The National Interest articles from March 2007

The National Interest archives from March 2007

Learning to appreciate France.(The Realist)
March 1, 2007... AMERICA DEFINES itself as the leader of the free world, and there is much truth in that idea. But leadership requires having followers who are prepared to move in the same general direction. And walking a path without followers, allies or...

Comments & responses.(issues on US foreign relations)
March 1, 2007... I wanted to echo some of the points that have been raised in recent issues of The National Interest, including in Dimitri Simes' editorial, "Ending the Crusade" (Jan./ Feb. 2007). Solving Iraq, if it can be solved, now means getting real...

Security first: ours, theirs and the global order's.(United States national security)
March 1, 2007... BOTH NEOCONSERVATIVES and liberals have overestimated the extent to which one nation, even a superpower with United Nations support, can re-engineer regimes. Neoconservatives believe forced democratization is possible; liberals believe in the...

China on the march.
March 1, 2007... TWENTY YEARS from now, will China be a friend or foe of the United States? Certainly, China's youngest generation will influence the answer. It controls future policies, the pace of internal development, domestic stability and whether there is...

Don't lose Russia: letter to Democrats.(from former US Senator Gary Hart)
March 1, 2007... THIS LETTER is an appeal to Democrats, now a congressional majority, to propose a more positive, constructive relationship between the United States and Russia--less for Russia than for the United States. At virtually any point between...

Left-out legislature.
March 1, 2007... FOR THE first time since 1994, the Democrats control both houses of Congress. Expectations run high among members of the new majority as well as their supporters and commentators at home and abroad. Their hopes for fundamental change are fed...

Beyond bombs and ballots: dispelling myths about democracy assistance.(Report)
March 1, 2007... A CENTRAL component of American foreign policy since the First World War is now under attack. In popular American perception, democracy promotion has become linked to the aggressive foreign policy of the Bush Administration, most notably the...

Mid-life crisis?(effectiveness of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe )(Organization overview)
March 1, 2007... DOES THE OSCE still matter for United States? The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), like its predecessor, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), has never gone down that well with the American...

Walking with the devil: the commitment trap in U.S. foreign policy.
March 1, 2007... BY THE George W. Bush Administration's self-imposed standards, a successful conclusion to the Iraq War was well within reach. The president declared victory on May 1, 2003, a constitution was ratified on October 15, 2005, and a general election...

Berlin's Russia challenge.
March 1, 2007... RUSSIA HAS found an innovative way to ring in the New Year with its European partners: threatening to cut off energy supplies. At the beginning of 2006, it was gas exports through Ukraine; in January 2007, it was oil supplies through Belarus....

NATO: going, going ... but not yet gone.(North Atlantic Treaty Organization)
March 1, 2007... IN ITS nearly sixty years of existence, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has often found itself in jeopardy. That is the case today. And Afghanistan is not the only cause celebre. NATO, of course, is one of history's great...

UN, rediscovered.(United Nations)
March 1, 2007... AFTER SIX years of tempestuous U.S.-UN relations, the next few months could prove a turning point. The proximate cause is the unusual confluence of four events: the ascension of a new UN secretary-general, Ban Ki Moon; the end of John Bolton's...

A view to a coup?(Contra Iran)(US regime change for Iran)
March 1, 2007... THROUGHOUT WASHINGTON'S impasse with Iran, many influential Americans have viewed regime change as a panacea that would revoke the country's Axis of Evil membership and turn it into a bastion of democracy. Such thinking gained prominence in the...

The view from Tehran and Moscow.(Contra Iran)(Interview)
March 1, 2007... From the interview of UN Ambassador Favad Zarif, the ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations, in National Interest online (www.nationalinterest.org). IRAN IS always ready for dialogue. We have to see whether tactics...

Revisiting Iran?(The Gramercy Round)
March 1, 2007... Chaired by Ian Bremmer and Fareed Zakaria, the Gramercy Round convenes over dinner in New York's historic Gramercy Tavern. Its task is to consider pressing issues that have received insufficient attention from the established foreign policy...

Utopia and its discontents.(works of Paul Hollander)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2007... Paul Hollander, ed., From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), 761 pp., $35.00. Paul Hollander, The End of Commitment: Intellectuals,...

Event horizon.(Critical essay)
March 1, 2007... Fred Charles Ikle, Annihilation from Within (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 142 pp., $24.50. FRED CHARLES Ikle has been called one of America's two or three remaining "strategic long-range thinkers." Undersecretary of defense...

Eurabian nights.(Essays)(the merging of European and Muslim cultures)(Essay)
March 1, 2007... THE MOST critical issue facing Europe is the long-term relationship between the continent's natives and its burgeoning Muslim minority. There are but three outcomes--Islamic takeover, Muslim expulsion or harmonious integration--and the end...

Big ideas, big problems.(concepts on enhancing US national security)
March 1, 2007... JOE NYE of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government is fond of saying that it's not whose army wins, it's whose story wins. Today neither America's army nor its story is winning. Americans ask why. Many analysts believe today's national...

The battle for Nigeria.(Reporter-at-Large)
March 1, 2007... WITH AROUND 36 billion barrels of proven petroleum reserves--the largest in Africa and the eighth largest in the world--Nigeria is America's fifth-largest supplier of oil. In 2006, the United States imported an average of 1,139,000 barrels of...