The National Interest articles from September 1993

The National Interest archives from September 1993

The "1205 document." (personal narrative)
September 22, 1993... LAST JANUARY, I was sitting in the former headquarters of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, reading top-secret Soviet files about the Vietnam war. While turning the pages of a file, I unexpectedly came upon a...

A Mandate for Israel.
September 22, 1993... HAS A CONFLICT evolved into peace when fighting between the opposing armies has ceased? In one sense, yes; but a cease-fire, or even a formal armistice, falls short of true peace. Should the description "true peace" be reserved until the...

The politics of human suffering.
September 22, 1993... LESS THAN A year ago, United States marines landed on the beaches of Mogadishu to the acclaim of its citizens. They did so at the beginning of "Operation Restore Hope," authorized by the United Nations Security Council "to establish as soon as...

The constraints of Russian culture.
September 22, 1993... RUSSIAN CAPITALISM and Russian democracy: are they partners, or are they adversaries? American capitalists and democrats naturally assume that their Russian counterparts are partners. Our conception is based on two mistakes. First, democratic...

International crime and punishment.
September 22, 1993... THE IDEA OF an international criminal court is supported b many people and now has moved from the lobbying of lawyers and moralists to an area of practical action. At the close of the Gulf War, the United States sent a team to investigate Iraqi...

Bottom line vs. front line.
September 22, 1993... IN EARLY AUGUST of 1990, the U.S. Air Force's First Tactical Fighter Wing, based at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, was ordered to the Middle East as Operation Desert Shield got under way. The unit began to arrive in eastern Saudi Arabia...

Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State.
September 22, 1993... THIS NATION owes much to George Pratt Shultz for his six and one-half years service during the 1980s as secretary of state. Put simply, he was the right man in the right place at the right time. In the circumstances in which he was placed, his...

Reconcilable Differences?
September 22, 1993... JAPAN IS without a doubt the most thoroughly, most widely, and most consistently misinterpreted major country in the world. This has just been confirmed for the umpteenth time in the ubiquitous media commentary about the Japanese public...

Turning the Tables: A Machiavellian Strategy for Dealing with Japan.
September 22, 1993... JAPAN IS without a doubt the most thoroughly, most widely, and most consistently misinterpreted major country in the world. This has just been confirmed for the umpteenth time in the ubiquitous media commentary about the Japanese public...

Strategic Capitalism.
September 22, 1993... JAPAN IS without a doubt the most thoroughly, most widely, and most consistently misinterpreted major country in the world. This has just been confirmed for the umpteenth time in the ubiquitous media commentary about the Japanese public...

Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia.
September 22, 1993... RUSSIAN NATIONALISM is the most important but least understood force to have emerged from the shadows following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is the most important because it increasingly defines Moscow's domestic and foreign policies....

Fireworks at Dusk: Paris in the Thirties.
September 22, 1993... FRANCE AND Frenchmen, it may be said with some confidence are incomprehensible for anyone insufficiently aware of their intellectual traditions. Those traditions, embodied in the works of great writers, are one of the glories of European...

Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956.
September 22, 1993... FRANCE AND Frenchmen, it may be said with some confidence are incomprehensible for anyone insufficiently aware of their intellectual traditions. Those traditions, embodied in the works of great writers, are one of the glories of European...

Culture and Imperialism.
September 22, 1993... PROFESSOR SAID says that his aim is to set works of art of the imperialist and post-colonial eras into their historical context. "My method is to focus as much as possible on individual works, to read them first as great products of the...

'Balkan Ghosts.' (response to book by Noel Malcolm) (Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 1993... NOEL MALCOLM ends his diatribe about Balkan Ghosts by noting the different ways in which I spell the Romanian word for Gypsies. That Malcolm would criticize me for a proofreader's error is final proof that this was not a review, but an...

The strange death of Soviet communism. (response to The National Interest, special issue) (Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 1993... YOUR SPECIAL Issue provided superb answers to the key question, "Why did the Soviet Union collapse?" What is largely missing, however is a response to Charles Fairbanks's broader version of this inquiry--"What, if anything, the failure of many...

The strange death of Soviet communism. (response to article by Walter Laqueur) (Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 1993... WALTER LAQUEUR believes that I, among other contributors to The National Interest issue on the "Strange Death of Soviet Communism," have made a travesty of the role of the Mensheviks in Western Sovietology. Long an admirer of his compelling...

Poets on power (and its loss).
September 22, 1993... IN THE SPRING of 1939, at the end of what he was to call "a low dishonest decade," W.H. Auden looked back across the Atlantic at the continent he had just left and wrote: In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, ...