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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

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