FPRI Wire

This past summer I had the pleasure (albeit it was no easy task) of reviewing two thick books of historical counterfactuals. Though considered a disreputable parlor game by most professional historians, contemplation of what might have, could have, and...

The Taiwan Strait: Hottest The possibility of tension escalating over the Taiwan issue was by far the most contested issue at the conference. Speakers painted pictures of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) alternatively as a military threat, an...

November 10, 1999 Several people, including our host Ron Naples, whose burden it was to introduce this lecture, have asked me what exactly I meant to discuss this evening inasmuch as my title was hopelessly vague. That, I confess,...

I have been asked to speak to the question of the challenge of ethnic conflict in U.S. foreign policy. The subject, of course, could not be more timely because of the Balkan wars. I don’t intend to give you...

Like the printing press in sixteenth-century Europe, the combination of mass education and mass communications is transforming the Muslim majority world, a broad geographical crescent stretching from North Africa through Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and the Indonesian archipelago....

Globalization is often described as a process: steadily progressing over time, pervasively spreading over space, and clearly inevitable in its development. But globalization is also a revolution, one of the most profound revolutions the world has ever known. Indeed,...

Does military culture matter? Students of either military history or current military institutions have devoted little attention to it, yet it may be the most important factor not only in military effectiveness on the battlefield, but in the processes...

Everyone talks, but hardly anyone thinks or does anything about it. I refer to the upsurge in awareness of religion’s impact on international politics, a phenomenon almost as startling as the crackup of the Soviet empire which faith- based...

Experience and history teach only this, wrote the philosopher Hegel in 1827: that people and governments never learn anything from history or act on principles derived from it. Americans’ confusion over foreign policy in the post-Cold War era would...