Call me naive, but I increasingly suspect that much of today's "left" is not antiwar on principle. Rather, it's anti-American war because, in its view, America (not just the government) is rotten to the core: bourgeois, racist, patriarchal, heteronormative, blah,...
interventionism
TGIF: Police-State Progressives
Progressives see themselves as, well, progressive. But they aren't. Even at their best, in opposing the national security state, they support massive government power in other realms of life. At heart they are social engineers. They seek a "moral equivalent of war,"...
Right Diagnosis, Wrong Prescription
The populist Sanders-left (which is actually broader because it includes Tucker Carlson and others called rightists) is partly correct and partly incorrect about what happened to the Democrats last Tuesday. They say correctly that the Democrats failed because they...
Who’s the Real Foreign-Policy Realist?
The establishment debate over foreign policy isn't between realists and whatever their opponents call themselves. It's a debate over who's more realistic. It reminds me of the debate between the Federalists and Antifederalists. No one wanted to be considered against...
The Brief Case for Pacifism – Bryan Caplan, Ph.D.
“My case for pacifism, to recap, comes down to three simple premises. The first two are empirical: Premise #1: The short-run costs of war are clearly awful. [Empirical claim about immediate effects of war]. Premise #2: The long-run benefits of war are highly...
TGIF: Watch the Forest as Well as the Trees
It's always important not to miss the forest for the trees. U.S. government announcements, such as its report of the turnover to the Afghan government of the seventh and last military base in Afghanistan, Bagram, should lead no one to think that U.S. foreign policy...
TGIF: What the State Really Is
To better understand the nature of government, one can think of it as an agency that sells or, more precisely, rents power to others. The greater the power and the wider its scope, the more opportunities the state's agents will have to sell access to it in return for...
Trump Foreign Policy: Doing the Same Thing and Expecting a Different Result
After a week of insisting that a meeting with Putin on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in Argentina was going to happen, President Trump at the last minute sent out a Tweet explaining that due to a Russia/Ukraine dispute in the Sea of Azov he would no longer be...
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The National Debt and You: What it Is, How it Works, and Why it Matters
Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine
Over and over, U.S. government officials and their mainstream media allies called Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine an “unprovoked attack.” The slogan became so overused that people began to ask the obvious question: Why do they protest so much? In Provoked: How...
