War Stories

A look at Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

It’s been more than 20 years. The liberals haven’t changed much, even if they now prefer to call themselves “progressives”. President Reagan brought an end to the Cold War, and freed much of the world from the tyranny of communism. But Democrats fought him every step of the way. Today President Bush seeks to protect America and bring stability to a dangerous Middle East. And the Democrats are no different, still obstacles. They’ll even declare the war lost before its over, at the very moment that American soldiers patrol the streets, battle with the insurgents, and protect the Iraqi people. Shameful.

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Read more from this blogger: President Reagan and “that ‘Blame America First’ Crowd”

The Russian record after the cold war.

In the March/April 2004 issue of Foreign Policy, along with collaborator Andrei Shleifer, a professor of Economics at Harvard University, Treisman published a voluminous essay about Russia entitled “A Normal Country.” It was just about the time that Vladimir Putin, a proud KGB spy, was being reelected president, and the West had to decide whether to fish or cut bait in opposing him. In the article, Treisman argued that while “conventional wisdom in the West says that post-Cold War Russia has been a disastrous failure, the facts say otherwise. Aspects of Russia’s performance over the last decade may have been disappointing, but the notion that the country has gone through an economic cataclysm and political relapse is wrong–more a comment on overblown expectations than on Russia’s actual experience. Compared to other countries at a similar level of economic and political development, Russia looks more the norm than the exception.”

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Read more from this blogger: REVENGE OF THE OYSTERS

Charles Krauthammer on post-cold war America.

Krauthammer divides the post-Cold War system of American leadership into three periods: The 1990s, a preeminently peaceful decade in which the U.S. could wade into humanitarian crises at its choosing; the immediate post-9/11 era, the half-decade starting the 21st century in which the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington stirred America to global military exertion; and our current historical era -- post-winter/spring 2005 -- which Krauthammer dates as the "apogee" of American unipolar power.

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Read more from this blogger: America Past the Apogee? The Coming Anti-Hegemonic Alliance Against the U.S.

A look at private armies and the post-Cold War defense industry.

Indeed, it is unfair to label them simply mercenaries. Militarized corporations do big business, with most security firms being held as divisions as much larger, multi-billion dollar companies: TRW, DynCorp, SAIC, Booz-Allen. And these PMFs are really just filling in the supply gaps created by the end of the Cold War—security threats were atomized, from “US v USSR” to “thy neighbor.” In light of this, and the sudden removal of the lone remaining super power as a security guarantor for vast swaths of the planet, the rise of PMFs, which can be hired for single missions (thus limiting the financial strain on the host country), were a natural choice.

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Read more from this blogger: The Future of Mercenaries

The Orange Revolution was the largest protest movement in Europe since the end of the Cold War.

My second talk was to an EU-funded conference in Halle, south of Berlin, on “Protest Movements in Europe Since the Cold War”. I told stunned Germans that the Orange Revolution, which 1 in 5 Ukrainians took part in, qualifies it as the largest protest movement in Europe since the end of the Cold War. They were stunned because Germans know little about Ukraine and are nearly completely focused on Russia. This is very different to Austria which I visited in June.

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Read more from this blogger: German High, Kyiv Blues

Have liberals changed since the Cold War?

How strange, how unexpected, to see liberals now embracing that school of foreign policy known as “realism,” given that throughout the Cold War they hated but hated it. Who’d a thunk, during those Cold War years when liberals chastised America for backing dictators, that liberals would someday come around and support none other than James Baker himself? Times are a-changin’.

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Read more from this blogger: Liberals and realism