Section: The American Interest (USA)
Is There a Recipe for Democratic Success?
In the aftermath of the Second World War, many Western intellectuals doubted that Germany could become a democratic, civilized nation again. Yet, in less than a generation, the Germans did it by adopting a federal constitution carefully constraining those close to levers of power, engineering an economic miracle, and holding many (though not all)...
The Time to Act is Now
In the contemporary era, where the meaning of historic events is increasingly muddled by “competing narratives”, the political crisis in Belarus offers the world a satisfying case of moral clarity. In his August 28, 2020 remarks in Vienna, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun proclaimed, “It is clear to me—and I hope it is clear to...
Apocalypse Now?
Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us AllBy Michael ShellenbergerHarperCollins, 430 pp, $29.99“What you’re experiencing and seeing,” Jennifer Manfre, spokeswoman for Southern California Edison, told me back in 2012, “is nuclear safety in action.”At the time, engineers at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS), a...
Portrait of an Ordinary Nazi
The S.S. Officer’s Armchair: Uncovering the Hidden Life of a Naziby Daniel LeeHachette Books, 2020, 320 pp., $28 “History is not another name for the past,” wrote the historian A.J.P. Taylor. “It is the name for stories about the past.” To tell new stories about the past, historians have to actively seek them out, whether by exploring...
Who Has The Right Stuff?
The Return of Great Power Rivalry: Democracy versus Autocracy from the Ancient World to the U.S. and ChinaMatthew KroenigOxford University Press, 2020, 302 pp., $30 Do democracies prevail over autocracies in great power rivalries? There can hardly be a more timeless—or timely—question. As the United States faces a Russian regime stoking...
No Country for Simple Solutions
While the future of Aleksander Lukashenko’s regime in Belarus following the grotesquely rigged presidential election seems bleaker by the day, the prospects of the country’s conversion to democracy, rule of law, and market economy remain equally uncertain. But that is not a reason for despair. It is a reason for Western policymakers...
A Peek into Our Nuclear Future
Seventy-five years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, one wonders what the next 75 might bring. Will nuclear weapons’ strategic status decline, much as chemical agents’ primacy did 75 years after their first use? Or will a future shot in anger validate the bomb’s security utility?The answer is unclear. Military advances in...
A Reply to President Putin
This year, Americans have been preoccupied with several crises. One is their own public debate about history and public memory, especially involving the Civil War and the legacies of slavery and racism. Meanwhile, though, another large historical debate has been going on, in Europe. It is a debate about the origins and lessons of the most...
The Next High Crime
When Stanford University Professor Pamela Karlan testified on December 4, 2019, as the first witness in the House Judiciary Committee’s hearings on the impeachment of President Donald J. Trump, she unknowingly predicted the future. To make the corrupt and impeachable nature of Trump’s shakedown of Ukrainian President Volodymyr...
Remembering Mr. Jones
The killing of George Floyd led to protests and demands for the removal of monuments and place names that glorify Confederates, slave owners, and European colonial oppressors. In the past, such deaths or shocking revelations provided compelling reason to correct history, as did the fall of the Iron Curtain. Now, a just-released,...
