The National Interest articles from September 2003

The National Interest archives from September 2003

The theological iron curtain: a foreign policy strategy for engaging the muslim world.
September 22, 2003... TWO YEARS after the fateful attacks of September 11, the United States remains locked in an epic struggle with a new nemesis--international terrorism. Like fascism and communism before it, terrorism poses a direct threat to our interests and...

Taking stock: the Bush administration and the roadmap to peace.
September 22, 2003... WHEN the Bush Administration assumed office in January of 2001, it shifted direction in a number of foreign policy areas. Nowhere was the shift in direction and priority more pronounced than in the approach to Arab-Israeli diplomacy. It was not...

Going critical: American power and the consequences of fiscal overstretch.
September 22, 2003... ... the interesting subject of the finances of the declining empire. --Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Book I, ch. XVII TOPPLING THREE tyrannies--that of Slobodan Milosevic, the Taliban and now Saddam...

The art of the bluff: why Kim is not Saddam.
September 22, 2003... WITH MAJOR combat operations in Iraq consigned to the history books (we hope), the United States can now give greater focus to North Korea's rogue regime. Kim Jong-il has captured public attention as a dangerous lunatic in the Saddam Hussein...

The stealth normalization of U.S.-China relations.
September 22, 2003... THE 1947 Marshall Plan conjures to mind certain ideals of foreign policymaking--bipartisan constancy of purpose, political perseverance and vision. Adherence to these ideals secured both American strategic interests and free-market and...

Iranian options: pragmatic Mullahs and America's interests.
September 22, 2003... MUCH HAS changed in the Middle East during the past year. Saddam's tyranny has finally been displaced, and even the most recalcitrant Arab despots are speaking the language of political reform. In the midst of these cataclysmic changes, the one...

Leashing the dogs of war.
September 22, 2003... WAR HAS always had rules, even if only to protect the dead. In The Iliad, for example, Homer tells us that Achilles' desecration of Hector's corpse angered the gods. Medieval churchmen sought to limit warfare to certain days of the week and...

More Latin, Less America? Creating a Free Trade Area of the Americas.
September 22, 2003... SHORTLY AFTER becoming president, George W. Bush embarked on a campaign to expand the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) to encompass 34 nations in the Western Hemisphere, spanning from Canada in the north to Argentina and Chile in the...

New Europe, new problems: the case of the Baltic States.
September 22, 2003... ON JULY 1, 2003, the United States suspended military aid to more than thirty nations, among which were six of the seven countries scheduled to join NATO next year. With the exception of Romania, the other countries so recently lionized as "New...

The sick man of asia: Russia's endangered Far East.
September 22, 2003... RUSSIA ACQUIRED its Far East (Dal'nii vostok) the old fashioned way, through war and conquest. The imperialism of the Muscovite state, its Romanov successors and finally Josef Stalin's Red Army fixed the region's current borders with China,...

Left behind: Ukraine's uncertain transformation.
September 22, 2003... Ukraine has never been so close to an oligarchic system of power. We are witnessing the first stage of a coup d'etat that started inside the walls of parliament. --Ukranian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko, December 18, 2002 THESE...

How Arabs fight Islamism.(Letter from Tunis)
September 22, 2003... IF THERE IS one foreign leader whose views were validated by the painful events of September 11, 2001, it is Tunisia's President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. (1) For years he has conducted a no-holds-barred battle against Islamism in Tunisia. And...

A people of extraordinary contradictions.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Paul Lendvai, The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat, translated by Ann Major (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 572 pp., $29.95. IT IS GOOD that Mr. Lendvai chose to entitle his book The Hungarians and not...

Davos man meets Homo Balcanicus.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Sumantra Bose, Bosnia After Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Intervention (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 352 pp., $35. Roger D. Petersen, Understanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in...

Building on sand?(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Joseph Braude, The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 288 pp., $26. IN THE months to come, hundreds of books on the "new Iraq" by experts and non-experts alike...

The shareholder model: making America's global leadership more effective. (Quarterly).
September 22, 2003... IRAQ HAS demonstrated both the extent and the limitations of American power. The relatively swift ground campaign reinforced the lessons of the first Gulf War, Kosovo and Afghanistan: the United States possesses unparalleled military might and...