The Clinton administration has targeted a new batch of global enemies. It wants to crush them with the usual mix of negotiation, treaty, and enforcement through spying, fines, and propaganda. It's all in a day's work for the "world's indispensable nation"—the administration's new name for itself.
It is no surprise that a bureaucracy would study itself and conclude that neither its budget nor its policies should change. Neither is it a shock that the Pentagon has bypassed the question of why we need to involve ourselves in any foreign wars. After all, the U.S. long ago abandoned the Constitutional ideal of a strictly defensive military posture.
Great Britain learned an important lesson from World War I.
Ever since World War II, the traditional American foreign policy of nonintervention in foreign affairs has had a bad press.
The rise in oil prices provoked a frenzy of opportunistic posturing by politicians of both parties. Yet neither Clinton nor Dole will acknowledge the real reasons for sustained high prices—taxes and environmental regulations designed to keep prices high—or the reason for the newest price rise itself. Both are complicit in their genesis, and both are conspiring to keep gas prices high and prevent American consumers from getting relief
The death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown in a Balkans plane crash exposed the real reason President Clinton sent American troops to Bosnia: to make the world safe for corporate welfare.
As I write these lines, an American soldier, no doubt the first of many to come, has been killed while taking part in the American "peacekeeping" mission in Bosnia. Many in Congress, as well as most of the Republican candidates for President,
Defenders of the free market are often stigmatized as uncritical apologists for big business. Nothing could be further from the truth, as readers of this book will at once discover.
Stuff those corks back in the champagne bottles. The Republican leadership in Congress can't celebrate the New Year until it breaks silence on the Mexican bailout. This is a debacle that makes subsidies for midnight basketball seem sensible.
John T. Flynn is best known today as a once-liberal columnist for the New Republic who became a bitter enemy of Franklin Roosevelt and a stalwart of the Old Right.
