The National Interest articles from March 2002

The National Interest archives from March 2002

The peace process at sea: the Karine-A affair and the war on terrorism.
March 22, 2002... ON JANUARY 3, in the clouds high above the waters of the Red Sea, Lt. General Shaul Mofaz, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, peered anxiously through a specially designed telescopic lens at an old, rusty, blue freighter several...

Law in order: Reconstructing U.S. national security.
March 22, 2002... FEW TOOLS of U.S. foreign policy are as vitally important and as consistently overlooked as law enforcement. Terrorism, organized crime, drug trafficking, arms smuggling, sanctions busting and foreign corruption are serious challenges...

The higher police: Vladimir Putin and his predecessors.
March 22, 2002... SO MUCH HAS changed in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union that it is easy to overlook some things that have not changed. One of the most significant of these constants is the continued importance of an intelligence elite that has existed...

The other orientalism: China's Islamist problem.
March 22, 2002... A GENERATION ago, men of divergent personal appearance, political experience, and cultural inheritance ascended to political leadership in the Third World and decided to embrace a transcendent secular radicalism. Whatever their inherited...

Disraeli's secret.
March 22, 2002... QUEEN Victoria's favorite prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli (1803-81), seems at first glance impossibly far removed from our experience. Novelist, wit, orator, arguably the founder of Britain's modern Conservative Party, Disraeli was an exotic...

One hundred years of ambiguity: U.S.-Cuba relations in the 20th century.
March 22, 2002... Double standards are inspiration to men of letters, but they are apt to be fatal to politicians. . . . Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about...

The new Cuba divide.
March 22, 2002... THE U.S. embargo of Cuba has been an extraordinarily resilient foreign policy, able to weather diverse political trends and even historical eras without substantial challenge. Change is afoot, however, and the best evidence of that change may...

Popper's return engagement: The open society in an era of globalization.(Karl Popper)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... THE NOTION of a contrast between open and closed societies, which was introduced by Henri Bergson and made popular by Karl Popper, is now familiar even to people who have read neither the former 's The Two Sources of Morality and Religion...

Freedom and duty: Pericles and our times.(terrorism and war in Afghanistan)
March 22, 2002... MID WAY through the long article on Afghanistan in the eleventh edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica, one comes across this description of the inhabitants of that ancient mountain country: The Afghans, inured to bloodshed from childhood,...

Erratum.(Correction Notice)
March 22, 2002... On page 5 of Joseph S. Nye's "Seven Tests" in the Winter 2001/02 issue, a quote from President George H.W. Bush was erroneously attributed to President George W. Bush. We regret the error; the author was in no way at fault.

Cruise control: a case for missile defense.(cruise missile defenses)
March 22, 2002... THE SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 terrorist attacks have reshaped whole swaths of debate over U.S. foreign and national security policies. Certainly, the issue of homeland security is a case in point. In that context, it was inevitable that the various...

America the despised. (Letter from Athens).
March 22, 2002... IN THE summer of 1999, the popular Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis said during an interview: "I hate Americans and everything American. I hope that the youth will begin to hate everything American." This most popular of Greek contemporary...

A poet passes: Leopold Sedar Senghor remembered.(Obituary)
March 22, 2002... IN 1961, less than twelve months after the independence of both Mauritania and Senegal, I was in my last year of high school at Van Vollenhoven, the prestigious French lycee in Dakar, Senegal. I still remember the beautiful green, white and...

Stress testing the global economy. (Books).(three books on globalization)
March 22, 2002... Harold James, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 288 pp., $39.95. Roger M. Kubarych, Stress Testing the System: Simulating the Global Consequences of the Next...

The best defense. (Books).(The Tragedy of Great Power Politics )
March 22, 2002... John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 448 pp., $27.95. THE ABSENCE of a sovereign in international politics, the root of what structural realists call the condition of anarchy, encourages...

Kaplan's War. (Books).
March 22, 2002... Robert D. Kaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (New York: Random House, 2002), 198 pp., $22.95. FROM WHAT standpoint should we conduct foreign affairs? We currently discuss this issue by deploying a stylized...

Bacon's Proof: The Career and Controversies of Edward Teller. (Books).(Memoirs: A Twentieth-century Journey in Science and Politics )
March 22, 2002... Edward Teller (with Judith. L. Shoolery), Memoirs: A Twentieth-century Journey in Science and Politics (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2001), 628 pp., $35. NEARLY 400 years ago, Francis Bacon heralded the dawn of a new era of science and...

Arabian Nightmares. (Books).(What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response )
March 22, 2002... Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (New York: Oxford University, 2002), 180 pp., $23. THERE IS a story; perhaps apocryphal, about a scholar who wrote a book of a million words on his subject. Asked...

Letters.
March 22, 2002... God and Mammon: Daniel Pipes rightly argues that militant Islam often surges in countries experiencing rapid economic growth ("God and Mammon", Winter 2001/02). Nowhere is this phenomenon more pronounced and conspicuous than in India's...

Weak realpolitik: The vicissitudes of Saudi bashing. (Quarterly).
March 22, 2002... ABOUT SIXTY years ago, R.G. Collingwood wrote, "Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way." (1) Inasmuch as his thinking was suspended somewhere between hope for a science of history and an awareness of its practical limits,...