The National Interest articles from March 2004

The National Interest archives from March 2004

The sources of Russian conduct.
March 22, 2004... THE POLITICAL personality of Russian power today is the product both of ideology and circumstances. George Kennan's observations, made nearly sixty years ago, are just as valid today when considering Vladimir Putin's Russia. Too often,...

Does Iraq matter?
March 22, 2004... DEPUTY Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and once high-flying Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean do not see eye to eye on the virtues of the Iraq War, but they and other leading Democrats and Republicans agree on the same key policy...

Uncle Sam in the Arab street: Mideast democracy and American interests.
March 22, 2004... IT IS established U.S. policy that the promotion of democracy in the Middle East is vitally necessary to secure America's strategic interests. Washington policymakers and pundits routinely proclaim the virtues of a democratic order and the...

The dating game: Turkey, Europe and the American matchmaker.(Turkey as prospective European Union member)
March 22, 2004... THIS YEAR is make-or-break for Turkish-EU relations. After forty years of being kept at arm's length--albeit with promises of an eventual full embrace--Turkey wants the EU to commit to beginning accession talks at its December summit. All the...

The blogs of war: how the Internet is reshaping foreign policy.
March 22, 2004... THE WAR in Iraq was the first Internet war: the first major conflict in which the Internet crossed theater lines and affected the course of events. This was unexpected. In the pre-Internet era, many commentators seemed to believe that rapid...

Can NATO survive Europe?
March 22, 2004... E. Wayne Merry's essay, "Therapy's End", in the Winter 2003/04 issue of The National Interest advances a controversial proposition: "The main instrument of the Cold War now inhibits rather than encourages transatlantic cooperation and should be...

Keeping terror out: immigration policy and asymmetric warfare.
March 22, 2004... SUPPORTERS of open immigration have tried to de-link 9/11 from security concerns. "There's no relationship between immigration and terrorism", said a spokeswoman for the National Council of the advocacy group La Raza. "I don't think [9/11] can...

Redefining the terrorist.(Outmaneuvering Terror)
March 22, 2004... SINCE THE War on Terror began in late 2001, the American military has captured thousands of Al-Qaeda terrorists, Taliban soldiers and other assorted jihadists. Many of these men have been interrogated and released. Others have been returned to...

Winning over the Muslim mind.(Outmaneuvering Terror)
March 22, 2004... FACTS ARE stubborn things. And the facts, sad but stubborn, are that hatred of the United States in the Arab and Muslim world is greater today than ever before; that it shows no sign of diminishing; and that Washington's efforts to counter it...

A civil solution.(Outmaneuvering Terror)(using civil litigation and public relations to bankrupt and discredit terrorists)
March 22, 2004... WE ARE AT war against a new form of terror. 9/11 was significant, not least because it launched Al-Qaeda as a household name but also because it signaled the arrival of neo-terrorism: traditional terrorism packaged for the 21st century, alert...

Yes, he has no bananas: Mugabe runs out of time ... and everything else.(Despot Watch)(Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe)
March 22, 2004... WHAT possessed Robert Mugabe to start wearing the wispy little Hitlerian mustache? Fortunately, he has the big saucer eyeglasses and the statesmanlike receding hairline to announce his grandfatherly intentions. We could send over the cast of...

Retreat from globalization.(Outmaneuvering Terror)
March 22, 2004... Nothing is more usual, among states which have made some advances in commerce, than to look on the progress of their neighbours with a suspicious eye, to consider all trading states as their rivals, and to suppose that it is impossible for any...

The cost of living: the economics of preventing nuclear terrorism.(Outmaneuvering Terror)
March 22, 2004... NUCLEAR terrorism presents an unparalleled threat to the United States. The economic impact alone of a nuclear terrorist attack would undoubtedly be staggering. Estimates of the direct economic cost of one potential scenario--a crude nuclear...

Don't cut the cheese.(Outmaneuvering Terror)(bioterrorism regulations effect import of cheese to the United States)
March 22, 2004... ONE OF THE world's great sensual experiences, exulted in daily across Europe, is illegal in the United States. That bite you may be about to take into an unctuous and intense young French raw milk cheese oozing off the edges of a chewy chunk of...

In the ranks of death.(9 books on recent miltary operations)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Williamson Murray and Major General Robert H. Scales Jr., The Iraq War: A Military History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard Press, 2003), 311 pp., $25.95. Oliver North, War Stories: Operation Iraqi Freedom (Washington, DC: Regnery...

The terrorist as statesman.("A Farther Shore: Ireland's Long Road to Peace")(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Gerry Adams, A Farther Shore: Ireland's Long Road to Peace (New York: Random House, 2003), 448 pp., $25.95. IN THE 1930s, with the ghastly blood-letting of 1916-22 at a reasonably safe distance, nationalist Ireland began to create a fresh...

Bad laws make bad judges.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Robert H. Bork, Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2003), 161 pp., $25. JUDGES, according to Robert Bork, are increasingly usurping authority that belongs to the people and their elected...

A champion for the bourgeoisie: reinventing virtue and citizenship in Boris Akunin's novels.(Essay)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2004... WITH THIS summer's publication by Random House of The Winter Queen, the American reader will finally have a chance to savor what is without doubt the most interesting phenomenon in Russia's contemporary literary marketplace. Published in 1998...