The National Interest articles from September 1998

The National Interest archives from September 1998

Raise the anchor or lower the ship: defense budgeting and planning.
September 22, 1998... Defense Budgeting and Planning It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change. Charles Darwin Strategy is always simple, but it is not for that reason easy....

Inside the cave: the banality of I.R. studies. (international relations)
September 22, 1998... The twentieth century has certainly been among the most - if not the most - grand and dramatic centuries in the history of international relations. In the military sphere, there was the First World War, the Second World War, and the Cold War...

The Indonesian debacle: what Americans need to know and do.
September 22, 1998... Something very important is happening in Southeast Asia, but its significance has yet to register fully in America. Indonesia, the Brazil of Southeast Asia, is in very deep trouble. It has often been said that, as the world's fourth-largest...

Embassies at risk. (terrorist attacks on US embassies in different countries)
September 22, 1998... The last crushed bodies had scarcely been extricated from the car-bombed carnage of the American embassies in Dar es-Salaam and Nairobi when the cry went up to harden security at 280 U.S. diplomatic posts around the world, turning them into...

Serious about sanctions. (positive and negative aspects of economic sanctions)
September 22, 1998... Self-inflicted wounds. Chicken soup diplomacy. Boomerangs. Good intentions gone bad. These clipped responses reflect the accepted wisdom among policy cognoscenti about the scant value of economic sanctions to the United States. Even Hollywood is...

City of bad omens. (deterioration of conditions in Hong Kong following its handover to China)
September 22, 1998... As every schoolboy would once have known, traditionally the Chinese have believed that a dynasty reigns because it has been vouchsafed divine approval - the Mandate of Heaven. According to this belief, extensive natural or man-made catastrophes...

China studies in McCarthy's shadow: a personal memoir. (Sen Joseph R. McCarthy)
September 22, 1998... A Personal Memoir Great differences among academics and personal antagonisms in their fields of specialization are common in the best of times. But the 1950s were not the best of times. In what was to become known as the McCarthy era,...

Machiavelli's realism.
September 22, 1998... This new translation of Machiavelli's The Prince appears as part of a series called "Rethinking the Western Tradition." Now, the Western tradition is rather odd as traditions go, for it is a tradition of subversion. The tradition that Machiavelli...

The Prince.
September 22, 1998... Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince. Edited and translated by Angelo M. Codevilla, commentary by William B. Allen, Hadley Arkes, and Carnes Lord (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 151 pp., $11.00. This new translation of Machiavelli's The...

Strong state, weaker theory. (expansion of political interests in other countries)
September 22, 1998... A group of five Americans gathered in Paris a century ago to negotiate an end to the Spanish-American War. President William McKinley had already decided to take the Philippines from Madrid's decrepit empire but had cunningly included in the...

From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role.
September 22, 1998... Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 216 pp., $29.95. A group of five Americans gathered in Paris a century ago to negotiate an end to the...

Globalism and the American tide.
September 22, 1998... When Napoleon reorganized French administrative units, Frances Cairncross tells us, he chose a size for the departement that would permit officials to travel anywhere within it and still be home for dinner. As Cairncross observes, on-the-spot...

The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives.
September 22, 1998... Frances Cairncross, The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997), 314 pp., $24.95. When Napoleon reorganized French administrative units, Frances Cairncross tells...

America and the euro gamble. (implications of single European currency for the US)
September 22, 1998... As the American foreign policy establishment has been preoccupied in recent months with such things as the fall of Suharto, the Indian bomb, and Kosovo - all serious issues - an event of much greater long-term significance has received scant...