Articles

The lesson of Worms was not the lesson Luther meant to give. He meant to defend the Word of God against a corrupt Church. He taught, instead, that no earthly authority is beyond the judgment of a conscience answerable to something higher — and that lesson, once learned, could not be confined to the Church.

Two stories crossed my desk this week, and at first they look unrelated. One is a fight over a proof-of-citizenship and voter-identification bill that the House passed and the Senate could not advance past a filibuster. The other is a long-shot resolution to repeal a constitutional amendment more than a century old. Follow them far enough, though, and they meet at the same question — the one I keep returning to. Did this leave Americans more free, or more governed?

The medieval centuries in which the inheritance traced in the first three installments of this series was put to immediate political and legal use. Athens had given the West reason and the idea of the mixed constitution. Jerusalem had given it the covenant and the conviction that even kings stand under a law above themselves. Rome had given it natural law and the architecture of a republic. The House of Wisdom had preserved and transmitted the Greek philosophical inheritance

This is the article in which the cross-civilizational character of the liberty tradition becomes unmistakable. The reader who insists on seeing the Founding as the product of one people, one continent, one faith, will find the historical record contradicts such insistence. The reader willing to follow the evidence will find an inheritance richer than any chauvinism could fit inside.

If Social Security returns so little compared to the alternative, leaves nothing to one’s heirs, and rests on a financial foundation this precarious, why is it so popular?

The men who designed the American constitutional order treated antiquity as a laboratory of political experiment — failed experiments, mostly, and one or two qualified successes — from which the principles of constitutional design could be empirically extracted.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

A convention should be judged first by what it accomplished, and the body that met in Grand Rapids accomplished more than its sharpest critics will credit. The case for the convention, stated as charitably as the record permits, is substantial.

This final article aims to do four things. First, it synthesizes the long arc — not as a 1945 break with the founders’ republic, but as a two-century accumulation of choices, each of which could have been made differently, each of which can in principle be made differently again. Second, it acknowledges the Roman example, which has hovered over the entire series. The Roman Republic did not fall to invasion. It was abandoned in stages, each stage seeming individually tolerabl

This three-part feature exists to ask what should happen there, what is likely to happen there, and what either outcome would mean. The first piece cannot begin at the convention. It has to begin at a distance from the convention, with the most basic question: what is being claimed, and by whom, when someone uses the word libertarian?

This article examines Venezuela as the present-tense case study, surveys the ongoing operations that receive far less attention, and asks the only question that ultimately matters: what does the choice between republic and empire look like when the empire is not a memory but a current event?

This article examines that architecture of US Debt and Finance. What it is, how it was built, what it enables, and why it is no longer working the way its designers intended. The military empire traced throughout this series could not exist without the monetary system that finances it. Understanding that system is the precondition for understanding both the power the United States has exercised over three generations and the limits it is now beginning to encounter.

“Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”—George F. Kennan, The New York Times, Februa

This article examines three interventions — Libya, Syria, and Yemen — that together constitute the proof that the pattern identified throughout this series is not a series of mistakes but a structural feature of American foreign policy. The question is no longer whether interventionism fails. It is whether the system that produces it can be changed.

On September 11, 2001, 2,977 Americans were murdered by al-Qaeda terrorists operating from Afghanistan. Twenty years later, in August 2021, the last American forces evacuated Kabul as the Taliban—the same Taliban the United States had overthrown in 2001—reclaimed control of the country. The Afghan government America had spent two decades building collapsed in eleven days. Twenty years of progress, two trillion dollars, and thousands of lives were erased in less than a fortnig

The question is not whether foreign influence exists. It does, and it is as old as the republic. The question is whether these relationships serve American interests. That is the question George Washington asked in 1796. It remains the right question today.

The 1990s are remembered as a decade of peace and prosperity—the Clinton years, the dot-com boom, the “end of history.” But they were not a decade of peace. They were a decade of intervention: the Gulf War, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, ongoing strikes against Iraq. More importantly, they were the decade when the architecture of permanent intervention was constructed.

The Afghan operation was the largest CIA covert action since Vietnam. It succeeded brilliantly in its immediate objective: the Soviets withdrew, humiliated, their empire weakened. But covert operations have consequences beyond their immediate objectives. The enemy of our enemy is not our friend—he is merely our enemy’s enemy. Arming religious extremists to fight secular communists does not produce moderates; it produces empowered extremists.

Vietnam is the template against which all American interventions must be measured. The pattern established—initial optimism, escalation without clear objectives, lies to sustain public support, eventual failure, and determined forgetting—would repeat in Iraq and Afghanistan. The “lessons of Vietnam” would be invoked to justify subsequent wars while the actual lessons were ignored.

This article examines the covert operations that the Church Committee exposed and contextualized—the secret history of American foreign policy from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s. These operations share common features: they were justified by Cold War necessity, executed without democratic accountability, produced catastrophic long-term consequences, and were subsequently forgotten or rationalized.