Sublime

Meanwhile, effective statecraft is conspicuously lacking. Institutions have failed to adapt. No one today would design a UN Security Council that looked like the current one, yet real reform is impossible, because those who would lose influence block any changes. Efforts to build effective frameworks to deal with the challenges of globalization, in

The assumption that individual freedoms are guaranteed by freedom of the market and of trade is a cardinal feature of neoliberal thinking, and it has long dominated the US stance towards the rest of the world.7 What the US evidently sought to impose by main force on Iraq was a state apparatus whose fundamental mission was to facilitate conditions f

the Marshall Plan, announced by Secretary of State George Marshall in June 1947. The focus was on Europe’s recovery; the aid ($150 billion in today’s dollars) was extensive but transitional, with the goal of getting Europe to the point where its economic growth would be self-sustaining.

The last time Saddam Hussein threatened the peace (by invading Kuwait), 7 out of 10 Democrats in Congress voted against authorizing the use of force and in favor of the useless pseudo-solution of sanctions.

The concept of sovereignty had three basic dimensions. First, countries should accept the borders of other countries and not use force in an attempt to change them. Second, countries should not interfere in events inside other countries. Third, governments should have a free hand to do as they please within their own borders. These three notions ma

The Cuban model resonated. When the Roosevelt administration sought a transoceanic canal to connect its Atlantic trade to its Pacific trade (larger now that the United States had Pacific territories), it eyed the Panama isthmus in Colombia. But it neither bought nor conquered it. Instead, Roosevelt’s government encouraged Panamanian nationalists to