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This episode traces the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the modern Middle East through three documents: the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the Balfour Declaration. We examine the key figures who shaped these events—Enver Pasha and the Young Turks, Winston Churchill and the Gallipoli disaster, T.E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt, the Hussein and Saud families—and explore how promises made and broken a century ago created conf

Contemporary Application to the Empire of Liberty: America's Foreign Entanglements from the Founders to the Forever War - Ep. 05

Understanding Sykes-Picot is essential to understanding why the Middle East looks the way it does—and why American intervention there repeatedly fails.

America’s entry into World War I was not a response to German aggression against the United States but a choice—influenced by British propaganda, financial entanglement, Wilsonian ideology, and the interests of those who would profit from war. This episode traces how neutrality eroded through $2.3 billion in Wall Street loans, how the Lusitania and Zimmermann Telegram provided pretexts for intervention, and how the dissenters who opposed war were silenced and destroyed. We ex

This contemporary application episode connects the alliance dynamics traced in Episode 4 to current events in Ukraine and Iran. As peace talks continue in the UAE and the USS Abraham Lincoln positions off Iran’s coast, we examine how alliance commitments—NATO’s Article 5, the Russia-Iran strategic partnership, the Russia-North Korea mutual defense pact—create the same escalation dynamics that produced World War I. With 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers AWOL and President Trump threa

Understanding how America entered World War I is essential to understanding how America enters every war since. The patterns established in 1917—the manufacture of consent, the financial entanglements that precede intervention, the ideological framing that forecloses compromise, the suppression of dissent once war begins—have repeated with remarkable consistency for over a century.

Before Americans can evaluate whether intervention in World War I was wise, they must understand the system they were being asked to join. This episode examines the European imperial order that produced the Great War: the British Empire at its zenith, the Crimean War and the birth of anti-Russian propaganda, the romantic brutality of the Great Game in Afghanistan, the horrors of the Scramble for Africa, and the alliance system that transformed a Balkan assassination into cont

This contemporary application episode connects the yellow journalism that drove America to war in 1898 with modern legacy media’s coverage of interventions from Iraq to Libya to Syria. It examines the commercial incentives that shape foreign policy coverage, the repeated pattern of uncritical amplification followed by post-hoc acknowledgment of failure, and the great migration of audiences from cable news to streaming platforms where anti-interventionist voices can reach thei

To understand America’s entry into World War I—and to evaluate whether it was wise—we must first understand the world Americans were being asked to enter. This article examines the European imperial system: its origins, its logic, and its catastrophic failure. Before Americans can judge whether intervention was necessary, they must grasp what intervention meant: joining a continent-spanning network of automatic commitments that could transform any local dispute into general w

1898 was the year America crossed the threshold from continental republic to overseas empire. In ten months, the United States acquired colonies spanning the Caribbean and Pacific, engaged in brutal counterinsurgency against Filipino independence fighters, and abandoned the founders’ foreign policy principles. This episode examines the manufactured justification for war (the Maine explosion, likely an internal accident), the Philippine-American War’s atrocities (reconcentrati

This contemporary application episode applies the historical template from Article 2—the Mexican-American War’s pattern of manufactured casus belli, executive manipulation, and marginalized critics—to current events in Venezuela, Iran, and the renewed discussion of American territorial expansion. We examine how the DOJ’s “Cartel de los Soles” claim dissolved when it had to be proven in court, how American objectives toward Iran have continuously shifted, and how current annex

Understanding 1898 is essential because the patterns established then have repeated throughout the subsequent century: the triggering incident of disputed origin, the media hysteria, the humanitarian justification for commercial and strategic interests, the executive manipulation of Congress, the marginalization of critics as unpatriotic, and the unforeseen consequences that produce the next intervention. From the Maine to the Gulf of Tonkin to weapons of mass destruction, th

This episode examines American continental expansion—from Jefferson’s peaceful Louisiana Purchase to Polk’s manufactured Mexican-American War to Cleveland’s principled refusal to annex Hawaii. We explore the diversity of Native American nations and the varying (but consistently dispossessive) American policies toward them. We trace how the Mexican-American War established a template for imperial conflict—executive manipulation, manufactured casus belli, congressional acquiesc

This contemporary application episode examines how the founders’ key insight—that foreign policy and domestic liberty are intimately connected—plays out in a current case study. We trace the chain from America’s ongoing undeclared war in Somalia (over 100 airstrikes in 2025 alone) to the refugee crisis it has fueled to the fraud scandal now dominating headlines in Minnesota. The founders warned that entanglements abroad would have consequences at home. This is what those cons

I more than suspect already, that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong—that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him. —Abraham Lincoln on President Polk, 1848

This episode establishes the baseline of American foreign policy as the founders envisioned it. We examine the lessons of the Revolutionary War and the French Alliance, the classical republican tradition's warnings about standing armies, and the constitutional provisions designed to prevent military adventurism. We explore the foundational texts—Washington's Farewell Address, Jefferson's First Inaugural, and Madison's "Political Observations"—in depth and in the founders' own

On January 3, 2026, the United States launched military strikes against Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro. This special episode—released alongside our series introduction—applies the founders’ framework to these events in real time. We examine the facts as currently known, compare the operation to historical precedents (Panama 1989, the Escobar manhunt), analyze the constitutional questions raised by unilateral executive military action, and ask what precedent h

“Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” —Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 1801

How did a republic founded on principles of non-intervention become an empire with military bases in eighty countries? How did a nation that once warned against “entangling alliances” come to maintain alliance commitments that span the globe? And here is the question that matters most: How have these choices abroad shaped liberty at home?

When the Founders wrote the Constitution, they assumed emergencies would be temporary. War, invasion, rebellion — these were storms to be weathered, not climates to be lived in. They left no explicit clause for “suspending” liberty because they believed free men would never consent to live without it.