Defending and Advancing Freedom

The War of the World by Niall Ferguson

Moscow 1941 by Rodric Braithwaite

Three Reasons Not to Bomb Iran—Yet

The regime must not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, but neither must we act immediately.

American Power-For What?

Foreign policy has once again become a matter of consequential dispute in American political life. Twenty-one respondents give their views on the current American role in the world and the proper direction of American foreign policy now and in the years ahead.

The National Prospect

To commemorate Commentary's fiftieth anniversary, the editors addressed the following statement and questions to a group of American intellectuals:

Washington's Biggest Scandal

The biggest Washington scandal by far has nothing to do with Arkansas real estate, is not being investigated by either Congress or a special prosecutor, and has made no headlines at all.

If Bosnians Were Dolphins

If the Bosnian Muslims had been bottle-nosed dolphins, would the world have allowed Croats and Serbs to slaughter them by the tens of thousands?

The First Dissident, by William Safire

Himself a man of some wealth and influence, William Safire, the well-known columnist of the New York Times, has written a book about another man of (much greater) wealth and influence: Job of the land of Uz, who had 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, 500 asses, many servants, and sufficient authority to be “the greatest man in the East” when his atrocious sufferings were about to begin.

George Ball's Latest Diatribe

In its confrontations with Israel of the last few years, the Bush administration attempted on more than one occasion to discredit not just the government of Israel but that country's entire reliability as an ally and, therefore, its worthiness to receive American support.

Is America on the Way Down? (Round Three)

Is America on the Way Down?

The idea that the United States is in decline might itself have been expected to decline with the collapse of the Soviet Union and our emergence as the only remaining superpower.

Victory Through Air Power

When President Bush reversed his immediate reaction to Iraq's August 2, 1990 invasion of Kuwait (he had originally ruled out any use of force), the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, was only the most senior of the military officers and defense officials who opposed sending U.S. troops into Saudi Arabia.

The Shape of Things to Come

For more than forty years, the affairs of the world have been greatly troubled but also structured by the Soviet-Western antagonism.

Gorbachev's Strategy, and Ours

As we watch the glasnost-perestroika express train advancing into the unknown, we need not refuse the profound satisfaction that liberalizations already achieved must give us, or renounce hopeful expectations of greater liberalizations to come, in order to focus soberly on the problem that Mikhail Gorbachev's new course presents for Western strategy.

The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War; The Archidamian War; The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition; The Fall of the Athenian Empire, by Donald Kagan

Imagine that the only contemporary record of most events of World War II had been written by a well-known general on the losing side, seriously at odds with his own people--a Rommel, say, though of philosophical disposition, moral clarity, evident compassion, and altogether superior intellect.

American Jews and Israel A Symposium

Never, perhaps, has criticism of the state of Israel by American Jews been so open, so widespread, and so bitter as it is today. Commentary asked 49 American Jewish intellectuals: Have your attitudes toward Israel changed in recent years? To what extent do you believe Israel has fulfilled, or disappointed, the hopes vested in it? How do you feel about the upsurge of Jewish criticism of Israel?

Eisenhower at War 1943-1945, by David Eisenhower

By 1960 or so it was the consensus of military historians that Britain had managed to fight all of World War II with hardly one good general (Slim of Burma was the ritual exception).

Delusions of Soviet Weakness

In recent years, entire books have appeared which argue that the Soviet armed forces are much weaker than they seem. Citing refugee accounts or personal experience, they depict the pervasive technical incompetence, drunkenness, corruption, and bleak apathy of officers and men. But no great military empire is likely to be undone by generals who procure villas through corrupt dealings, nor by sergeants who take the odd rubble off the conscript; Anglo-Saxon morality makes much of these things, history much less.

The Wizards of Armageddon: Strategists of the Nuclear Age, by Fred Kaplan

This account of the evolution of American strategic thought in the nuclear age begins in a promising fashion, with the first attempts to understand how the atomic bomb could be used, or rather kept unused, to keep the peace.

Power and Principle, by Zbigniew Brzezinski

Zbigniew Brzezinski's book is an honest and well-written account which will be valuable to historians and attractive to many readers.

How to Think About Nuclear War

Now that the United States is belatedly acting to restore a tolerable balance in forces nuclear as well as conventional, a vast chorus of protest has been heard from those who hold that deterrence is a policy not merely dangerous but irrational, and who therefore demand an immediate "freeze." And then there has been the broadest of claims, in which pastors and priests, rabbis and bishops, have been most prominent: that nuclear deterrence, and indeed nuclear weapons as such, are in themselves immoral. The churchmen who hold that nuclear weapons are ipso facto immoral are guilty of a crude ethical illiteracy.

Why We Need More

In its revised budget the Reagan administration requested $214.1 billion for defense in the current (1982) fiscal year. Among those who object, some columnists and many TV personalities, full-time defense critics, disarmers, isolationists, and "concerned" churchmen and academics remain blessedly ignorant of the full dimensions of the Soviet military upsurge and of our own weakness.

A New Arms Race?

Too late to avert the predicament of weakness now upon us, the great debate over the facts of the military balance is finally over. More generally, the widespread presumption that the quality of American equipment is significantly higher than that of its Soviet counterparts is no longer justified in most cases.

After Afghanistan, What?

Those of us who have been warning for some years that the military balance was shifting in favor of the Soviet Union, and that the consequences would unfailingly become manifest in harsh reality, have been sufficiently vindicated by events to resist the temptation of celebrating successful prediction.

Cubans in Arabia?

WHEN Senator Richard Stone began asking questions about Soviet do- ings in Cuba during his ten minutes

Ten Questions about SALT II

As part of a campaign for ratification of the SALT II agreement, ten questions and answers pertaining to the treaty have been sent by the Carter administration to all members of the United States Senate. These questions and answers appear below, followed in each case by a critique by Edward N. Luttwak.

Strategic Options for the Early Eighties, edited by William R. Van Cleave and W. Scott Thompson

This work is a compilation of papers presented at a conference, with some edited extracts of the proceedings.

American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, by William Manchester

Douglas MacArthur rose to the top in the small army of the interwar years and then retired in 1934, after serving his full term as chief of staff. It is very hard to retrieve the true dimensions of the man.

Against the China Card

IN THE four Soviet "military districts" bordering on China, and in the Soviet client-state of Outer Mongolia,