An all-american agenda

This column advances what the U.S. must do to get its domestic house in order. There are probably a million reasons why this will not work. Yet, if America is to emerge stronger and future generations made more secure, there is no alternative except to act no matter how much the political system resists. America was once known as a “can-do” country.  Much of that probably stems from World War II.  As the motto of the U.S. Navy’s Construction Battalions aka “Sea Bees” went (“the difficult is easy; the impossible just takes a little longer”), a can-do attitude was part of the American psyche that won the war and the [...]

By |2013-07-30T15:30:19+03:0030 iulie 2013|America, Blog, Harlan Ullman, Regiuni|0 Comentarii

American decline–pure poppycock!

A specter is haunting the United States. That specter is one of American decline.  But this specter is not merely exaggerated.  It is poppycock.  Those who see in America the conditions that led to the fall of the Roman Empire or the catastrophic Grecian wars between Athens (read America) and Sparta (read China) are simply wrong. The United States or any other state could never remain the world’s colossus and singular dominant power forever.  The end of World War II with the destruction of Europe and Asia granted the United States a unique moment in history.  However, an ascending Soviet Union ultimately checked the unilateral authority and influence of the [...]

By |2017-11-14T21:28:36+02:0015 iulie 2013|America, Blog, Harlan Ullman, Regiuni|0 Comentarii

Mr. President missing in action?

Regional crises abound. Massive protests in Egypt that ended the flailing Morsi government to continued bloodshed from Afghanistan to Syria are representative of these crises.  Meanwhile, at home, political Tsumanis batter the landscape. Supreme Court actions to strike down parts of the Defense of Marriage (DOMA) and Voting Rights Acts and the White House decision to defer parts of the new Health Care law regarding small businesses for a year rile politics as brutal heat and forest fires torment the West and torrents of rain drench the East make this a long, hot and so far bitter summer for the United States.  Yet, where is President Barack Obama “the world [...]

When governments become destructive

Tomorrow, July 4th, marks America’s Independence Day.  The document we celebrate, the Declaration of Independence that rejected British rule, was the masterpiece of democratic expression written by Thomas Jefferson in 1776.  The most profound lines are not the more famous “When in the course of human events” and “all men are created equal.”  They appear at the end of the first sentence of the document’s second paragraph: “when… government…becomes destructive, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and institute new government.” Two hundred and thirty-seven years later, too many governments have become destructive in governing whether through smashing dissent with force or blatant, repressive misuse [...]

Too many archdukes, too many bullets

Ninety-nine years ago this Friday, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his pregnant wife Sofia were gunned down in Sarajevo by a nineteen-year old Bosnian Serb nationalist named Gavrilo Princips.  The assassinations quickly provoked a crisis that more quickly erupted into world war.  Ironically, many of the elites in Europe believed that an early 20th century version of globalization and economic interdependencies on the continent made war too expensive to contemplate or to wage.  Indeed, Nobel Prize winner Sir Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion, written in 1910 and required reading for the intelligentsia, made that case eloquently and, as it turned out, entirely wrongly. Today, the nearly four hundred year old Westphalian [...]

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