African Independence
It isn't all that it's cracked up to be.
By Ernest W. Lefever
Posted: Monday, April 30, 2007
While in Africa during the 1960s researching three books on U.S. policy, I saw poverty, corruption, and a retreat from the rudimentary rule of law established by the British and French colonial powers. As Kempton Makamure wrote recently, "It is entirely possible that conflicts within independent states in Africa have caused more privation, deaths and stalled development than the colonial rule they have replaced."   [Read More]

After Bhutto
A nation in crisis.
By Stanley Kurtz
Posted: Friday, December 28, 2007
Is Pakistan a failed state? Experts debated that question long before today's events. Pakistan is certainly a tragic state, where brilliant, accomplished, cosmopolitan moderns live in sometimes uneasy association with a vast peasant heartland, and the fiercest tribes in the Muslim world. Today Pakistan's unruly juxtapositions lie raw and exposed.  [Read More]

AIDS, Aid, and Africa
"Hey, brother, you have a problem."
By Ernest W. Lefever
Posted: Friday, April 20, 2007
In sub-saharan Africa an estimated 30 million people have the HIV-AIDS virus. Some 17 million have died so far, and the disease kills 5,000 adults and 1,000 children every day--a rate 20 times that of Western countries. The crisis is especially grievous because it adds millions of victims to those killed by tribal wars and genocide in postcolonial Africa.  [Read More]

Al-Qaeda Is Losing the War of Minds
By Peter Wehner
Posted: Wednesday, March 5, 2008
The US "surge" in Iraq has been so manifestly successful that no serious person can deny that gains have been made. Even Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have (grudgingly) conceded progress. Yet both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama are quick to add that progress has been purely on the military side and that those gains are ephemeral. This fits with their broader narrative -- that the war has been a disaster on every front.  [Read More]

Al-Qaedastan
Grim possibilities for Pakistan.
By Stanley Kurtz
Posted: Tuesday, November 6, 2007
President Musharraf's declaration of a state of emergency in Pakistan opens up the possibility of a dangerous civil war for control of a nuclear-armed state.  The result could be anything between the end of Osama bin Laden's sanctuary to the transformation of Pakistan into Talibanistan.  [Read More]

All Quiet on the Western Front
By Ernest W. Lefever
Posted: Friday, February 9, 2007
European elites railed against Saddam's execution, while the American anti-death penalty establishment was relatively silent. Typically, ACLU and Amnesty International power the anti-capital punishment movement. But these two crusading groups were uncharacteristically quiet in the wake of the Baghdad hanging, even though they have not altered their unqualified opposition to it.   [Read More]

America Among the Nations
We will do our duty
By Hillel Fradkin
Posted: Friday, January 31, 2003
Why do they hate us? President Bush asked after 9/11. Aren't we good and a force for good was the gist of companion remarks.  [Read More]

American Power—For What?
By Elliot Abrams
Posted: Saturday, January 1, 2000
Anyone instructed in international relations during the last two centuries would know about the centrality of the balance of power. But the recent emergence of the United States as the dominant world power constitutes a radical change from that condition. The key question we now face is whether to preserve this dominance, or whether to view it as a danger to ourselves and others.  [Read More]

America's Imperial Burden
Is the Past Prologue?
By Ernest W. Lefever
Posted: Monday, June 1, 1998
On the cusp of a new millennium, are we Americans prepared to accept the imperial burden that history has thrust upon us? Looking back, the author argues that writ large, America, despite its internal flaws and external blunders, has borne its imperial burden with a singular sense of responsibility.   [Read More]

America's Imperial Responsibility
By Ernest W. Lefever
Posted: Monday, June 1, 1998
Ernest Lefever reviews Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives.  [Read More]