March 1997

The National Interest archives from March 1997

The next Lenin: On the cusp of truly revolutionary warfare. (new warfare strategy)
March 22, 1997... When the romans set out to annihilate Carthage they first had to lay siege to the city and overcome its defenses. When Francisco Pizarro led a small band of Spanish soldiers into Peru and destroyed Incan society, he first had to prevail in fierce...

Power failure: American policy in the Caspian.
March 22, 1997... A cardinal principle of U.S. policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union has been to foster the independence of the new states established on former Soviet territory. In Central Europe, U.S. policy goes further: In order to protect the...

Tough choices: toward a true strategic review. (formal review of US defense posture)
March 22, 1997... Well before Bill Clinton was re-elected to office, indeed long before the Congress required a formal review of U.S. defense posture as part of the Fiscal Year 1997 Defense Authorization Act, the Department of Defense realized that such a review...

Don't isolate us: a Russian view of NATO expansion.
March 22, 1997... Russia's arguments against NATO expansion are well known. Moscow warns that NATO enlargement would create new dividing lines in Europe. If NATO military structures were to approach Russian borders and its troops were to appear on the territories...

After the miracle: can South Africa be a normal state?
March 22, 1997... The lessons of history are sometimes learned as much from what did not happen as from what did. Thus a historian on a slow day might ask himself what would have happened if Nelson Mandela, on taking office, had denounced his opponents and then...

After Hebron. (Arab-Israeli peace process)
March 22, 1997... A strategic retreat is the most difficult of all maneuvers. This is the nightmare that has tormented all Israeli leaders since the modern Arab-Israeli peace diplomacy began after the October 1973 war. But the experience of this diplomacy has...

The common sense. (public opinion regarding international relations)
March 22, 1997... A few years ago international politics experienced the functional equivalent of World War III, only without the bloodshed. In a remarkably short time, virtually all the major problems that haunted international affairs for a half century were...

A pessimist of promise. (Swiss-German historian Jacob Burckhardt)
March 22, 1997... The twentieth century has not been kind to the idea of progress, to that core of optimistic Enlightenment thinking whose project Condorcet described as the "limitless perfectibility of the human species." If the trenches of the First World War...

The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany.
March 22, 1997... Several years ago, my husband and I were unexpectedly offered the chance to spend a weekend in a famous and rather isolated hotel on the island of Madeira. Within a few hours of our arrival, we realized that the only other inhabitants of the...

Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire.
March 22, 1997... Five years have passed since the end of the Soviet Union, and an amazing amount of new information has surfaced. Gone is Churchill's "enigma wrapped in a mystery." Russia's media and many of its archives, along with its borders, have opened. It...

India, relevant at last?
March 22, 1997... This is a year of fiftieth anniversaries. Soon, and very properly, Americans will be celebrating two decisions that truly deserve the adjective "seminal" - those embodied in the Truman Doctrine (birthday May 15) and the Marshall Plan (June 5)....