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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.

This episode traces the direct line from American covert action in Afghanistan to the September 11 attacks—the paradigm case of blowback. We examine the largest CIA operation since Vietnam: how Charlie Wilson and Gust Avrakotos built a billion-dollar program to arm the mujahideen, how Pakistan directed aid to extremists, how the Arab Afghans including Osama bin Laden built networks that would become al-Qaeda, how American abandonment created the vacuum that the Taliban filled

This contemporary application episode connects the Vietnam War’s patterns of deception and infrastructure targeting to the ongoing Iran conflict. We examine the intelligence claims that justified the war, the media mechanisms that manufacture consent, the return to overt civilian infrastructure targeting, and the constitutional failures that have allowed executive war-making to proceed unchecked.

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.

This episode examines America's most devastating military defeat—the Vietnam War. We trace the conflict from its origins in French colonialism and Ho Chi Minh's ignored appeals to America, through the Gulf of Tonkin deception, the escalation under Johnson, the Tet Offensive that exposed the lies, the domestic upheaval that tore America apart, and the fall of Saigon in 1975. We examine why the war was unlikely to succeed under the chosen strategy, why the government systematic

This contemporary application episode examines why congressional oversight of intelligence agencies has failed systemically since the Church Committee’s 1975 reforms. We trace how the Iraq WMD intelligence failure—which took the nation to war on false premises—produced no accountability, with Director Tenet receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom. We examine the structural incentives that discourage oversight: 97% incumbent re-election rates, institutional self-protection

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 special episode examines the motivations of the principal actors behind the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. It traces Benjamin Netanyahu's thirty-four-year campaign against Iran, documents how President Trump was persuaded to launch the war he spent a decade opposing, and identifies the congressional and institutional figures across both parties who pushed for, enabled, or laid the groundwork for this conflict. The episode presents the strongest case for those who supp

This episode surveys thirty years of CIA covert operations—from the recruitment of Nazi war criminals in Operation Paperclip, through the infiltration of American media in Operation Mockingbird, to the overthrow of governments in Cuba, the Congo, Indonesia, and Chile. We examine the documented conflict between President Kennedy and the CIA, the mass casualties in Indonesia’s 1965-66 massacres, and the Church Committee’s brief moment of accountability. Throughout, we trace how

This contemporary application episode examines how American regime change evolved from covert CIA operations denied for decades to open presidential assertions of authority over foreign governments. Tracing the trajectory from Korea through Syria, we analyze how President Trump’s statement that he “must be involved” in selecting Iran’s next leader represents the culmination of seven decades of executive aggrandizement and congressional abdication. We examine the Venezuela mod

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.

This episode begins Part IV of our series—The CIA and Covert Empire—by examining the 1953 coup that overthrew Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. We trace the British oil interests that motivated the coup, the Dulles brothers' WWII background that shaped its methods, the operation itself, and the blowback that produced the 1979 hostage crisis and four decades of U.S.-Iranian hostility. We also examine the cases of Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames to il

As American military operations in Iran continue, this contemporary application episode examines how the national security state—built for the Cold War, expanded for the War on Terror—has delivered the very outcome the Old Right warned against and Donald Trump himself promised to prevent. We trace the War on Terror framework that enables executive war-making without congressional authorization, the transformation of campaign promises into regime change, and the global applica

This article examines the coup, its origins, its execution, and its consequences. The story is essential for understanding American covert action—its methods, its justifications, and its predictable failures. Iran 1953 established the template that would be applied in Guatemala, the Congo, Chile, and beyond: identify a target government, frame it as a communist threat, recruit local assets, create chaos, install a friendly dictator, and declare victory for freedom.

This episode examines the institutional transformation that followed World War II—the construction of permanent agencies, alliances, and war footing that replaced the founders’ constitutional design. We trace the Truman Doctrine’s unlimited commitment, the National Security Act of 1947 that created the CIA and NSC, NATO’s entangling alliance, the Korean War’s constitutional precedent, NSC-68’s blueprint for permanent militarization, and Eisenhower’s warning about the military

This contemporary application episode examines how the rhetorical techniques used to silence the Old Right in 1940-1941 continue to be deployed against critics of intervention today. We analyze the function of labels like “isolationist,” “Russian asset,” “antisemite,” and “conspiracy theorist” as tools of exclusion rather than argument. We document how the Old Right’s predictions about war’s consequences for the American republic have been vindicated by eighty years of eviden

This article examines how the national security state was constructed in the years following World War II. The institutions created in this period—the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, NATO, the global network of military bases—remain the architecture of American power today. Understanding how they were built, and what they replaced, is essential to evaluating whether the transformation was necessary, whether it has made Am

This episode recovers the lost tradition of principled American non-interventionism that flourished between the world wars. We examine the intellectual foundations developed by thinkers like Albert Jay Nock and Garet Garrett, the political leadership of Senator Robert Taft, and the mass movement of the America First Committee. We trace how this tradition was suppressed after Pearl Harbor and systematically discredited by historians who wrote interventionism into consensus—and

This contemporary application episode traces the direct line from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to present-day Gaza and the West Bank. We examine Balfour’s explicit calculation—his refusal to consult “the wishes of the present inhabitants”—and trace how that imperial logic persists in the current “ceasefire,” the Board of Peace reconstruction framework, and the accelerating annexation of the West Bank. We present data on ceasefire violations and casualties, analyze the Kushner

The “Old Right”—a term applied retrospectively to the coalition that opposed American intervention in World War II—represented the last significant American political movement to defend the founders’ foreign policy of non-intervention. Their arguments were not answered; they were rendered moot by Pearl Harbor and then retroactively discredited by court historians who wrote the interventionists’ perspective into scholarly consensus. The phrase “isolationist,” applied as a pejo