One of the most persistent myths about war is that it is sometimes inevitable. States are carried along by the impersonal forces of history: the balance of power, alliance commitments, ideological antagonisms, the rise and decline of great powers, et cetera. Leaders...
After Hosni Mubarak became president of Egypt in 1981, his government maintained a close relationship with the United States. Over the following decades, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) would become increasingly involved in reforming Egypt's...
When one of my acquaintances expressed his enthusiasm for Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s October 7 speech from the Acropolis in Athens, Greece—seeing it as the de facto launching of a presidential campaign—I thought to watch the talk in its entirety. It was worth...
Piers Morgan recently said on his program of Russian President Vladimir Putin, “I do think he's the nearest thing to a modern day Hitler…” Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton had something to say about that. “You know what?” Horton said. “Noriega's Hitler and...
Well, it’s election season, and the routine embrace of mindless partisanship has commenced. We are again being told by Republican politicians that we must ignore monetary inflation, the disastrous war of choice with Iran, the ever-expanding surveillance state, and the...
There has been a good deal of discussion recently among libertarians and conservatives over whether to vote in the upcoming midterms. Those among us (I confess to being one) who had hopes that what passes for the political right among American politicians might...
On October 9, as Ukraine’s negotiating team was meeting with American envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff in Miami, President Donald Trump announced a deal with Russia that would see the United States provide sanctions relief for Russia to sell diesel to the...
On September 29, China and Laos opened the China-Laos Joint Support and Training Center and the China-Laos Friendship Aviation Academy at Ban Keun Airport, roughly thirty-one miles north of Vientiane. China’s Defense Ministry said both sides would jointly maintain and...
In 1924, the Lord Chief Justice of England quashed a criminal conviction over nothing more than an appearance. The clerk who had sat with the magistrates while they deliberated also worked for the firm that was suing the defendant in a related civil matter. No one...
When Xi Jinping departed Washington at the end of September, the verdict was already plain. Another carefully choreographed encounter produced a short extension of the trade truce, a modest $30 billion reciprocal tariff arrangement on non-sensitive goods, some coal...
Unfortunately, the probability rises with every passing day that NATO will wage war with Russia. The proxy war, openly fought since February 24, 2022 between Russia and Ukraine and which has lasted longer than World War I, may soon become an open war between Russia...
On October 4, Flávio Bolsonaro narrowly defeated incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by two points, 47% to 45%, in the first round of Brazil’s election, forcing a runoff to be held on October 25. It was a shockingly strong performance by Bolsonaro in an...
The other day, my wife made me a sandwich, and I ate it. Who benefitted from this transaction? I enjoyed the good, but my wife did all the work. I like to think I benefitted from the transaction. It’s in the enjoyment of a good that’s the benefit of the good. The...
In the 1990s, Pat Buchanan came to embody, politically speaking, a movement that Lew Rockwell would later call “paleoism”—a movement of paleolibertarians and paleoconservatives against the statist status quo. On the one hand, paleoconservatives were characterized by...
Israeli politician and former Knesset member Moshe Feiglin believes he is working to realize historical necessity. And that means rebuilding the Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and emptying Gaza of every single Palestinian, either through mass expulsion...
U.S. President Donald Trump repeatedly promised he could end the Russo-Ukrainian War quickly. Yet the actions attributed to his administration point toward a more familiar Washington strategy that demands capitulation to the so-called “rules-based” order. The...
Since March, Israeli attacks in Lebanon have displaced more than a million civilians and killed or wounded more than 17,000 people. Al Jazeera reported last month: “Israeli artillery shelling is still causing uncontrollable fires. Lebanese civil defense and...
Barely four years after the Pretoria Agreement formally ended one of the deadliest wars of the twenty-first century, large-scale fighting has returned to Ethiopia. In late September the principal anti-government force, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF),...
