Profiles

Lenin called World War I a war among the capitalists of Europe. He was wrong. It was a war among oligarchs, statists who extract wealth from legitimate economic activity at the barrel of a gun.

The scale of the sanctions which Washington has imposed on Russia (and Russians) should not distract us from a crucial fact. What Washington is doing against Moscow is not rare. It is something that happens every day. 

Kulikowski's two-volume history of Rome offers many lessons in what was at the center of the empire. What was Rome? It was violence—political violence as an organizing principle.