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The National Interest
Spring 1999, No. 55
Why U.S. intelligence has not performed better with respect to the crime and corruption that have helped frustrate Russia’s transition to a stable, free-market democracy.
Britain is dithering about whether to join European Monetary Union or to go it alone. But it should explore the much better option of becoming a member of an expanded nafta—an arrangement more in accord with its traditions and interests.
The approaching deadline for final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians threatens the Oslo process. But an arbitrary piece of scheduling should not be allowed to dictate events.
The trend toward “global governance” on the part of overzealous international law courts poses a real threat to U.S. sovereignty. Three current cases—that of Pinochet, of unesco’s interference in Australian affairs, and of the overturning of a court verdict in a Texas murder trial—are used to develop the argument.
Macedonia’s democracy and independence remain imperiled. While regional forces are largely responsible for this, U.S. policy to date has done little to help a country that may be next in line to experience serious instability.
Dignity is the essential concept that connects two objectives usually regarded as conflicting in contemporary China—individual human rights and national prestige. Chinese nationalism has inadvertently incubated an ideal of individual rights and self-determination within its discourse on national rights.
Franco-German relations over the last century and a half have been characterized by a complex pattern of attraction and repulsion that is crucial to an understanding of the new Europe.
Greece is fundamentally a status quo country in a part of the world where the status quo is being challenged from many directions. Its future prosperity and security depend on economic reforms at home and a more prudent diplomacy that will make it fully a part of Europe.
American anti-Communists distorted and corrupted the domestic political scene with exaggerations of a threat that was never as strong—or worrisome—as they pretended it to be. William F. Buckley, Jr., Robert Conquest and Nathan Glazer find the argument unconvincing.
Without realizing it, the United States is taking over the role of the Habsburg Empire in the Balkans, a role that it is ill-equipped to play.
Book Reviews:
Christopher Coker’s Twilight of the West looks at present geopolitical trends and predicts the West’s dissolution; David Gress, in From Plato to Nato, sees them as yet another episode in the long struggle between the mainstream Western tradition and its internal enemies. They may both be right.
Rather surprisingly, William Odom’s Collapse of the Soviet Military provides the most comprehensive and serious examination to date of the Soviet military’s unexpected passivity during the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
James Ceaser’s Reconstructing America locates the “real America” in the ideas and values of the Founders. But a purely political conception of America is inadequate.
Itamar Rabinovich’s The Brink of Peace is a masterly chronicle of the Syrian-Israeli peace negotiations of 1993-96, in which Israel and Syria—and America—once staked so much hope.
In Blacklisted: A Journalist’s Life in Central Europe, Paul Lendvai recounts his remarkable journey from the Nazi wartime death marches, to his days as a young communist apologist, and on to his later “crusade of information” against communism in Eastern Europe.